How Big Oil Created Corporate Free Speech, and Why It Matters Today

Edward Bernays: The Freudian Slip

E. Bruce Harrison: The Godfather of Greenwashing

Amy Westervelt

Like Daniel Edelman, prior to his PR career, Schmertz worked in military intelligence. He also helped run JFK's presidential campaign, and worked as a labor lawyer for a few years. But he's best known for his decades-long stint as VP of Public Affairs for Mobil Oil.

In that role, Herb Schmertz brought many new PR tactics to the oil industry and the world; he invented the advertorial, bullied journalists into false equivalence (what he called “creative confrontation”), and pushed for the first big corporate personhood case—long before Citizens United—back in the 1970s. He also coined the term “affinity of purpose” marketing to describe Mobil’s longtime funding of Masterpiece Theatre and various other PBS programming, which helped to establish Mobil as “the thinking man’s oil company.”

But Schmertz didn't take credit for many of his tactics. In his book 

a sort of handbook for corporate PR in the 80s, he said he had merely brought the aggressive tactics of political PR to business PR—Schmertz was forever telling corporate PR folks that their approach of being nice to journalists would never get them as far as his approach of shouting at them and accusing them of bias any time they left out his company or industry's point of view. Sadly, he was right. Bullied by flaks like Schmertz, the media largely retreated into the practice of false equivalence, and a manufactured frame of "objectivity" in which there are two equal sides to every story.

Collected below are archival videos of Schmertz, examples of the advertorials he distributed for 
Mobil (in numerous interviews he refers to them as “pamphlets” and to 

as an excellent distribution system for the company’s pamphlets), as well as highlights of some of the documents we've obtained detailing Schmertz’s strategies and wins.

In 1982, CBS 60 Minutes brought together business executives, journalists, and Herb Schmertz as the PR guy, for a panel discussion on whether the media treats business fairly. There were four episodes:

Interview with the Museum of Public Relations about Corporate Personhood:

CSpan: Roundtable on Corporate Philanthropy 

 into how Schmertz viewed corporate giving. In a nutshell: there's no such thing as altruistic corporate philanthropy, nor should there be. Corporations should align their philanthropic work with their bottom 
lines.

In 1980 a documentary aired on 1980 that painted the Saudi Arabian government in an unfavorable light. At the time, Mobil was negotiating with the Saudis to develop oil fields there, and Schmertz was tasked with trying to stop this documentary from coming out. He tried to use his influence with PBS to stop it being aired altogether. When that 
didn't work, he went on the offensive, running an advertorial and doing interviews like this one about how inaccurate and culturally insensitive the documentary was (it may well have been, we're not weighing in on that, merely showing how the company's business interests were supported by Schmertz's media machine).

Schmertz Documents

S9, Ep3 | The Next Citizens United Will Be a Climate Case

S9, Ep2 | A Legal Strategy

S3, Ep5 | Oil Slick, Part 2—False Equivalence and Free Speech

S3, Ep4 | Oil Slick, Part 1—The Rise of the Corporate Persona

Mad Men

Herb Schmertz: The Bully

Martin Zaltz-Austwick

[00:00:00] Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm. Hmm, hmm, hmm. Hmm, hmm, hmm. Hmm, hmm. Hmm. Hmm, hmm. Hmm. Hmm hmm. Hmm. Hmm hmm. Most of these theater is brought to you by mobile reading the fuel the public television around.

[00:00:18] Masterpiece Theater has been bringing British dramas and occasionally comedies to Americans via PBS for more than 50 years now. It's one of the longest running shows in American television history. The show is still basking in the glory of its most recent hit Downton Abbey, but there were plenty of others before it, like Upstairs, Downstairs, the Downton Abbey of the 70s. Also about how class works in Britain. Because, you know, as Americans, we like to pretend class isn't a thing here. At this point, Masterpiece Theater has become an institution. But by all accounts, it might never have happened at all without one publicist who saw the show's potential-- not for exposing Americans to British culture, but for polishing the image of the giant oil company he worked for. That man's name was Herb Schmitz, and he's something of a legend in the PR world, but today we're going to focus on just one of his major contributions to the world of spin. Welcome back to Rigged the Story of Disinformation, a podcast about the war for hearts and minds and television right here on U.S. soil. Today's trick? Sponsored content. SponCon!

[00:01:39] Shaw, and I think he visited at least 20 or 25 different corporations, but he finally found an entree at mobile.

[00:01:49] This is Henry Becton, a producer at WGBH in Boston. When Masterpiece Theater first got going, he's talking on the Making Masterpiece podcast here about Stanford Calderwood, the president of WGBH and one of the creators of Masterpiece Theater.

[00:02:07] So he got an interview with Herb Schmitz, and Herb liked the idea.

[00:02:13] Herb Schmertz was the VP of Public Affairs for Mobil Oil at the time, the company's top PR guy in his book Goodbye to the Low Profile. Schmitz tells the story behind Masterpiece, and you can catch a few glimpses of his personality in this story. As Schmitz tells it, Calderwood called him up one day in 1970 and asked him if he'd been watching the Foresight Saga, a BBC miniseries that had been running on PBS. And Schwartz writes in his book Now in those Days, and I suppose the same holds true today. Even those people who didn't watch serious drama on public television would say that they did so, although I had never seen a single episode. I assured Stan Calderwood that the Foresight Saga was one of my favorite shows. Calderwood was asking $10000 an hour to sponsor Masterpiece, an incredible deal for mobile. And Schwartz didn't know that Calderwood had already called up several other companies first looking for sponsorship. It probably wouldn't have mattered, because for Schmidt's masterpiece wasn't just a good deal. It would also deliver a key benefit to mobile. Here's WGBH producer Rebecca Eaton explaining why on the Making Masterpiece podcast.

[00:03:35] Herb Schmertz was a very smart guy who understood marketing instinctively, and he understood that a high class British drama series on public television was exactly what his oil company needed because his oil company needed its name to be burnished. They wanted to be the classy oil company. Not so much to sell gas at the local pump, but in Washington to impress the policymakers, the movers and shakers.

