Earl Newsom: The Man Behind the Curtain

Daniel Edelman: The Psy-Opps King

Herb Schmertz: The Bully

Ivy Lee: The Godfather

Amy Westervelt

Edward Bernays gave himself the title "The Father of Modern Public Relations," a clever way to erase the contributions of those who came before him and solidify his legacy. Clever because it was technically true: he created the term "public relations" after the Germans had, as 
he put it, "given the word propaganda a bad name."

Bernays is better known than his predecessor Ivy Lee, in part because Lee died so young, while Bernays lived to over 100 and continued to work, write, and think about PR almost to his dying day. He's a central figure in the documentary 

, which provides fascinating  insight into who Bernays was as a person and what he believed, namely that the masses needed to be controlled because most of them were too stupid to know what was good for them, and certainly to know what was good for the country.

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 Edward's father’s sister). Bernays grew up in Vienna, hearing all about Freud’s theories on the deeply buried human 
impulses that drive behavior. As a young man, he was very interested in the performing arts, particularly ballet and theater and he began to work in that world as a new sort of publicity man, less focused on posters and ticket sales and more on making his clients a major topic of conversation at dinner parties. His work in that realm attracted the attention of George Creel, who was heading up the government's WWI propaganda effort, and Bernays headed to Washington to join the effort.

It was here that he saw the real power in propaganda and became a bit drunk with his own ability to manipulate the masses. Bernays chaired the Committee on Public Information's Export Service, meaning his job was to help sell Europe on the idea of America as an ally and a savior. 
There is very little documentation of what Bernays actually 

during WWI, but unlike his predecessor Ivy Lee, Bernays was all about promoting himself as much as his clients, and he spun a narrative for decades that he was integral to the Committee's success.Bernays and Lee represent two archetypes that we see over and over again in PR  history, with Lee preferring to operate behind the scenes and Bernays seeing value in being as visible himself as his clients were. Which is why, in addition to crowning himself the father of public relations and playing up his role in the Creel Commission, Bernays also consistently referenced his uncle and his relationship to him, creating the impression that he had a special understanding of human psychology and 
behavior by virtue of that family connection.If Bernays was good at selling himself, he was also very good at delivering big wins for his clients. And he fundamentally changed many aspects of American society without Americans really knowing it. His list of successes includes:

Convincing American men to wear wrist watches (the prevailing social norm was that anything worn on the wrist was feminine and the masculine thing to do was carry a pocket watch)

Making smoking in public acceptable for women (more on that below)

Making bacon and eggs the classic American breakfast (on behalf of a bacon client, naturally)

These examples show Bernays' genius at work and highlight the techniques he contributed to the information ecosystem:

In 1929, the head of the American Tobacco Company called Bernays up and said "we're losing half of our potential market—there's a taboo against women smoking, what can we do to break down that taboo?" Bernays asked if he could go talk to a psychoanalyst about it and got the green light. Through that conversation he came up with the idea of cigarettes being associated with female empowerment (and, yes, penis envy). So he called up a few stylish and influential young women he knew, asked them if they would be interested in staging a little protest, walking up and down 5th avenue smoking, and they agreed. Once he knew the "protest" was on, Bernays notified all the newspapers and magazines. His "Torches of Freedom" protest spread like wildfire and within a year the taboo on women smoking had been permanently lifted.

Here’s Bernays telling the story himself decades later:

In the 1940s, Beechnut Packing Company, the country’s biggest bacon producer, tapped Bernays to help them with plummeting sales. In the 19th century, when manual labor was the norm—from farming to mining to building the railroads—Americans ate enormous breakfasts, mostly modeled
on the English breakfast: eggs, meat, pasties and so forth. By the 1940s, however, work was less physically demanding. Needing less fuel to get through their days, and wanting to stay slim, Americans had whittled breakfast down to just a piece of toast and orange juice or a 
cup of coffee.Bernays had a medical doctor on his agency's payroll by this point. So he asked the firm's MD, a well-known New York physician, if a hearty breakfast might actually be healthier. The doctor, knowing the answer Bernays wanted, said yes and Bernays asked him to get other doctors, all over the country, to weigh in as well. He got more than 5,000 doctors to agree that a heavy breakfast was, in Bernays' words, “scientifically desirable.” That survey was published 
and sent out to every newspaper, magazine, and radio station around the country. Six months later, Beechnut's sales had boomed, and the classic breakfast was back.

And again, here’s Bernays telling the story in his own words later in life:

In 1918, a watch manufacturer contacted Bernays. They had the opposite problem to American Tobacco: they made wristwatches, which only women would wear. There was a taboo against men wearing wristwatches, which, because of their similarity to bracelets, were seen as feminine. At the time, men would only wear wristwatches to indicate that they were homosexual. So, Bernays did some research. He discovered that American soldiers were all carrying pocketwatches, and that actually lighting a match to see their pocketwatch was a good way to attract attention and get killed on the frontlines. He convinced the U.S. Army that wristwatches could save soldiers lives. The watches became standard issue in the Army, obliterating the taboo and sending sales soaring.

