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POLITICS & COMMUNITY by michael agger	A few weeks ago, I watched Gen X pundit and media consultant Douglas Rushkoff on television. Rushkoff is the author of Media Virus, Cyberia, and several other tracts on youth and technology. He is paid $7,500 an hour to consult about this same subject with media companies like Disneyland and the Discovery Channel. Dressed in the standard thrift store garb of young knowledge workers, Rushkoff spouted off the usual assumption that "this generation sees through conventional media," and as usual, I nodded along with him. I've read Adcult, I've read Baudrillard. I fancy myself as someone who can see through media to the "truth" hidden behind the filters and the screens. Wrong again. What destroyed my sense of superiority was a book recently written by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton entitled Toxic Sludge is Good For You, and subtitled, "Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry." The book is a thorough undressing of the PR industry. You see, it doesn't do much good to "see through" media, because there is nothing there to see through to. Stauber and Rampton estimate that 40% of all "news," both print and television, flows unedited from public relations offices. What we read in the papers and see on television is not the product of independent journalists and producers, but rather the end result of a not-so-subtle collusion between the PR industry and media professionals.
Stauber and Rampton estimate that 40% of all "news," both print and television, flows unedited from public relations offices.	The PR industry practices much more than news manipulation. Firms like Hill & Knowlton, Ketchum, Shandwick, and others employ a variety of techniques to influence publishing, politics, and local community issues. There are over 150,000 PR practitioners at work in the United States, and the industry earned 1.04 billion dollars in 1995, but most of us would be hard-pressed to define what these firms do. If we really want to be media savvy, we need to understand how the PR industry operates. A bit of history: The archetypal PR "event" occurred during the 1929 Easter Parade in New York City. A coterie of society women marched in the parade down Fifth Avenue smoking cigarettes. At this time, smoking was considered beyond the pale for any respectable lady. The society women where dubbed "the torches of liberty" and their feat was covered extensively in the press. The example set by these women helped erase the taboo placed on women smoking in public. Soon after the parade, sales of cigarettes began to rise, spurred by a female population eager to participate in this new form of liberation.
If we really want to be media savvy, we need to understand how the PR industry operates.	Years later, Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, admitted that he had orchestrated the entire event. His services had been retained by George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company. Hill's company sold Lucky Strike cigarettes, a brand that became extremely popular with women. Bernays went on to become the most influential figure in the burgeoning PR industry, using his uncle's psychoanalytic techniques to offer his clients the tools "to engineer the consent of the mass mind." Bernays was arrogant, but his fundamental insight of cloaking advertising messages in the garb of legitimate news proved extremely effective. The "torches of liberty" event is held up as a paradigm, because it exemplifies the fundamental rule of the industry: The best PR is never noticed. In Toxic Sludge is Good For You, Stauber and Rampton delineate the various ways that PR firms work behind-the-scenes to further the goals of their clients. The specialization of the industry is impressive. One group of firms excels at creating grassroots activist groups from whole cloth. For example, let's say that you are Wal-Mart and you are having trouble with a local community group opposing the building of a superstore outside of their town. To help with this difficulty, you could hire National Grassroots & Communications, a firm specializing in combating NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) groups. Their technique: hire local "ambassadors" in the community and train them to counteract the arguments of their neighbors.
The fundamental rule of the industry: "The best PR is never noticed."	Remember the "Harry and Louise" commercial that showed an American couple griping about the complexity of Clinton's health care system? The advertisement and the concerned citizen's group that sponsored it were complete PR creations. (The ad was produced by Goddard Clausen/First Tuesday, a PR and election campaign management firm.) This fictional couple was used as a metaphor by a host of media sources. A PR success story. Other firms specialize in radio and news releases, a practice that began in the 1980s. PR firms discovered that if they produced radio and video segments that had the appearance of news, and distributed them to cash-strapped local networks, their segments would usually run unedited as news. Stories that were favorable to their clients were presented to the public as legitimate reporting.
Related Resources Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting: FAIR is a national media watch group offering well-documented criticism in an effort to correct media bias and imbalance. Douglas Rushkoff: read a profile of Rushkoff printed in The New York Times. This Modern World: this comic strip by Tom Tomorrow frequently punches holes in the reality constructed by the PR and media industries. Public Relations Society of America: this site is an official organ of the PR industry. It contains links to all the major agencies as well as a special "student society." PR Tactics is a monthly trade newspaper that publishes news, trends, and how-to information about the practice of public relations.	Worse, a lot of the focus of the PR industry is making sure that negative studies never receive any media play. For example, in 1992 when Jeremy Rifkin wrote Beyond Beef, a screed against the meat industry, his publicity tour was sabotaged by someone who impersonated his publicity agent. This "agent" changed dates and appointments. At one point, Dutton Books, Rifkin's publisher, suspected that their phones were being tapped. The culprits were never discovered, but as Stauber and Rampton document, the PR industry has a long history of using informants and moles. When millions of dollars are at stake, no tactic is too devious. At times, the stories Stauber and Rampton chronicle of PR activities seem almost too fantastic. One can only imagine what they have chosen not to document, what PR coups have escaped everyone's purview. It's enough to push the hardened cynic over the line into conspiracy theory. I suppose I should have realized sooner that all information is slanted, politicized, and biased, but it was not until I read Toxic Sludge Is Good For You that the full scope of the battle for the "public mind" was defined. The balanced observer in me recognizes that public relations is not all about deception, but even if the PR industry is half as duplicitous as Stauber and Rampton maintain, we would all do well to scrutinize everything we read and see for signs of placement, handling, and PR motivations. If you desire to be one less sucker easily manipulated by the PR industry, read this book soon. Michael Agger co-edits the Politics & Community section.