Drilled S3Ep3: Psychological Warfare, Astroturfing, and Another Tobacco-Oil Connection

Hostedย andย reportedย byย climateย journalistย Amyย Westervelt, DrilledNews.

Featuring: Bob Brulle, environmental sociology researcher at Brown University; Christine Arena, former Edelman PR executive; and clips from Daniel Edelman, founder of Edelman PR.

WWI news clip about Nazi propaganda: These Germanย pictures, destined for certainย neutral countries, were intended to spread Nazi propagada, but Dr. Goebbels tripped up badly, veryย badlyโ€ฆ

Amy Westervelt: Just a few months after their meetings with Ivy Ledbetter Lee, the Third Reichโ€™s propaganda machine kicked into high gear. Within a year they were at war, and using techniques theyโ€™d learned from Lee and others to cover up atrocities and to sell the German public โ€“ not only on the war effort but also the superiority of the Aryan race. In the final months of World War II, that propaganda took a very Ivy Lee-style turn into completely made up news stories about German wins in battles that had never even happened.. In those months, a young Jewish American reporter was charged with analyzing and combatting those claims. That manโ€™s name was Daniel Edelman. Here he is, remembering thoseย days.

Daniel Edelman: Doing the psychological warfare thing was fascinating because we were offsetting the claims made by the Germans. It was all liesโ€ฆ. And we had to disclaimย them.

Amy Westervelt: Edelman would ultimately spend four years working in psychological warfare. He became an expert on propaganda, and how to combat it. And he put that expertise to work for American industries, from beauty products and Sarah Lee to cigarettes and Big Oil. He added several new tactics to Big Oilโ€™s propaganda machine, including a unique blend of lobbying and media relations, that he called โ€œmarketing public relations, and a fun new thing called โ€œastroturfingโ€ that involves creating fake โ€œgrassrootsโ€ groups. Thatโ€™s the story weโ€™re going to get into today. Iโ€™m Amy Westervelt and this is Drilled, Season 3: The Mad Men of Climateย Denial.

Daniel Edelman was born in 1920 in Brooklyn. He was a diligent student and something of a boy genius, so by 16 he was already at university. He ultimately went to Columbia Journalism School, and spent the first year or so of his professional life as a journalist, mostly covering sports and human interestย stories.

When the U.S. joined World War II, Edelman wanted to enlist but his poor eyesight got in the way. Within a year, so many infantrymen had died the military no longer cared about things like eyesight, it needed bodies. Edelman was drafted. But his vision still made him ineligible for combat. And his background in journalism made him a perfect fit for counter-intelligence. He was sent for training, and then on to join the Fifth Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company inย London.

WWII mobile radio tape: โ€œThis is your American expeditionary station, in the field with the fifthย army.

Amy Westervelt: After learning for a time in London, Edelman was tapped by a former Columbia classmate to join him in France, helping to prepare a nightly analysis of German propaganda. Edelman was soon in charge of the entireย operation.

Daniel Edelman: He says itโ€™s a good job. You work in a truck and in psychological warfare and I saidย fine.

Amy Westervelt: When the fighting ended, Edelman was transferred to Berlin to help shut down the German propaganda effort and state-owned media. He actually helped start the popular magazine Der Spiegel which he and a few other Americans ran for a few months before turning over to German ownership. For a while, Edelman thought he might stay in Germany and take a job as a reporter there. Eventually his family dissuaded him and he returned home. And then, Like Ivy Lee before him, and plenty of journalists since, Edelman struggled with whether he wanted to report the news or make the news, live the modest life of a journalist or take advantage of the burgeoning post-war economy in America and get into the business side ofย communications.

By this point he had worked in psychological warfare for years and he knew that expertise would be valuable in the public relations business. So he went for it, and took a job for his brother-in-lawโ€™s music label. Through that job he met the folks behind the Toni hair company, who eventually hired him to run their PR department, which brough Edelman toย Chicago.

As the PR guy at Toni, he took the companyโ€™s ad campaign โ€“ which twin has the Toni? โ€“ on the road, with six sets of twins. The campaign featured side-by-side twins, both with perms, and dared customers to guess which had a salon perm and which had the Toni homeย perm.