On behalf of his client Dixie, Bernays created the Committee for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary Dispensing of Food and Drink, which ran various campaigns about how unsanitary using regular old glasses was. And, true to form, Bernays incorporated subtle sexual messaging as well. One ad emphasized that with disposable cups you never had to wonder if someone else's lips had touched your cup. Others connected imagery of overflowing non-disposable cups to subliminal images of vaginas and sexual disease. It was all in service of one message, convincing people that disposable cups were more sanitary.

Bernays Documents

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

Mad Men

Edward Bernays: The Freudian Slip

Martin Zaltz-Austwick

[00:00:02] The American Breakfast is a staple of diners and kitchen tables up and down the country. But that wasn't always the case. In fact, the American Breakfast was the brainchild of the self-styled father of public relations man who literally saved the US meat industry's bacon. Welcome to rigged. The story of disinformation and rigged will rummage through the bag of tricks used by PR to shape the world you live in. These tricks are used to manipulate your feelings, fend off regulation and evade public scrutiny. Over the last century, they've rigged the media, the government society really to benefit the rich and powerful with sometimes ridiculous and sometimes profoundly serious effects on our democracy. This is a podcast about that war for hearts and minds and bacon right here on U.S. soil. I'm Amy Westervelt. Today's trick fake experts. But first breakfast

[00:01:09] cracking your eggs nice and gently. Just a little sprinkling of the cayenne. Make the eggs a little bit spicy, then into a preheated oven for six to eight minutes. Meanwhile, onto my bacon and I'm giving it a classic American twist. We're just going to bring

[00:01:24] it back down to ground level and make proper scrambled eggs and perfectly cooked bacon. We're basically just going over the most basic breakfast you can make. We're just going to take this simple ingredients. We just have eggs. We just had bacon and we have some toast.

[00:01:40] So one of the requests was show me three ways that I can cook bacon. While actually I could show you flour if I was in my house with my deep fryer.

[00:01:56] But it's hard to imagine it was ever rare for Americans to eat bacon with breakfast. Go to most diners in the country today and what's listed under classic breakfasts. Almost all include bacon, pancakes and bacon, bacon and eggs, French toast and bacon bacon with bacon wrapped in more bacon.

[00:02:16] Let me tell you, as a vegan, breakfast is the most obnoxious meal to eat out because it's all bacon sausage. I couldn't eat a damn thing.

[00:02:27] This is Mary Annaise Heglar, my friend and frequent collaborator. I've spent most of the last 20 years researching disinformation and propaganda, and mostly that entails sitting in the dark corner of an archive, looking through the papers of a long dead PR guy and then going, Oh my God, this can't be real. Is it real? I don't know. To myself, when I need a sanity check something, I call up Mary.

[00:02:53] I brought whiskey for this occasion because I have no idea where this is going.

[00:02:57] So, OK, it might seem totally normal that the classic American Breakfast is built around bacon because so many of the first settlers in America were from the UK or Ireland. Even the Brits were carrying, salting and eating pork belly from the early Middle Ages onward. And by the 18th century, it was a standard part of the English breakfast. Look, in one 180, the British people didn't exactly have a great life expectancy anyway. English immigrants to the American colonies brought pigs with them, and bacon really took off in the new world, where there was plenty of space to build hog heaven. By the 1870s, Cincinnati was known as Porkopolis and Chicago. Meatpacking plants were butchering more than a million pigs every year for workers doing manual labor on a farm or maybe in a mine or the railroads, a meaty breakfast helped them get through the day. But as the 20th century marched on, most Americans weren't doing that kind of work anymore. Even in factories, people weren't expending as much energy and a health food. Back to nature kind of movement emerged and began reshaping the American diet. So for most Americans, breakfast had become a pretty light meal, a piece of toast or a roll, maybe juice coffee. That's it. With the disappearance of the cooked breakfast, bacon was facing its own demise. It's Armageddon, if you like. Enter Edward Bernays, one of the founders of Modern Public Relations. If you listen to my other podcast, Drilled, you might remember Bernie's from his work with the oil industry. We'll stick a link in the show notes for those of you who are curious. At any rate, Bernays considered himself of high pedigree, often boasting about being Sigmund Freud's double nephew. Wait, what?

[00:04:50] Well, my mother was his younger sister, and my father was the brother of his wife.

[00:04:59] Weird flex. But. OK. Growing up with the Freud's had a huge impact on bearnaise.