[00:04:09] Herb Schmertz might sound like the name of a beige suit wearing insurance salesman who has one line in an episode of Columbo, but Herb was anything but beige. He was a blond haired, blue eyed, clean shaven, flashy suit wearing ladies, man. Picture Mad Men, but for PR. Don Draper, but blonde. He had a toughness about him earned during a decade or so as a labor lawyer before he held court in a corner office at mobile headquarters. Herb Schmertz had actually made headlines for settling big labor disputes like the nationwide dockworkers strike in 1964. He had worked on political campaigns too and been an adviser to JFK. In fact, he was tapped by all the Kennedys to work on all of their campaigns, and he brought these experiences into his PR work for mobile. Later in his life, he would describe his work for Mobil as an ongoing political campaign, but for ideas instead of a man. Even people who hated Schmertz would begrudgingly admit he was incredible at his job, whether it was bullying the media into covering Mobil's point of view or using cultural institutions to turn Mobil into the thinking man's oil company. He would later talk about this as influencing the influencers or influencing the influential. And it was the driving force behind a lot of Mobil funded content.

[00:05:43] Masterpiece Theater is made possible by a grant from Mobil Corp., which invites you to join with them in supporting your local public television station. Coming soon from Mobil Masterpiece Theater, a very unusual television event. About a very unusual group of people in a very unusual place. Mystery introduces its latest detective a familiar face in a new role, the woman who caught the Bombay poisoner and the blackmailer Belgrave Square and modest winning combination

[00:06:18] PBS had just launched itself in 1970 and in 1971, Masterpiece Theater launched with mobile attached. The company had actually already dabbled in some public TB funding, with donations to Sesame Street, Big Oil and Big Bird the perfect pairing. But Mobil went even bigger on Masterpiece Theater, and it was just the beginning for shipments. Within a few years, he had added mystery. Another British show on PBS this time focused on, you guessed it, crime dramas. And then there were the nature documentaries. Americans who have enjoyed the dulcet tones of David Attenborough narrating the animal kingdom for decades might be surprised to learn that it was mobile oil that first brought Attenborough's nature documentaries to the states. Schmitz also launched another show called Mobile Showcase on commercial TV. Less highbrow content could play in mobile showcase and smarts later explained that it gave him a way to get mobile backed content onto commercial channels, content and ads that just weren't allowed on PBS. Things like this

[00:07:33] because I am the foreigner in another man's country. Every time I look in the mirror, I say, Who is that? Yeah, I told Vern Porter he didn't have to look over his shoulder at anybody because he's given it everything he's got every day. Verne Porter and other mobile people working around the world to find and produce oil strive to build deeper understanding between our culture and others. Watch for another mobile showcase presentation titled 10 Who Dared? Anthony Quinn is your host every week.

[00:08:06] Publicly, Schmertz and PBS always insisted that Mobile had no editorial power over what Masterpiece Theater showed. But in an interview for a book about masterpiece later in his life, Schmertz was in the mood to spill some tea. I found the notes from that conversation deep in a university archive in Baltimore, and it was eye opening. Here's how Schmertz describes bringing the show Upstairs. Downstairs masterpieces biggest hit last century to the US.

[00:08:39] "I just said that mobile is going to buy this show, and if you people don't want to run, it will find other ways to distribute it. They said. We were trying to pressure, we're trying to build booths or we're trying to dictate to them. We didn't try to dictate anything. I just said, we're going to take the decision that this is a show the American public should see and will enjoy now. They characterize that in negative terms, threats and everything else. But I merely said that I could syndicate this with public television stations around the country without PBS GBH, which I'm sure we could. That's just a practical statement of the truth.

[00:09:16] I'm not threatening you and merely reminding you that you are replaceable.

[00:09:24] When I found this interview, it was so surprising to hear him lay it all out like this that I had to call up my friend and partner in crime writer Mary Annaise Heglar, because she knows I've been fascinated by this master for a while. Mary, I'm calling you to tell you about one of my all time favorites in the PR world. I know you've heard me talk about him before. A guy named Herbert Schmertz.

[00:09:51] The Schmertzster! My boy Herb. So he sees this masterpiece theater thing is like a cool opportunity. And he was actually one of the last calls they made. Everybody thought that it was boring. Everybody was like, Why are you bringing British cinema to the U.S.? Americans don't like that stuff. And then Herb is like. This is going to make us look a little posh. Posh, which means fancy, fancy, Ray, like British slang for fancy. Yes, and so OK. Anyway, so he he does it and it starts to become more and more successful, and he starts to really fancy himself a film producer like for Real. So he starts making these regular trips to London, and he's meeting with all these different production companies. And he within like five years or so from the point where mobile from that point to like mobile stop sponsoring masterpiece, which is like another 20 years, he becomes one of the most important men in British cinema. Because if you want your show or your film to get to America, you basically have to impress Herb.

[00:10:59] It's completely wild to me that an oil company exec became one of the most important people in TV and film in the 1970s.

[00:11:08] But his influence didn't stop with Masterpiece Theater. It reached PBS 60 Minutes, Ted Koppel. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and even more more on the many tentacles of Herbert Smith's after this. We heard before the break about Herb Schwartz's multipronged propaganda parade to persuade the public that mobile oil was the classiest gas guzzler in town. Now keep in mind that around the same time, Mobil jumped on board with Masterpiece Theater. Schmitz had pioneered another form of sponsored content. The advertorial In 1970, the New York Times opened up its op ed pages to advertisers for the very first time. Schmitz saw this as a golden opportunity, and rather than run ads in those pages, he hired writers to pen mobile funded op ads. They were clearly marked as ads, but they read like all the other op ads, and they were juicy with headlines like If

[00:12:15] we tell you oil companies don't make enough profit, you'll have effect. Oil companies don't make enough profit. Sorry.

[00:12:24] Well, Herb would have loved a clickbait headline at work. Surely, the American people wouldn't be swayed by a British accent and some clickbait headlines, right? Well, yes, yes, they were. Herb Schwartz's campaign of culture washing was highly successful, about 10 years after Mobile started sponsoring Masterpiece. They surveyed upscale college grads and found that Mobile had a surprising amount of cred with this group of people. They didn't necessarily agree with Mobil's views, but as experts put it, they knew who we were. 31 percent said they bought mobile gas more often than other brands. In his book, Schmitz wrote, Our

[00:13:08] pollster was so surprised by the numbers that he wrote in the margin mobile must be the thinking man's

[00:13:15] gasoline. The thinking man's gasoline makes about as much sense as the intellectuals weedkiller or the philosophers toothpaste. But Herb Schwartz had pulled off making mobile seem kind of classy and in mobile marketing reports about the impact of those New York Times editorials. The company saw major dividends Kert Davies from the watchdog group. The Climate Investigation Center dug up one of these reports from 1982.