Toni ad: Which twin had the Toni? You can’t tell? Nobody can. Not yet, anyway. But wait. Only Toni gives you this twinย guarantee.

Amy Westervelt: Media tours had been part of political campaigns forever, but product companies had never bothered with them. Edelman saw that as a missed opportunity to score hundreds of local press hits and move product in communities across the country. And he was right. In addition to getting coverage in local newspapers, radio and TV, at one point during the tour the twins were arrested, in Oklahoma, for โ€œperforming salon services without a license.โ€ Edelman turned it into a national news story that made Toni a householdย name.

It also paved the way for another new approach to P.R., one that included a bit of lobbying on the side. The Oklahoma arrests happened because salon owners were pissed about these home perm kits taking their business. Salon owners in states across the country were mobilizing to push for laws that would ban kits like the TOni kit. So Edelman got busy meeting with state legislators and applying some of those psy-opps moves, mocking the salon owners and their proposals until they were literally laughed out of state building after state building. A couple years later, he started his own firm, calling it Daniel J. Edelman and Associates, with Toni as his first client. But within a few years, he had signed several huge clients, including Mobil Oil, Sarah Lee, Heinz, and several tobacco companies and tobacco trade groups. His hunch was proving correct: What heโ€™d learned about psychological warfare was extremely valuable to Americanย industry.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, you donโ€™t have to take my word for it. Edelmanโ€™s son Richard bragged about this history in a tribute to his father on the Edelmanย website.

Richard Edelman clip: My dad was a real New York City kid. Born in Brooklyn, went on to highschool, Columbia College, and Columbia Journalism School. He went on to work in Europe in the U.S. army for four years in psychological warfare, and when he got out, somehow the cumulation of all these experiences led him to become the father marketing P.R.

Amy Westervelt: โ€œMarketing public relationsโ€ was the term Edelman came up with to describe his 360-degree approach to PR โ€“ it wasnโ€™t just media relations, it was also legislator relations, and true public relations where you were creating a direct relationship between the company and the public. One way to do that was to pretend to be part of the publicย yourself.

Christine Arena: Iโ€™m a 20-year communications industry professional. Iโ€™ve worked in corporate PR for a long time, on lots of different kinds of accounts. Including fossil fuel accounts, which Iย hated.โ€

Amy Westervelt: Thatโ€™s Christine Arena. She was an executive vice president at Edelmanโ€™s firm, by that time just called Edelman. Arena headed up the firmโ€™s sustainability division right at the same time that it was representing the American Petroleum Institute. She and a few other executives at the Firm made the news when they quit en masse over the companies dealings with fossil fuel clients. She canโ€™t share any specific inside information about her time there, so sheโ€™s speaking here generally about the firmโ€™s reputation and about the techniques deployed by the fossil fuelย industry.

Christine Arena: That creation of fake, grassroots support which came to be known as astroturfing. Edelman was genius at doingย that.

Amy Westervelt: Edelman and his firm worked with multiple tobacco and oil clients, all big fans ofย โ€œastroturfing.โ€

Christine Arena: So fossil fuel industry organizations fund these fake front groups and they give these fake front groups, these names that sound there, like perfectly innocuous names like the California Drivers Alliance or the Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy. And these groups there are hundreds of them are usually secretly run by lobbying organizations like those two I just mentioned are actually run by the Western States Petroleum Association, which is a top lobbyist for the oil industry. And that group, the Western States Material Petroleum Association, is in turn funded by members including BP, Shell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Occidental, among others. So it’s fake activism, it’s corporate money posing as activism. And and it’s designed to undo all of the progress that real activismย makes.

Amy Westervelt: Working for both tobacco and fossil fuel clients, Edelman also invented litigation PR. Basically making his clientsโ€™ cases in the media. A key part of this was what Arena calls the โ€œattack the messengerโ€ย strategy.