[00:05:06] I heard about my uncle's theory of dream interpretation. I heard about psychology as being an important force in evaluating human behavior. I heard of repression and repression and suppression and projection and and taboos and Oedipal complexes.

[00:05:34] Bernays loved to tell this story. In fact, it's hard to find an interview with him where he didn't mention it. There are two types of PR guys the behind the scenes Svengali types who keep a low profile. And then there are the PR guys who make sure they're the story. Bernays was definitely the latter. He spent as much time on his own image as he did on his clients. They're part of this image was to cast himself as the father of public relations. If people took that to mean he was the world's first publicist, he didn't correct them. But that title actually belonged to his friend, colleague and mentor, a guy named Ivy Lee that you'll meet in a minute. First, more Bernays!

[00:06:18] Bernays loved sitting around listening to double Uncle Siggie's theories, but his father wanted him to do something practical with his life. He even sent Bernays to Cornell to study agriculture, hoping he'd follow his father into the green business. But it quickly became clear that this was not in the cards. Eddie Bernays was not a great guy. He fancied himself a member of the intellectual elite. He loved theater books singing. He wore expensive suits and flashy scarves, and he sported a mustache that definitely required grooming. He was a dandy, even by 1912 standards. Within a year of graduating, he was already working as a press agent for theater and ballet, and he loved it. He was already bringing Uncle Sigmund theories into that work, too. When I found one of the earliest examples of that, I had to run it by Mary.

[00:07:11] He had this idea for a poster for a Russian ballet that he was working for, and he he he had the one of the main dancers, a woman named Flor Ravel. And he put her in like a really tight dress and took her to the Bronx Zoo and had her pose with a giant boa constrictor.

[00:07:44] Like sort of his first foray into incorporating his uncle's theories about repressed sexual desire into PR and marketing,.

[00:07:55] Like what's the message here? Is the snake a dick?

[00:08:01] Basically, yes. Yes, very subtle. Very subtle,.

[00:08:07] Nobody wants a dick that big! I don't know why he would do this.

[00:08:13] He was just trying to get people to go to the ballet man. And he thought, like, sexy lady. Oh, the snake. Yeah, that's it.

[00:08:23] But it wasn't all just snake dicks and ballet tickets. Bernays was about to have a huge impact on shaping the American story thanks to his successful work for the ballet. Bernays was tapped to join the government's propaganda arm was called the Committee for Public Information. It was a group of journalists, artists, filmmakers and press agents all brought together to sell the American public on the need to join World War One. The President Woodrow Wilson, had been elected largely because he promised to stay out of the war. Now he had to sell the public on a U-turn. That was the committee's job, and they delivered. Here's a speech they wrote for one of the country's foremost bankers in 1918.

[00:09:06] It is simply a question now of the survival of autocracy or democracy they are in now. Just grappled. It is a fight to the finish and it is up to us.

[00:09:20] Bernays' role was to paint the picture a broad of Americans as fiercely independent freedom fighters who would liberate Europe and shine a light on the path forward to democracy. Here he is, describing that time in the Adam Curtis documentary The Century of the Self.

[00:09:37] At the age of nineteen twenty six, I was in Paris for the entire time of the peace conference. Then, with heroin in this, we were fast and we were to make the world safe for democracy that was being slow.

[00:09:56] And this was eye-opening to Bernays. Woodrow Wilson is famously one of the country's most boring and uncharismatic presidents, and propaganda had transformed him into a superhero. Freedom Man and

[00:10:12] I came back to the United States. I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you can certainly use it for peace and propaganda to be a bad word because you know the German using it. So what I did was to try to find some other words. So we found a way to counter the public relations

[00:10:45] Wait wait i have questions. So before this was propaganda like an OK word?

[00:10:51] People were just like, Yeah, we're just going to spit out some propaganda.

[00:10:54] Yes!This is also why I think it's so funny when people try now to to, like, differentiate between PR and propaganda because they're literally the same thing.

[00:11:07] So, OK, so in 1910 or whatever you could say, I work in propaganda with a straight face. Yes.

[00:11:16] Yes. In fact, Bernays  wrote a book called Propaganda that was like considered a serious book. It wasn't like a critique of propaganda. It was like, Here's how propaganda works. You know, it was the same as like a book now that would be like the basics of public relations.

[00:11:37] And so you're saying that what at the end of World War One, that was when propaganda became a bad word, a word you didn't want to say out loud, though people obviously kept doing it. That's right. And this guy was like, Let's just call it public relations.

[00:11:52] Let's use two words instead of one.

[00:11:54] Yeah, that's exactly what he did!

[00:11:56] So how did this theater kid turned propagandist come to wage war on America's breakfast plate? And what does any of this have to do with bacon? To answer that, we have to go back in time a bit to talk about the early days of the American railroad. That's right. We're talking about trains! Back with that after this quick break.