[00:13:43] They talk about having influence the New York Times editorial viewpoints in the document says quote. Our analysis shows that the Times has altered or significantly softened its viewpoints on conservation, moving from a total reliance on conservation to advocating increased production incentives to solve the supply shortage on offshore drilling. Moving from valuing environmental concerns at the expense of exploration and development. To urging accelerated offshore drilling and on gas. A haul which is another name for ethanol moving from increased subsidies for gas oil production from grain to arguing against such subsidies. So they tallying how they have affected the viewpoints of the New York Times on conservation, monopoly and divestiture, decontrol, natural gas, coal, offshore drilling and gas are all things that they had written op eds on.

[00:14:37] Sometimes the advertorials and the highbrow TV converged like the tame PBS ran a British docu drama on Saudi Arabia called The Death of a Princess. It was not flattering to Saudi who were furious about this film and the impact of that anger and Saudi's withdrawal of petrodollars was felt around the world. Mobil, of course, had a long history of business with the Saudi Arabians, and they did not want to jeopardize that relationship. So they placed an advertorial in the New York Times calling on PBS to pull the show. And then Schmitz even appeared on the show Open Mind in 1980 to attack the film himself.

[00:15:23] But my guest today is Herbert Schmitz Mobile's Public Affairs, Public Relations Government Relations vice president, who has never hesitated to raise any number of strong and strongly critical points about many aspects of the media, both public and private firm. Thanks for joining me today. Great pleasure to be here, Dick. I want to turn as quickly as possible to a new fairy tale, the mobile ad or op ed piece or editorial. Call it what you will have to call them pamphlets, pamphlets, but they appear in newspapers. Before we spoke about the accepted version was that this was an accurate portrayal of life in Saudi Arabia. I think after we spoke out, another spoke out. It was quite clear that this was a fiction. I have the feeling that this was that this had a measure of political polemic and it also well, that, of course, is what people were saying about your ad, a new fairy tale. Well, I mean, would that be fair? No, I don't think so.

[00:16:23] A new fairy tale was the title of the op ed that mobile had run in the New York Times, criticizing the film and chastising PBS for running it.

[00:16:33] Our ad was done for two purposes one to have the public know that if they did watch it, that it was a fiction and not another factual documentary. Secondly, to to try to urge that perhaps there be some other balancing type of programing which could occur in the one hour panel after the show. Now those were the kinds of things that that clearly helped to put the show in context. But at the end, your conclusion. In the end, we hope that the management of the Public Broadcasting Service will review its decision to run this film. Meaning you hope they wouldn't run it or at least review it and exercise responsible judgment in the light of what is in the best interest of the United States.

[00:17:20] And there you have it another benefit of Spon Khan control and access. Sheamus didn't just have that page in the New York Times that he paid for every week or the ability to tell PBS, which shows to run in masterpiece. Theater for a period of time, he seemed to have most of the media cowed when 60 Minutes turned its lens on itself to question whether it always did the right thing journalistically. Herb Schmitz was there to tell them where he thought they went wrong. Oh, great. A guy who's spent his life manipulating arts and culture to make oil companies look good, lecturing the country on journalistic ethics. This should be good.

[00:18:03] The real issue is, do you always exercise the maximum amount of your rights? And I think the public's perception of me is that you're more interested in exercising your rights to get somebody than you are and exercising the rights to inform.

[00:18:17] Ah yes, Herb Schmitz, VP of Mobile, but also a stand in for the public and really the guy who knows what sort of information the people really want from journalists. It wasn't just 60 Minutes, either. When Ted Koppel wanted to talk about whether a batch of libel suits corporations had brought against journalists constituted an attack on the First Amendment. Her experts was there to say No, not at all.

[00:18:44] Is it an effort at intimidation or just an attempt to keep an increasingly powerful news media accountable? We'll talk with a leading media critic, Mobil Oil Vice President Herbert Schwartz, and with New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis.

[00:18:59] This was a nightly news show positioning Herb Schmitz, VP of Mobile Oil, as an equally valid cultural critic as a New York Times columnist. That's the sort of position that Schmitz had carved out for himself as much as a lot of the media complained about his treatment of them. Something about it worked. It struck a nerve, and it had the effect of getting journalists to overcorrect and buy into what Herb was selling that his and Mobil's opinions were just as valuable to the public as any public intellectuals. Herb even went up against The Wall Street Journal, hardly a hotbed of Trotsky ism. Even back then, in its press, Rupert Murdoch days when the paper refused to bend to his will. Schmitz went on TV to blast him for

[00:19:48] its mobile oil, the nation's third largest industrial corporation. Against The Wall Street Journal, the world's most influential business newspaper this week, the tension that normally exists between an aggressive newspaper and a hard nosed corporation erupted into open warfare. The catalyst was an article in The Wall Street Journal about a mobile real estate project in Chicago. The Journal said this woman's husband will get part of the profits. He's Percy Pine. The fourth, and his father in law is Raleigh Warner Jr., who is chairman of the board of Mobil Oil. This week, Mobile canceled its advertising, with the Journal worth more than half a million dollars a year and imposed a news boycott. No press releases and no interviews. Herb Shimmered says the Journal has been attacking mobile unfairly for years. They have received documents that have been stolen from the company. They are the most widespread user of unnamed sources. They seem to be interested mostly in gossip and innuendo, derogatory comments from unnamed sources and it's been a five year history of this is accusations are false and very self-serving. What he sees is a cheerleading kind of news coverage that presents a picture of mobile that he would like to present to the world. So it's a stalemate.

[00:21:06] After that, he wouldn't give them earnings reports. Press releases, nothing. Herb Schmitz was nothing, if not Petty. Schwartz was a scourge of journalists in the 80s. But in 1988, he left mobile and returned to his first love. TV and film My favorite little personal tidbit about smarts is that when he left mobile, his big plan was to create his own film and TV production company because by this point, she was so convinced that the reason that all these producers wanted to talk to him was that he's actually good at it and that they appreciated his creative input like he really got involved. What shows they would run? He was in charge of the casting. He picked a lot of the shows he signed off on like artwork for the posters now. So he was like a little mogul. Yeah, yeah, a mobile mogul. So shot in his mind, he thought, Well, I've been a producer for like the last 10, 15 years, so I'm going to go off and do this job, you know? And then it's like, you totally see. As soon as mobile stops paying for anything, he has like no more production credits. It's like, no, dude, they really were just after the oil money. It was not your creative. I'm sorry.

