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Two Solitudes
(October 5, 2004) -
If journalists and public relationists were feuding nations, Sheldon
Rampton would have been receiving death threats for some time
now.
His quarterly newsletter PR Watch and five
books have all exposed the horror stories spawned by the American
journalist’s pet peeve: the explosive growth in PR budgets
over the past half century. Manipulations of public opinion, twisted
meanings, shameless lies – sometimes orchestrated by PR experts
– nothing is sacred, including scientific issues: dioxin,
mad cow disease, tobacco, toxic products, GMO and greenhouse gases.
For example, "No, tobacco is not carcinogenic,"
proclaimed institutes generously financed under the table by the
tobacco industry and armed with an enormous PR budget — so
huge that many reporters were completely taken in.
Because Rampton’s other pet peeve are his own
fellow journalists, especially those who so tamely swallow the
statements of "experts". This contempt was summed up
in the title of the book he co-authored with John Stauber in 2001:
Trust Us, We're Experts! (see Heedless, down).
Across the Atlantic, the problem has become just
as bad according to Aline Richard, editor-in-chief of the monthly
La Recherche. And she wonders if science journalists haven’t
become even more vulnerable than others to this type of manipulation
of information. "What I know about science journalists
is that they have a very poor grasp of the business world and
as a result may have a hard time getting the story straight, because
they also don’t know very much about public relations."
Before joining La Recherche in 2002, Richard
mainly worked as a business reporter after earning a Master’s
in Economics.
Advertising dollars
In recent years academic circles have often become
worried about the emergence of private-sector research funding.
But outside of journalism schools there has been much less talk
about its corollary, the emergence of PR. "In the 1990s,
the popularization of biomedical science was modelled on corporate
public relations," say British researchers Jane Gregory
and Martin Bauer in Les Territoires de la culture scientifique.
Winfried Göpfert, a German professor of journalism puts it
this way: over the past two decades while the budgets allocated
for scientific information in the media – and just plain
information – have been withering away, corporate budgets
for science communication have soared.
Is a magazine such as La Recherche, which
is active in science communication but works more closely with
researchers than a Science et vie or Discover, immune
to the smokescreens? Yes, "but that doesn’t mean
much," says Richard. La Recherche is mainly interested
in basic science, a world neglected by relationists. As she puts
it ironically, "They don’t care much about Higg’s
boson."
Heedless science communication
In the early 1990s, as Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber tell it in Trust Us, We're Experts!,
the tobacco industry launched a massive secret  advertising
campaign. In particular, 13 scientists were paid $156,000 to write
(or have someone write) one or two letters to influential medical
journals to point out how tobacco was being unfairly attacked,
and how studies on secondhand smoke were biased.
But $156,000 was a drop in the bucket. During
the 1990s the Tobacco Institute alone spent $20 million a year
on PR and lobbying.
The Institute is a perfect example of the "third-party
tactic": establish and discretely fund a research centre
that describes itself as independent; hire scientists who’ve
already been one over to your cause; officially what they publish
are only opinions and recommendations, but have the hired PR gun
give them a subtle spin and journalists call them independent
"studies". Game over.
That’s what’s known as "the best
science money can buy".
Stauber, John and Sheldon Rampton.
2001. Trust Us We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science
and Gambles with Your Future, New York, Penguin Putnam, 359
pp.
Meet Sheldon Rampton and Aline Richard at the Science for Profit
(106 B) session today from 2 to 3:30 p.m.
Pascal Lapointe
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