[00:12:27] OK, so remember, at the top of this episode, I mentioned that there was another guy who started doing PR before Bernays: Ivy Lee. He got his start working for the railroads and the coal companies and eventually really made a name for himself working for the Rockefellers. We're going to talk about Lee again in this season because he was a real pioneer in this industry. But this time we're going to focus on one technique in particular: fake experts. Or, I guess, real experts, but secretly funded by corporations.

[00:13:03] Today, we have this very warm and fuzzy, almost romantic view of the railroads. Traveling by train feels cool or special. Maybe a little old timey. Of course, the majority of trains now as then are not for travel, but for freight, for cheaply and quickly moving stuff from one part of the country to another oil, coal, wood and all kinds of other goods zigzagged the country in trains every day. And back in the early 1800s, that was not a quaint or romantic affair. It was terrifying. Trains were constantly derailing and crashing because the industry cared way more about money than safety. They ran the trains too fast and too full, and it got so bad that in the late 1800s, the railways actually became the first industry to be regulated by the U.S. government. How bad does it have to be that you get regulated in the eighteen hundreds? It's like being kicked out of Westworld for bad behavior. So, yeah, not a huge shock that PR emerges right as the U.S. government first starts to regulate business. And as the vote is being extended to lots of people who are not captains of industry, PR was a handy way to keep power in the hands of the powerful in the face of creeping democracy. By the early 1800s, the public was starting to think this regulation thing was probably a good idea and that annoyed the shit out of industry, which made PR even more appealing. Miners began striking, and workers in other industries weren't far behind. Journalists began portraying America's executives as greedy industrialists who were cutting corners and exploiting workers. The public was hungry for industrialist blood, and this is when propagandist extraordinaire Ivy Lee stepped into the picture. Ivy Lee began arranging the first press tours and press conferences to show journalists just how much the railroad companies put into safety. He also created the Bureau of Railway Economics, which looked and sounded like an independent bureau of economists, but was entirely funded by the rail industry. The bureau's experts pushed the same line again and again. They said regulations and taxes would be bad. They'd just increase costs and force job cuts for the railroads, and that would make everything more expensive for consumers. No one wants that right. They said it made more sense to let the railroad companies handle these things themselves. And Lee left no stone unturned. One year to promote a rate hike for his clients, Lee created a coordinated campaign designed to get the public behind paying more to have their goods from here to books shipped across the country. Yes, you heard that right. That it was a good thing to pay more for shipping costs. First, he had the bureau right to journalists across the country briefing them that the railways had very high labor costs. Pretty soon, articles citing these costs started to appear everywhere. Then he placed ads and opinion pieces in more than 20000 newspapers. Then he hosted events with local chambers of commerce and businessmen, encouraging each of them to write to 10 friends in support of the reading increase. At a certain point. Lee even casually left folders of information in passenger cars on trains for passengers to just happen across. It's honestly a miracle he didn't go door to door at this point. He must have really enjoyed riding the rails. It was a very clever campaign of manipulation, convinced the public that the extra money they'd be paying would be going to workers, and it was absolutely not the fault of the railroad company. Probably those greedy unions. Very few journalists knew that the bureau had been created by Lee and funded by the railroad companies themselves. None had any idea the lengths Lee was going to. Decades later, Bernays would deploy a similar tactic on behalf of a client who needed to sell. You guessed it, more bacon. Today, if you know the name beach, not at all. It's as a baby food company. But back then, they were known for ham and bacon. From the late eighteen hundreds to the 1940s, they were one of the country's primary providers of both in the 1920s. They approached Eddie Bernays with a problem. You remember Eddie Bernays? He's the literal mustache twirling villain from part one. Fancy scarves? Double nephew, snake penis, that guy.

[00:18:03] Many years ago, our client was the Beechnut packing company. We made a research and found out that the American public a very light breakfast of coffee, maybe a roll and orange juice.

[00:18:23] The US had fewer and fewer manual workers in the 1920s and 1930s. Chances were high that the average U.S. worker would be sitting at a desk or in front of a sewing machine. They didn't need a gutbuster breakfast to get them through the day. And that's not great news if you sell bacon. So what to do? Bernays borrowed a page from his old friend Ivy Lee's book and found himself a fake expert. Well, technically a paid expert. What if a doctor said it was actually healthier to eat a big breakfast? Or better yet, what if a bunch of doctors said that

[00:19:02] we went to a physician found that a heavy breakfast was sounded from the standpoint of health? Then a light breakfast because the body loses energy during the night and needs it during the day.