[00:22:25] So he went from masterpiece to two-piece.

[00:22:27] Yes, that's right. That's right. Oh, so Herb Schwartz did not have a life in the public eye after mobile. But the trick he pioneered. Sponsored content. It sure did. Today, the New York Times doesn't just let companies write op ads. They have a whole internal brand studio that creates campaigns and writes pieces for companies. ExxonMobil hired them a couple of years back to create a comprehensive campaign around the company's investments in algae fuels. These vibrant green dots microscopic living organisms are algae. Look closely. Algae grows almost everywhere from murky pond. In other episodes, we've talked about how to spot various techniques. Sponsored content is a little different. It's relatively easy to spot, although it can sometimes blend in. But most publications clearly market. What a lot of people miss, though, is how and why it's effective. Because on the face of it, it seems harmless. Clearly marked and people aren't that easy to influence, surely. But in general, companies don't tend to spend millions of dollars on stuff that isn't effective. They don't buy into communication strategies that don't work. So let's take a look at why this one is still going strong. First, it wraps your messages and the credibility of another brand. When Exxon goes to the New York Times tea brand studio, for example, it's not because the Tea Brand Studio has hired the best creatives in the business. Sorry to break it to you. It's because of exactly what they market on the brand studio's website. Their connection to The New York Times, no matter how well it's marked when a story about Exxon's amazing algae program turns up on the New York Times homepage, that lends a certain amount of credibility. And that's what companies are buying. It furthers the idea that companies are people and that their ideas are worth listening to, that their opinions should be part of the mix. Public discussion. Companies don't give to art museums and music festivals or sponsor shows on public media to be good corporate citizens. They do it, as experts put it, in more than one talk about Mobile's philanthropic efforts for the bottom line payout and to maintain what's called a social license to operate this invisible permission slip that the public gives to industries and companies to let them keep doing what they're doing. Are you really going to support policies that harm the company that sponsors your favorite TV show or the music festival you go to every summer? Maybe. But it's going to take a lot to get you to turn against the company that brought Lizzo to Jazz Fest. Yeah, that's a real thing. Shell's sponsors Jazz Fest now and Lizzo's come in in 2020 to. That's it for this time next week. We're going to dig into astroturfing, the creation of fake grassroots groups to push business friendly messaging with a look at one of the most hilarious examples of it. Maybe ever come back for that. Thank you for joining us backstage for a behind the scenes look at the history of public relations. Remember to subscribe or ever to get your podcast, take this ride all the way to the end. Rigged is an original Critical Frequency production, lots of documents, photos, videos and other fun facts about the wild world of PR are on our website at Rigged Dot Media. Our producer is Martin Alz Bostwick. He also scored this season. Artwork is by Matthew Fleming. Our fact checker is Ashley Braun. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the First Amendment project. Big thanks to Mary and a heckler who you'll hear throughout this series. If you want to hear more of me and Mary joking around. Check out Hot Take. The show we do about climate change archival tape in this episode is courtesy of C-SPAN, Vanderbilt University, the University of Maryland and the Library of Congress. The show is reported by me. Amy Westervelt, thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

S1, Ep4 Transcription

The legendary Herb Schmertz, VP of Mobil Oil, worked with PBS and The New York Times to invent sponsored content—sponcon—back in the 1960s.

John Hill: The Right-Hand Man

Earl Newsom: The Man Behind the Curtain

Daniel Edelman: The Psy-Opps King

Rick Berman: "Dr. Evil"

Ivy Lee: The Godfather

The Reason Covid-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation

To understand the current state of disinformation in the U.S., it helps to know the history of how and why the PR industry was created. 

In response to a protest, the country’s largest oil company sent in private security teams, who wound up killing several protestors, including women and children. The company’s spokesperson claimed the protestors were hired by a labor union trying to stir up trouble.

Sounds like it could have been written about any of a half dozen recent pipeline protests, right? But these are the basic details of a mining strike in 1914, in Ludlow, Colorado. The mine was owned by Standard Oil, and the Rockefeller family had only a few years prior been raked over 
the coals by a messy antitrust lawsuit and a series of 

 about their monopoly on the country’s burgeoning oil industry.

They needed help burnishing their image, so they called on another industry that was just emerging at the time: Public relations. Ivy Ledbetter Lee, the first modern PR guy, came up with that idea that the protestors were 

 Today we would call them “crisis actors” and it’s an accusation thrown at almost every protest, but few people know the whole thing was created
 by a PR guy working for an oil company back in 1914.

Lee invented all sorts of other tricks of the trade too. 

 for a start. Before Lee, companies had a pretty adversarial relationship with the press and vice versa. Lee thought businesses would do better to tell journalists more of their story themselves. It was so unusual that when he first began sending press releases to The New York Times, the paper printed them verbatim. On behalf of rail, coal, oil and tobacco clients Lee also created seemingly independent information bureaus, like the 

, whose experts were regularly quoted criticizing railroad tax proposals.

Again, this was more than 100 years ago. And Lee was followed by generation after generation of PR experts, each adding another bell or whistle to America’s disinformation machine—some on behalf of oil, others on behalf of the chemical or tobacco industries, often on behalf 
of all three at the same time.

For years, the story about disinformation has been that Big Tobacco created it all and then Big Oil copied them. And there's a thread of truth there. Some of the same phony scientists who sold America on the idea that smoking was safe turned around and told them not to worry about climate change. But it’s not the whole story. To get that, we need to look at the context that enabled climate denial to flourish, an information system polluted by 100 years of propaganda. And we need to look at who was hiring those phony scientists—not companies, but PR firms. When people focus on one particular form of science denial, or on one technique that this or that industry copied from another, this is the big picture they miss: the disinformation machine driving everything from QAnon conspiracies to climate denial, vaccine hesitation to white nationalism. It’s bigger than any one industry, but it was built on behalf of all of them, and if we want to have any hope of addressing the large, intersecting, complex problems facing us today, it must be better understood. And then reconfigured, or dismantled altogether.