[00:19:22] There is a serious amount of spin packed into this one sentence. Bernays says, "We went to our physician. So right off the bat, it sounds like this is just your average family doctor. But we know from various documents Bernays left behind that he was in fact, the PR firms in-house doctor. So it's not exactly chicken pulses and whacking meals. And then before we even hear what the doctor has to say, Bernays is planting an idea in our heads. The body loses energy during the night. Sure, that makes sense, kind of. Then he goes on to explain how one doctor became many, all touting the health benefits of bacon.

[00:20:05] We asked the physician after telling him why we were talking to him. Would you be willing and at no cost to write to five thousand physicians and ask them whether their judgment was the same as his confirmed his judgment?

[00:20:28] Amazing. Would he be willing at no cost because he already works for us to write to five thousand physicians willing he'd be happy? Do anything to further the humanitarian mission of getting people to eat more bacon like I believe before him, Bernays realized that if the public knew that that doctor's expert opinion was bought and paid for, they would see right through the trick. We have no idea what exactly that doctor sent out or what exactly those 5000 other doctors set back. But we do know that Bernays sent a press release out to all the papers and magazines, saying All these doctors agree a heavier breakfast is better.

[00:21:10] That was publicized in the newspapers. Newspapers throughout the country had a headline saying Forty five hundred physicians urge every breakfast in order to improve health with the American people. Many of them stated that bacon and eggs should be embodied with the breakfast. And as a result, the sale of bacon went up.

[00:21:42] Oh gee, I wonder why they just happened to suggest bacon and eggs as part of that heavier breakfast. So a bacon industry hungry for profits and a PR man hungry for kudos work together to build an American institution, a classic American breakfast, bacon and eggs. But the PR industry's use of paid experts didn't stop at the diner, since Lee and Bernie is loads of other industries have used paid experts. Eventually paid experts became key to a new trick. Science denial a very effective tactic embraced by the tobacco companies, oil companies, chemical companies, you name it. Here's a food industry funded expert in 2015, telling people they really don't need to worry about antibiotics in meat.

[00:22:34] But is this meat actually healthier for consumers? Antibiotics are an important tool for farmers to treat sick animals and prevent animals from getting ill by strategically using these drugs. Farmers in Shaw only meat from healthy animals eventually makes it to your plate. 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.

[00:23:03] He works for the very independent sounding Center for Accountability in Science, an organization funded largely by the food and restaurant industries. Here's cancer researcher Clarence Cook little in the 1950s, telling people they probably don't need to worry about smoking.

[00:23:22] Dr Little have any cancer causing agents been identified in cigarets. No, none whatsoever, either in cigarets or in any product of smoking. As such,

[00:23:35] at the time, even Edward R. Murrow, the famous journalist little was talking to There, had no idea the research he was citing had been paid for by the tobacco industry. And then there's the oil funded Austrian physicist Fred Singer. He doesn't want consumers worrying themselves about climate change and CO2.

[00:23:55] Certainly manmade, yes. So it's plausible that humans could be affecting the climate. They would just have to look at the data. That's what we do know. The satellites don't show any warming.

[00:24:07] Singer around the very pro-environment sounding science and environmental policy project funded by a web of fossil fuel groups and dark money right wing think tanks. There are plenty more examples across really any industry that might not love the idea of regulation and look, nonprofits hire experts and fund think tanks, too. The problem here isn't so much that companies have a research agenda that's sort of to be expected. It's how they hide that agenda and try to porn industry funded research off as being completely independent or even name a think tank, something like the Center for Science that helps the little guy. So you think they're on your side? People shouldn't have to untangle a web of dark money organizations to figure out what information they can trust. It's an unfair burden to put on the public. Unfortunately, that's the world the PR experts created, and now we all have to live in it. But if you know how to spot certain techniques, you can save yourself a lot of time and confusion. To recap, here are the signs that you're being pitched by a fake expert. They misrepresent the other side's viewpoint, making a straw man argument when they can easily tear to pieces. They cherry pick data points and studies, sharing the bits that support the argument and ignoring everything else. They don't tell you who's funding them or any of the research they quote. There, overarching message is that you shouldn't worry about whatever problem they're discussing and the powers that be. Have it under control. The point of these kinds of campaigns is to convince you that whatever you're worrying about don't it's fine the grown ups habit and not that's it for this episode. Next week, we're going to take a dark turn and learn about a technique that's been around for over 100 years. In fact, one of the very first PR techniques The Myth of the Crisis actor.

[00:26:12] Thank you for joining us on this hair raising journey through the murky history of PR. Remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to 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 Salt's Bostwick. He also scored this season. Artwork is by Matthew Fleming. Our fact checker is Ashley Bryan. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the First Amendment project big thanks to Mary Agnes Hagler, who you'll hear throughout this series. If you want to hear more of Mary 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 show is reported by me. Amy Westervelt. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

Transcription

In this episode we'll meet the godfathers of American PR, Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays, and explore the origins and evolution of industry-funded experts who shaped everything from the breakfast table to our understanding of the economy and science.

John Hill: The Right-Hand Man

Rick Berman: "Dr. Evil"

E. Bruce Harrison: The Godfather of Greenwashing

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

Schmertz Documents

Berman Documents

S9, Ep2 | A Legal Strategy

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

S1, Ep5 | Fun With Front Groups

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

S1, Ep2 | Ye Olde Crisis Actor Myth

S1, Ep4 | The Birth of SponCon

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

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

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

[00:00:00] This episode contains discussion of gun deaths, child death and sexual violence. It's discussed throughout the episodes, so if those are topics you don't want to hear about right now, go ahead and skip on to episode three.

[00:00:15] David, why are you supporting the red flag laws?

[00:00:18] This is supposed to be a man of God, but yet he's told the whole world that twenty six people died in his church when he's no. Nobody died. He's a liar.

[00:00:24] I had avoided posting about COVID for a long time because of the negative reactions I got, like, called a crisis actor all the time.

[00:00:34] For the past couple of decades, every time there's a tragedy, a small but growing group of people will find a way to say that it didn't really happen. That shooting is a hoax. COVID is a hoax, a false flag, and especially those people, the victims. They are not really victims. They're crisis actors. You could be forgiven for thinking it's something Alex Jones concocted on Infowars, but in fact, it's a story as old as... Well as old as the PR industry. Welcome back to Rigged The Story of Disinformation, a podcast about the war for hearts and minds and reality right here on U.S. soil. I'm Amy Westervelt. Today's trick: Crisis actors. But first, let's welcome back Mary Annaise Heglar.

[00:01:33] OK, first, I want to know what you think of when you hear the term crisis actor.

[00:01:42] Quick reminder Mary is my friend and partner in crime. We do a podcast called Hot Take Together, but I also call her whenever I find something weird in the murky underworld of disinformation. And now someone else you met last time.

[00:01:58] Mr. Rockefeller listen to me patiently, pleasantly and calmly until I'd finished my eloquent presentation of why you should do what we recommended.

[00:02:09] Ivy Ledbetter Lee, the railroad guy! Lee is generally considered the first modern publicist, and a big part of why he holds that place in history comes down to the very first job he did for the Rockefellers.

[00:02:26] It is early springtime and the strike was on...

[00:02:31] That's Woody Guthrie singing about this incident 30 years later. If you don't know that name, and I suppose some of you might not. Woody Guthrie was one of the most important and influential folk singers of the 20th century. He was a survivor of the Great Depression, and he inspired a lot of the big folk acts of the 1960s. So, you know, no Woody Guthrie, no Bob Dylan. And Guthrie was deeply committed to unions and the labor movement. By the time he wrote this song in the 1940s, the Ludlow miners strike had become a lightning rod for the American Left. But at the time that Ivy Lee was getting involved back in 1914, it marshaled the forces of the burgeoning PR industry to try and nice wash one of the worst massacres in American labor history. Today, we remember the Woody Guthrie version, so I guess folk music won in the end, in your face, Ivy Lee!

[00:03:34] Here's the story. In 1914, coal miners in Ludlow, Colorado, have been striking for more than six months.

[00:03:43] Yes, like so. I read a little bit about the conditions and coal miners around this time. And it really was like, there's a lot of people who were former slaves who worked in coal mines and their like. These conditions are not much different. So these company towns? Yeah. Yeah, the company towns were not that different than living on a plantation, especially if you factor in like sharecropping, right? And so like obviously, the work itself is arduous, which is why you get somebody doing it. You kind of don't want to let them go. The the the history of forced labor in coal mines in the north and the south is like really deep and really terrible. One of the things I heard about was like the sexual violence in these coal mining camps. So like the families would have to buy food on credit and then pay it back when they got their wages from, you know, picking or from mining the coal. I almost said picking the cotton and then like, but if you couldn't pay, if you didn't get enough money back, the women had to pay it back with their bodies.

[00:04:49] Oh, that's so disturbing. But also, yeah, of course. Or what their daughters? Right? I mean, this is this. This is a big part of what was behind the Ludlow strike to they wanted fair wages. They didn't want to have to live in the company town. You know, they didn't want to have their house tied to their employer. So that was the whole thing. And then there was the whole company store thing. So it was like the company had total control over every aspect of their lives.

[00:05:22] There's some evidence to suggest that what would become the crisis actor myth might have even begun further back than a lot of those strike. Some politicians in the South accused civil rights activists in the wake of the Civil War of being paid agitators. But Ludlow is the first documented example of the crisis actor narrative being really strategically used by a corporation to discredit its critics for a lot of historians. It also marks the birth of the modern PR industry

[00:05:57] that drove US miners out of doors out from the houses that the company owned. We moved into. Ends up and a whole lot more.