Just as Ivy Lee was building the modern PR industry, the U.S. government realized it needed a bit of propaganda to help sell American citizens on World War I. President Woodrow Wilson had made staying out of the war a key part of his campaign, and now he needed to convince Americans that it was a good idea to join in...without looking like a hypocrite. He tapped George Creel, a journalist turned political campaigner who had helped with Wilson's electoral bid, to build out what was eventually called the Committee on Public Information and generally referred to as The Creel Committee or the Creel Commission. Creel tapped some of the nation's greatest journalists (Ida Tarbell, for one!), filmmakers, artists, and publicity men to create a 360-degree assault on the 
American public. They made films, created compelling posters, and even launched the world's first "influencers." In cities and towns across the country, Creel and his team found influential members of society and trained them to give 4-minute pro-war speeches before screenings of 
silent films or big events. They were known as the "4-Minute Men".

Several members of the Creel Committee went on to be major influences on the burgeoning PR industry. One of them was a young publicity agent from the theater, Edward Bernays. Bernays had done some creative promotion of plays with particular social missions and had worked for major ballet companies as well, and his work caught the eye of Creel. It didn't hurt that Bernays's uncle was Sigmund Freud—on both sides, in a bizarre and some might say Freudian twist (Edward's mother was Freud’s sister, and Freud was also married to Bernays’ father’s sister). Bernays grew up in Vienna, hearing all about Freud’s theories on the deeply buried human impulses that drive behavior. While Ivy Lee was 

 part of the Creel Committee, he handled publicity for the American Red Cross during the war effort, and he and Bernays worked together often through their respective positions. Bernays became a trusted colleague of Lee's during the war, the only other PR guy that Lee thought his equal. It was after WWI that Bernays famously said, “If propaganda could be used so effectively in war, why could we not use it in peace?”

At the time, democracy was still a relatively new idea, and those in power were almost universally terrified of it. Propaganda—which Bernays later 

 because “the Germans had given it a bad name”—was created as a reaction to growing public criticism of the titans of industry who had once been hailed as heroes. But it was also created to provide those in power with the tools to manipulate the masses. Bernays, Lee, and 

—Adolf Hitler—were all close readers of French philosopher Gustav Le Bon, who posited that the public, or as Le Bon put it 

 could only be both satisfied and safe when it was controlled. Like Le Bon, Bernays had a real disdain for the public, writing in his seminal book 

Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by a relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

To be clear, Bernays saw himself as part of that “ruling power,” and he relished the role of manipulator.

Ivy Lee died fairly young, in his 50s, and when he did Edward Bernays inherited many of his clients, including both 

the fossil fuel industry trade group that Lee had helped Standard Oil create as World War I was ending. While Ivy Lee largely focused on shaping and controlling the way the media got information as a way to mold public opinion, Bernays tried to manipulate the masses more directly. His best known trick was obliterating the taboo against women smoking in about six months, a 

They tasked Bernays with increasing sales, and he actually went to a psychoanalyst to talk about what cigarettes signified. You guessed it, phalluses. This got Bernays thinking about the “penis envy” women supposedly feel and an emergent push for women’s rights, and boom he had it: he would make smoking a women’s empowerment issue. He convinced a few young women he knew to stage a smoking “protest” in New York, calling cigarettes “freedom torches,” then alerted the press to the protest. It made headlines across the country and within a few months women all over the country were smoking and American Tobacco’s sales were soaring.

So, to recap, PR emerged as a way for industry to deal with a three-pronged threat: the rise of investigative journalism and activism shining a light on the misdeeds of industry, the emergence of regulation (which previously left industry to its own devices), and the expansion of the vote to members of society that had little in common with captains of industry. It was wildly successful. The first wave of PR effectively put a stop to the muckrakers’ early calls for corporate accountability.

Then the Depression hit and once again America’s bosses were the bad guys. Publicists like John W. Hill helped companies like 

paint labor unions, social security, and the New Deal as socialist. Hill paid commentators like 

 to write op-eds in newspapers and magazines, or join panel discussions 

 ginning up fear about these ideas. (At one point, Hill’s firm Hill & Knowlton was paying Sokolsky $40,000 a year to write pieces criticizing Social Security and the New Deal—that's a high six-figure salary in today's dollars). Hill would go on to mastermind the 

 (TIRC), a hub of science denial around smoking...that sounds an awful lot like the research bureaus Ivy Lee had set up some 40 years before. Not a huge shock given that Hill idolized Lee.

Hill’s client roster also included the 

 during those years, so it's no surprise that you see the same tactics deployed by TIRC then used by oil companies to combat rising concern over "the greenhouse effect" or by agribusiness to combat rising concern over GMOs. In fact Hill would have folks from the tobacco companies and chemical companies join the API, because he spotted ways for all three industries to work together—to lobby together for or against regulation, to trade strategies and ideas, even to create new products together. Without PR firms bringing them together, these industries and companies 
may have tended to stay in their own worlds, but the type of cross-pollination Hill enabled was hugely influential.

In fact it’s how the cigarette filter came about.

Cigarette filters are one of the reasons oil and gas companies were named defendants in the tobacco litigation of the 1990s. “When tobacco companies needed to assess the toxics in their cigarettes and in cigarette smoke, the people they turned to to do it were the oil companies,” says Carroll Muffett, President and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law. Oil companies had been testing exhaust and refinery smoke for years because of the Clean Air Act, so they were the ones that had the sophisticated equipment and the knowledge to test for toxins in cigarette smoke.

“And when the oil companies reported back to the tobacco companies on the toxins they were in fact finding in that smoke, you know, what did they do with the information?" Muffett said. "Did they go public and say there's a massive risk here? No. They entered into joint enterprises, joint ventures with the tobacco companies to produce cigarette filters.”

Since the inception of the PR industry, its most expert practitioners have deployed a handful of techniques on behalf of multiple industries and really in service of all industry: to paint business as a good faith member of the community, to sway public opinion, to avoid what infamous PR guy Rick Berman calls "public judgement," and to create political will in their favor. But they weren't operating in a vacuum. In deploying these techniques on behalf of industry, they fundamentally shifted the information ecosystem in America.

Today, it's not just industries that want to avoid regulation or deal with a crisis who use PR techniques, it's everyone from your local county government to your favorite musician to the most 
earnest nonprofit. It's the filter through which all information flows to the public. Which doesn't 

 to be a bad thing, but it has certainly led to the information pollution we have in the U.S. today, where trust in journalists and experts is at an all-time low, the public is tremendously confused, people can (and do) just consume "news" that tracks with their opinions, and so on. To clean up that pollution, it helps to know how to spot these techniques. Our hope with this investigation and related podcasts and documents is to help people do just that—not to make people even more suspicious of everything they see, or double down on getting their information only from one trusted YouTuber, but to pull the mask off a bit and help people find their way through the filters to the information they need to make important decisions about their lives.