[00:06:10] Shortly after the Ludlow strike began, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company kicked all the strikers out of their homes, proving their point entirely. The strikers set up a tent city at the mine, and there were pretty regular skirmishes between them and company guards or military. And when I say skirmishes, I don't mean, you know, people calling each other names at the country bar. I mean, actual danger men with guns hired by the mine company today, we might call them private military contractors or even mercenaries hired muscle. Woody Guthrie calls them soldiers.

[00:06:51] I was worried bad about my children, the soldiers guarding the railroad bridge. Every once in a while, a bullet would blood kick up gravel under my feet.

[00:07:09] Tired of the strike, the mine owners sent in the Colorado National Guard to help their little private army shut down the encampment. They would regularly head to the camp, dragged strikers out of their tents and generally mess with them. And one April morning in 1914, things seriously escalated. We're going to hear all about what happened that day and the aftermath of the most violent campaign in American labor history. Right after this. OK, so we've heard about how tensions were ramping up between the striking coal miners and the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. By April 1914, things had started to calm down. Actually, the state couldn't really afford to keep the National Guard at the camp, and scab workers had disrupted the miners bargaining power. But just as it looked as if the strike was going to end peacefully, well, relatively peacefully. The private guards helped by stragglers still remaining from the National Guard, attacked the strikers.

[00:08:20] We were so afraid you'd kill our children. Nuggets of Cave, the seven foot deep, carried our young man, a pregnant woman down inside the cave. The sleep that very night you soldiers waited till all those miners was asleep. You snapped around our little ten pound soaked our palms to the old kerosene. You struck a man. The blaze it started, you pull the triggers of your Gatling guns. I made a run for the children, but the firewall stopped me. Thirteen children died from your gun as

[00:09:13] they fired into the camp and set the miners tents on fire, killing over 20 people, including women and children who had been hiding from the gunfight.

[00:09:24] I said, God bless the mine workers union, then I hope. My hidden pride.

[00:09:35] It was brutal and quickly became a national story about greed and the plight of the working man, especially when people figured out that the majority owner of the mine was the Rockefellers. The fancy pants iest of the robber barons. It didn't take long before the press were calling it the Ludlow massacre. And here's the amazing thing they didn't break the strike even after they'd been shot at and had their children literally set on fire. They refused to back down. The strike didn't go away, and neither did the bad press. Mary Harris Jones, the famous labor organizer known as Mother Jones. She even showed up.

[00:10:20] No longer a single day when we have to destroy those institutions were on hand to spend the night before and show the world what the workers can do.

[00:10:42] Ivy Lee had his work cut out for him to turn the tide on this thing, and he already had a full time job as the PR guy for the Pennsylvania railroad. Do you remember how much Ivy Lee liked trains, but the Rockefellers wanted him and what the Rockefellers want the Rockefellers get. This was John D. Rockefeller Jr. we're talking about at this time. And so off Ivy Lee went to Colorado by train. Of course, his first big idea was to create regular bulletins and distribute them to important people in Colorado, New York and D.C. Only a handful of these people were journalists. Most were prominent business types or politicians. Remember, this is the guy that would casually leave brochures on the seats of trains for his rail clients. So it might not surprise you to learn. He also wanted to distribute them to the miners homes. Well, tense at that point. It's possible he didn't really think this through anyway. Women had the vote in Colorado, and Lee figured if the miners wives got a hold of the truth-telling, they would vote the right way and maybe even influence their husbands to calm it down with the strike. Not creepy at all. The bulletins were all published under the title The Struggle in Colorado for Industrial Freedom, Industrial Freedom, Amazing Freedom from the Curse of Unions, Freedom to be set on fire by the management. Lee worked really hard to keep his and Rockefellers names out of it, but they were his baby. And in those bulletins, all the way back in 1914 was the very first example of the crisis actor myth. The very first pamphlet that Ivy Lee wrote reads

[00:12:24] a strike was forced on Colorado. The men did not ask for it. They had presented no grievances to their employers.

[00:12:32] It goes on to say that these strikers are out-of-towners. They don't even work here. It's all made up by the unions. But what about the whole killing women and children, thing? Well, Ivy Lee goes, "Well, we didn't kill them and they weren't shot. They just suffocated." Here's how he put it.

[00:12:53] A fire was accidentally started either by an overturned stove or an explosion, and two women and 11 children were afterward found suffocated. Not one of them was hit by a bullet.

[00:13:07] What a ringing endorsement of corporate social responsibility! Not one of them was hit by a bullet. Put that on the recruitment poster. It's bizarre how much it sounds like the Parkland or Sandy Hook truthers that we hear from today.

[00:13:22] It's a horrible thing to think that 17 children got murdered, but it's even more disturbing to think that the government would do something like this and present it as a real event when it's not.

[00:13:35] Lee also exaggerated the salaries of various union leaders and Mother Jones, a fact he later had to apologize for publicly and correct. The thing is, the bulletins probably didn't even do that much. In the end, it was the union running out of money that put an end to the Ludlow standoff. But not long after, at Lee's insistence, Rockefeller actually met with and talked to union leaders and even had Miss Jones in, and that helped turn the tide of public sentiment in favor of Lee's client. It helped Rockefeller develop something of a reputation for being reasonable and flexible, being the kind of guy who could change his mind because Lee was so involved, and because his campaign really did improve the public's perception of what happened in Colorado and who the Rockefellers were. Ludlow is considered the first example of modern corporate PR and those few throwaway lines about how the strikers weren't really miners. Just outside agitators didn't really amount to much in Ludlow, but they planted the seeds of a new trick, one that would take root and grow in various directions. Ivy Lee only dreamed of random citizens, let alone journalists, picking up his insinuations and running with them, while Ivy dreams do come true. Let's take a look at how the crisis actor myth shows up in today's world. This is a guy who claims the First Baptist Church shooting never happened because he can find no evidence in the church walls. That bullet holes there were ever fixed by the church.

[00:15:26] All right, guys, we just want to show everybody that there's a fixed bullet hole anywhere. No way was anything replaced bullet holes.

[00:15:37] OK, folks, this is this is dark, really fucking dark. This guy calls himself side thorn. Not his real name. And he's been fixated on the idea that the First Baptist Church shooting, which killed 26 people in Sutherland Springs, Texas, didn't really happen. And a little like Ivy Lee with those women and children at Ludlow, he focuses on bullets and bullet holes as his proof. But this guy goes way beyond an inappropriate line in a pamphlet. He harassed survivors and victims families to the point where he wound up in jail.

[00:16:14] We didn't say you were crisis actor and believe this happened. We just pointed out that you're an admitted actor and journalism student and said that your anti-gun and that you're being fed talking points.

[00:16:23] This is Alex Jones with one of his many attacks on David Hogg, one of the Parkland school shooting survivors. Because of course, if you're a theater kid or God forbid, a budding journalist, you must be a crisis actor. For some, like Jones, there's money to be made off of these conspiracy theories. Others are fervent believers that there should be no regulation at all on guns and don't like that. These events encourage talk of, you know, making it slightly harder to own heavy artillery. Still, others simply can't face that these terrible things are actually happening. And with shocking regularity. The thing is, some protests do use actors. The ones organized by corporations and their PR firms, for example. It's a tactic we're going to talk about later. In the series called Astroturfing, corporate PR firms have hired actors to protest regulations and even to show up at city council meetings, posing as outraged citizens, giving public comment. We'll tell you how to spot astroturfing later, but in the meantime, here's how to tell when someone is just trying to de-legitimize a real tragedy or protest. They use the term crisis actors never seen. Someone is not pushing a conspiracy theory. Use this term unless they happen to be in disaster management, which actually does use crisis actors to practice rescue missions. They go after particular people who fit the story they want to tell a theater kid, for example. They rarely make statements about the people they're accusing, because that could lead to lawsuits. Instead, they ask leading questions Why is he so well-spoken? Why would a kid whose dad used to be in the FBI be anti-gun? Hmm. Really makes you think. And then there are the folks playing politics. Unfortunately, the ones in recent history have been very specifically targeting. Low information, voters, this is Caitlin Gilbert, a Ph.D. data scientist who focuses on disinformation and who traced exactly how it was flowing online during the 2020 election. Marginalized communities are especially vulnerable because they don't have the proper resources in many cases, or they're already coming from a place of inequity in their lived experience. So they're more likely to be like, Yeah, well, this fits with my notion of how this country has treated me thus far. So wait. After more than a century of being fed propaganda and an effort to manipulate them and benefit the powerful people are susceptible to disinformation and conspiracy theories. Who would have thought? That's it for this episode. Next week, we're going to throw on a white coat and delve into one of the most effective PR tactics ever science denial. Thank you for joining us on this dark and twisty journey through the murky history of PR. Remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Take this ride all the way to the end.

[00:19:47] 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 Salt's Bostwick. He also scored this season. Artwork is by Matthew Fleming. Our fact checker is Ashley Bryan. 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 Mary 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 show is reported by me. Amy Westervelt. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

S1, Ep2 Transcription

You could be forgiven for thinking the crisis actor myth was cooked up by Alex Jones to sell people on school shooting conspiracies, but in fact it's more than a century old. In this episode we meet the world's first publicist, the legendary Ivy Ledbetter Lee, and learn about his work crushing mine strikes for the Rockefellers.

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, Ep1 | Fake Experts and Real Bacon

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S1, Ep2 | Ye Olde Crisis Actor Myth

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