E. Bruce Harrison Documents

John Hill Documents

Ivy Lee Documents

Newsom Documents

Edelman Documents

Berman Documents

Bernays Documents

S3, Bonus: We Interrupt This Podcast for New Research + Emily Atkin and Guardian CEO Anna Bateson on Banning Fossil Fuel Ads

S3, Ep9 | Jay Rosen and Nicholas Johnson on What the Media Can Do About Disinformation

S3, Ep7 | John Hill and the Tobacco-Oil-Plastic Triangle

S3, Ep8 | Meet The Harrisons

S9, Ep1 | The Panic

S3, Ep6 | Manipulating the Masses and Predicting the Future—Edward Bernays and W. Howard Chase

S1, Ep5 | Fun With Front Groups

S1, Ep2 | Ye Olde Crisis Actor Myth

S1, Ep4 | The Birth of SponCon

S1, Ep6 | How a Standard Oil PR Guy Shaped Post-War America

S1, Ep1 | Fake Experts and Real Bacon

S3, Ep3 | Psychological Warfare, Astroturfing, and Another Tobacco-Oil Connection

S3, Ep2 | The Oil-Nazi-Propaganda Triangle

S1, Ep3 | A Tie Is a Win

S3, Ep1 | The Father of Public Relations

S1, Ep3 | Weaponizing False Equivalence

[00:00:00] It's simple supply and demand, more abundant energy means more affordable energy, producing more American oil and natural gas will help keep energy bills in check. Who doesn't want that? I'm Rick, and I'm an energy voter.

[00:00:15] If you can afford a Tesla, then this message won't really matter to you.

[00:00:22] Name is Dawn Smith. I've been with Wal-Mart for three years. Twenty eight years. Seventeen half years. Six and a half years. Seventeen years. Eleven years. And this love this love my job.

[00:00:39] If these commercials are to be believed, hundreds of Americans are out there rallying around the causes of protecting energy companies, automakers and big box retailers from regulation. Wow, those plucky little guys protecting those vulnerable behemoths of U.S. industry. Ads like this tend to appear when legislation or unions threaten the profits of big companies, they claim to be messages from grassroots groups like energy citizens or the California Drivers Alliance or from employees that just love Wal-Mart so much they want to sing it from the rooftops, but they're actually paid for by industry trade groups or specific companies.

[00:01:32] They give these fake front groups these names that sound their like perfectly innocuous names like the California Drivers Alliance or the Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy.

[00:01:44] This is Christine Arena. She knows a lot about this tactic because she used to be a VP at a PR firm that's famous for using it.

[00:01:53] There are hundreds of them are usually secretly run by lobbying organizations like the two I just mentioned are actually run by the Western States Petroleum Association, which is a top lobbyist for the oil industry. Western States Betrayal Petroleum Association is in turn funded by members including BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Occidental, among others. So it's it's fake activism. It's corporate money posing as activism and and it's designed to undo all of the progress that real activism makes.

[00:02:33] Welcome back to Rigged, a podcast about the war for hearts and minds and activism right here on U.S. soil. I'm Amy Westervelt, and today's trick is astroturfing. Ah yes. Astroturfing When grassroots don't exist, a plastic version will do very nicely. One of the PR firms most associated with astroturfing is Arena's former employer, Edelman PR. It was started back in 1952 in Chicago by Daniel Edelman, a former journalist who had spent World War Two working in psychological warfare for the U.S. Army. Here he is much later in life, describing that gig.

[00:03:19] Working in a and doing the psychological warfare thing was fascinating because we were offsetting the claims made by the Germans that it all lies. I mean, we had to disclaim them.

[00:03:33] Yep. And then he came home and put those skills to work on behalf of U.S. industry against the American public. Edelman son Richard took over as CEO in 1996, and one of his first moves was to make a really big show of how the firm was no longer going to work with tobacco companies. A noble move after his dad had spent decades helping the industry pushed the idea that secondhand smoke was no big deal. It must be weird doing in the family business when the family business is propaganda and a strategy he crafted for R.J. Reynolds in 1977. Daniel Edelman, Dad. If you like, recommends a civility campaign for smokers as a way to push the idea that smokers care about nonsmokers, that they're not just trying to be assholes imposing their cigarets on the public, he writes.

[00:04:33] A program directed at our own constituency, the smoker makes the greatest sense to us. Example a code of conduct for smokers publicized and all the traditional ways are Smokers Etiquette Handbook distributed in smoking sections of trains, airplanes, etc. Restaurant Tabletops on Smoking Etiquette Awards to courtesy smokers contest to develop the do's and don'ts of civility and smoking. The possibilities are limitless. We need to develop various ways such a campaign can be pursued intelligently and effectively, but also seems to us that within the framework of a campaign of this sort, we have the best opportunity and the most congenial way of communicating our case that there is no real evidence that inhaling someone else's cigaret smoke causes any health problems.

[00:05:32] In 1998, after Big Tobacco had lost multiple lawsuits and been hauled in front of Congress and investigated by the Department of Justice, Richard Edelman said, No, sir, we will no longer work for these guys. Richard Edelman may have sworn off tobacco, but he made up for it with a voracious appetite for oil, or at least the money of oil companies who were more than eager to pay him for bringing that Edelman family magic to their industry. Christine Arena joined Edelman in 2012, leading the business and social practice. She thought she'd be helping the firm do good work for organizations that were doing genuinely good things for the environment. But she quickly realized that she'd just been hired to do greenwashing. In the summer of 2014, Edelman created an astroturfing master plan designed to sway public opinion on TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline. It did just not in the way they'd hoped. In November that year, the astroturfing plan was leaked to the press. Embarrassing, and Edelman enjoyed another moment in the spotlight. By the end of 2014, Arena knew she had to leave. In 2015, the Guardian caught wind of Arena's departure, along with three other Edelman executives who all left the firm over its work with Big Oil. The Guardian published an article on that, and it got quite a bit of attention. So once again, Edelman took a brave stand, promising to do better in the future. The firm vowed to stop promoting climate denial and to stop working with the coal industry. Period. It also committed to no more greenwashing or astroturfing, which is weird because in 2018, they said. An entry for a PR award for a campaign they created for Shell. That's well, it sure looks a lot like greenwashing. In their award submission, Adelman said There, campaign was meant to quote

[00:07:47] raise awareness of Shell's ambition in the UK to create more and cleaner energy solutions in a way that appeals to millennials. And in doing so, to build Shell's reputation in the UK as an innovative energy company,

[00:08:04] they claimed a 28 percent increase in people's belief that Shell quote works to provide a sustainable energy future as a key result of their campaign. Is that greenwashing, you say, persuading the public that a fossil fuel giant is a plucky investor in renewables? I say potato. So, yeah. One of the precursors to all of that was that ad you heard up top from energy. Citizen's Energy Citizens is a front group created by Edelman for the American Petroleum Institute. Way back in 2009. But creating groups like that is something Edelman has done over and over again for lots of clients in lots of different industries,

[00:08:48] like that creation of fake grassroots support, which came to be known as like astroturfing. And Edelman was genius at doing that. And that's like rallying with the tobacco companies that was like, you know, doctors and academics and climate change scientists to take a contrarian perspective and anybody who would like to hear it, the propaganda they'll use that astroturf plan to then influence media to influence politicians, influence regulatory agencies.

[00:09:20] Edelman created all kinds of astroturfing groups to fight environmental regulations, but they didn't just work against environmental regulations. They worked against all kinds of other regulations, too. We're going to hear more about that after the break. The world of politics can certainly feel overwhelming, like right wing movements are gaining traction, and there's too much to do before the midterm elections next fall. Listening to season two of words to win by hosted by renowned communications researcher and campaign advisor a not Shenkar Rosario, each week was to win by takes listeners on a journey from Switzerland to Arizona to the Dominican Republic to unpack some of the fiercest fights and biggest come from behind victories for progressives. New episodes of words to win by premiere every Tuesday. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts. Examples of Edelman's astroturfing work for oil companies and other big polluters abound, but the most over-the-top example of astroturfing they ever did was for Wal-Mart. When I heard about it, I had to call up Mary Annaise Hagler writer and my frequent partner in crime.

[00:10:49] OK, I'm going to. I'm going to just I'm going to read you a little story and we can pause along the way for for your reactions to the song.

[00:10:58] This is sweet, it's story time!

[00:11:00] It's story time with Mary! Here we go." In April 2006, Jim and I hiked the Grand Canyon price and slot canyons in Escalante. During our trip, we ended up in Page Arizona. At five a.m. We were up and ready to go. Although not much else is in page, except, of course, the Walmart Supercenter, we pulled into the parking lot and made at least a dozen RV is not sure what was up. We asked why, and we learned that Wal-Mart allows RVs to stay in store parking lots overnight for free. As we hiked up Bright Angel Trail from Phantom Ranch in the Grand Canyon, a new adventure was born. I started thinking about all the other amazing things there are to see in this vast country of ours. And then I started thinking about how Wal-Mart, one in every town, practically lets you park overnight for free. The idea just sort of came together. We would take vacation from our full time jobs and drive across the country in a rented RV from city to city, spending the night in a different Wal-Mart parking lot every night. And of course, I'd write an article about it and maybe and may be able to sell a story to an RV magazine with photos of RV in America and only staying at Wal-Marts. Given the litigious age we live in, we decided to get permission from Wal-Mart to do so. So I called my brother, who works at Edelman and whose clients include working families for Wal-Mart. In order to find out if we'd be allowed to talk to people and take pictures in Wal-Mart parking lots. As a freelance writer, I've learned over the years that it's always better to ask about stuff like that in advance. They didn't just give us permission. They said they would even sponsor the trip. Hmm. A blog seemed like the perfect medium to tell those stories and even more exciting. No editors. What writer could say? No to that? Oh dear. All in all, it was a perfect fit. Working families for Wal-Mart wants to get the word out about all the good things Walmart does for people. I wanted to make this trip and write about it. It just seemed to work.

[00:13:17] Is that the end of that story?

[00:13:21] Have you ever heard about the blog Wal-Mart across America become?

[00:13:29] OK. OK, so this is the final post in that blog. It was a project of Edelman PR company for Wal-Mart, and it was started amidst a push among Walmart employees to unionize. So Edelman helped them create this group called Working Families for Wal-Mart, which is one of the many, many, many examples of of astroturfing that Edelman has done for various companies. And it was kind of presented as like, you know, an employee group of of people who really didn't want to unionize and that they were just good old fashioned working class Americans who just loved Wal-Mart. And this blog came about as this whole, you know, fight about unionizing was happening and they would go to all these Wal-Marts, this woman and her husband and they would talk to employees and the employees would just go on and on about how much they loved working for what I'm

[00:14:37] sure they did. Meanwhile, hair and makeup is like just out of the parking lot, right?

[00:14:50] Yes. Yes. You mean, at the time, at Wal-Mart and across America, they viewed Wal-Mart was paying Edelman some 10 million dollars a year to improve its reputation. That reputation, of course, was that it was cheap with its wages and its benefits. Nothing like paying a PR firm, millions to make you look generous instead of just paying your employees. In the aftermath of the Wal-Mart Across America debacle, Richard Edelman himself went to the press with a statement.

[00:15:24] We regret not being 100 percent transparent about the identity of the blogger. That was entirely our fault, not our clients.

[00:15:33] OK. Sure. But nowhere in there did he say anything about working families for Wal-Mart, which was just as big of a fake. The organization was set up by Wal-Mart, and most of its members were Wal-Mart executives, not the store clerks you might imagine. When you hear working families for Wal-Mart? Well, I mean, technically, those executives do work for Wal-Mart, and I guess those families must really like the sweet paycheck they bring home. Wal-Mart execs can earn a thousand times that of an average employee if I were in that family. I'd be very in favor of Wal-Mart. The sole goal of working families for Wal-Mart seemed to be to stop Wal-Mart workers from unionizing, which tracked with Wal-Mart's history when a handful of Wal-Mart butchers at one store in Texas came together to bargain with the store collectively in 2000. The company shut down not only the meat counter at that store, but all of its stores in Texas and five neighboring states, just in case any of those rogue butchers had it in mind to move to a nearby state, I guess. As a business practice, taking off and nuking the site from orbit is always an option. If you're Wal-Mart, of course, Edelman doesn't have a monopoly on astroturfing. The other absolute legend at it is Dr. Evil Doctor Who Doctor, a.k.a. Dick Evil Richard Berman, King of the Front Group. He's the Atai is a win guy from episode three. You don't need to get people to like you. All you have to do is create enough uncertainty that they won't act against you. Remember, back in episode one, when we heard from the doctor with the Center for Accountability and Science and he was talking about antibiotics in meat,

[00:17:26] choosing a burrito or a footlong sub labeled antibiotic free might make you feel like you're making a healthier choice. But in reality, you're simply paying more for a label. To learn more, visit accountable science dot com.

[00:17:41] That's a Berman group. He also runs the perfectly innocuous sounding Environmental Policy Alliance, which is the official publisher of a site called Big Green Radicals that highlights the bad behavior of environmental groups some real eco extremists like the Sierra Club. The money for that site came from the right wing Bradley Foundation and initially went to another Berman group, the Center for Consumer Freedom. That group must have gotten too much bad press because in recent years, Berman scrapped it and renamed it the Center for Organizational Research and Education. Big Green Radicals was an environment focused spinoff of a previous project that Berman had done for Bradley called Activist Cash Dot Com. And then, of course, Berman also runs the Center for Union Facts. Surprise, surprise in the anti-union site. If you're getting lost in this maze of slightly boring sounding, innocuous names, guess what? That's the point. He's hoping you lose track of all the money he's throwing at these fake pressure groups. One of Berman's many claims to infamy is his work going after those radicals and mothers against drunk driving on behalf of the restaurant and bar industry and those hippies at the Humane Society on behalf of the industrial meat guys. Here's an ad for the website Humane Watch, a watchdog site that Berman runs to highlight the nefarious ways of the Humane Society.

[00:19:28] What do you give money to a charity that was involved in a multimillion dollar racketeering lawsuit? Would you donate to a charity that was being investigated by an attorney general?

[00:19:37] When you write a check to an animal charity that moves $50 million to offshore accounts instead of using it to help animals? Would you support a humane

[00:19:44] society that actually ran zero pet shelters? Would you would you?

[00:19:49] Would you? Would you? But he's got more serious sounding groups to the Employment Policies Institute Foundation, for example. OK. Actually, the use of both institute and foundation there, in an attempt to sound serious and objective is goofy and hilarious. Classic Berman. The Department for Academic Study is it's amazing. He really can't help himself, but that organization looks on the face of it like a pretty standard DC policy think tank. And it is in fact part of a cluster of nonprofits funded by the Bradley Foundation. They're an ultra conservative group that spends more money than the Cokes. A huge funding source for anti environmental campaigns, the Bradley Foundation pushes very specific pro-business policies, and in this case, a group of Berman led efforts the Center for Union Facts and the Center for Consumer Freedom and the Employment Policies Institute Foundation all focused on one thing getting rid of labor unions. Here's Burman defending his right not to disclose who's funding which groups on Rachel Maddow. Back in 2009,

[00:21:01] I started a lot of these myself because I believe in them, and then I go to people and I say, Listen, this is what I'm doing. If you are, if your beliefs are consistent with mine, will you help me get this thing right? So who? Who doesn't? Who does anything to put a website up,

[00:21:13] but who on the acorn? So nobody ever, ever supported that. That was out of the goodness of your heart. Yeah, the problem with that is that I can't prove it one way or another because you don't have to disclose it. And so I have to take your word on that and I will. There's no reason not to. But in general, your strategy is not to say I, Rick Furman, am being paid to tell you that the efforts to stop you from eating fish or stop eating trans fats or or or or stop smoking cigarets, whatever they are, I'm being paid to tell you that these things are a bad idea.

[00:21:45] I don't want things that I don't believe.

[00:21:47] OK, but you are being paid to say them as well by people who have a vested interest, if you admitted that. But of course, nobody would call you Dr. Evil anymore. They just call you a PR guy. No reason that you're on the show is because you don't disclose who's paying you to say the things that you're saying. Well, then you

[00:21:59] can't have anybody on your show from the left or the right who is connected to these nonprofit organizations because they won't tell you who's funding them.

[00:22:08] I think that they're entitled to do this. They're entitled, they're entitled to keep their donors quiet. I think that that's up to them.

[00:22:14] Of course, not all astroturfing attempts are as obvious and goofy as a Wal-Mart thing across America. I mean, come on, guys through at least one employee and who doesn't just love the shit out of their Wal-Mart shop. If you want to sell this thing. But if you know what to look for, even the more subtle efforts are pretty easy to spot. They really play up the we're just normal average citizens thing in their names and in their messaging. They talk about saving you average American money, but their number one goal actually seems to be saving a company or an industry money. They use stock photos of people who are supposed to be members of their group in their ads. Hilariously, these guys are constantly doing this and thinking they're not going to get caught. They always get caught. There's no real way to join the group. You can learn more or sign a petition, sometimes even show up at a rally, but unlike genuine community groups, they're never having meetings unless you're hanging out near the Wal-Mart executive washroom in Arkansas. These types of ads really ramp up around elections, so keep an eye out for them in 2022. That's it for this time, next time on our final episode of this series, we're going to find out why Americans really embraced consumerism after World War Two. Come back for that. Thank you for joining us on this hair raising journey through the murky history of PR. Remember to subscribe or ever you get your podcast to find out once and for all who's really pulling the strings. Rig is an original Critical Frequency production, lots of documents, photos and other fun facts about the wild world of PR are on our web site at Rigged Media. Our producer is Marten's Alz Elswick. He also scored this season. Artwork is by Matthew Fleming. Our fact checker is Ashley Barone. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the 1st Amendment Project. Big thanks to Mary Agnes Hagler, who you'll hear throughout this series. If you want to hear more of me and Mary joking around, check out Hot. Take the show we do about climate change. Archival tape in this episode is courtesy of the Library of Congress, the PR Museum and Vanderbilt University's TV news archive. The show is reported by me, Amy Westervelt. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

S1, Ep5 Transcription

Astroturfing—the creation of fake grassroots groups to agitate for pro-business policies—has been a favorite tactic of industries and companies trying to avoid regulation for decades. In this episode we take a look at some of the greatest hits.

Rigged Season 1

In Rigged, we rummage through the bag of tricks used by PR to shape the world you live in. Over the last century, these tricks have rigged the media, the government… society, really...with sometimes ridiculous, and sometimes profoundly serious effects on our democracy. This is a podcast about that war for hearts and minds right here on US soil.

S1, Ep4 | The Birth of SponCon

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S1, Ep5 | Fun With Front Groups

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