Christine Arena: Rhey are relentless at the attack the messenger strategy. This has been ongoing for like 30 years. So the most effective attack the messenger strategy to me is like the use of labeling. So, for example, if climate scientists refer to facts and data rather than ideology, then they’re labeled liberal elites. If climate scientists or activists are alarmed by the data, then they’re labeled alarmists. If climate scientists apply for grant dollars to fund their research, then they are accused of being in it for theย money.

Tom DeLay: The report is made by scientists that get paid to further the politics of globalย warming.

Rick Santorum: If there was no climate change, we’d have a lot of scientists looking for work. The reality is a lot scientists are driveb by theย money.

President Donald Trump: All of this with the global warming, and da da da, a lot of it’s a hoax. It’s a hoax. I mean, it’s a money making industry,ย ok?

Amy Westervelt: Arena says that while tobacco used the same strategy, the fossil fuel guys were just better at it. Big Tobacco would attack the whistleblowers personally, Big Oil โ€“ they attacked the whole idea of fossil fuels being any sort of problem. Because theyโ€™d spent decades crafting the narrative that fossil fuel is an essential part of American life, it was easy to call anyone who thought otherwise un-American, effectively politicizing theย issue.

Of course we know that Big Oil learned new tactics from Big Tobacco, too, namely in the form of science denial. And Daniel Edelman was right there, too. In the 1970s Edelman proposed an aggressive campaign for the RJ Reynolds tobacco company. It contained more than a few echoes of the PR giantโ€™s time in the trenches of psychologicalย warfare.

Salem tobacco ad: Country soft, country fresh, that’s the taste you get wherever you light up a Salem, because Salem genty’ air-softens every puff, for the smoothest, most refreshing taste of any filterย cigarette.

Amy Westervelt: The proposal begins by suggesting, for example that, โ€œThe non-smoker must be made to feel that the smoker cares about him. It is our sense that the non-smoker is divided into two general groups โ€“ those who don’t really care if others smoke; and those who are growing more hostile to anyone who does smoke. We need to woo the former group to our side; we need to soften the opposition of the latter. Step 2 is pure science denial. Edelman recommends โ€œWe need to pierce the solidly-assumed notion that no additional research is necessary on the subject of cigarette smoking, Imaginative and creative ways must be found to correct this Impression.โ€ Of course one of those creative ways is to create doubt. Edelman proposes: โ€œWe need to counter public impressions based on oversimplification by dramatizing pinpointed areas of study that are mysteries to researchers and scientists on both sides of thisย issue.โ€

That proposal won Edelman a contract, and the firm would go on to work for Big Tobacco for more than a decade. If the science approach they recommended for tobacco sounds an awful lot like the climate science denial that starts showing up a few years later, thereโ€™s a reason for it. Edelman also worked for several fossil fuel clients, and the American Petroleum Institute. Thatโ€™s important because by the 1980s the API, Ivy Leeโ€™s brainchild, was pushing the industry away from researching climate change and toward denying it. Former Exxon scientist Richard Werthamer told us that in Seasonย 1.ย 

Richard Werthamer: The key is the American Petroluem Institute. Exxon had a huge influence, rightly so, in the API and I think the API changed its tune, and probably other majors went along withย that.

Amy Westervelt: And you can hear exactly the same sort of strategy that Edelman suggested for RJ Reynolds in this speech from then-ExxonMobil CEO and American Petroleum Institute president Lee Raymond inย 1996:

Lee Raymond: Proponents of the global warming theory, say that higher levels of greenhouse gases, especially CO2, are causing world temperatures to rise and that burning fossil fuels is the reason. By scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to whether human activities affect the climate.

Amy Westervelt: You heard that right? Raymond said the evidence that humans contribute to climate change is โ€œinconclusive.โ€ But this speech was in 1996, long past the point where Exxon’s own scientists had said climate change would cause catastrophic damage for some percentage of the planet in the not so distant future if emissions weren’tย curbed.

In the late 1990s, Daniel Edelmanโ€™s son Richard took over as CEO, but Dan remained involved for the rest of his life. In various interviews, and in Edelmanโ€™s biography, Richard said he talked to his dad daily about the business. They didnโ€™t always agree, of course. When he took the reins, Richard almost immediately decided to drop tobacco clients, for example. The writing was on the wall about tobacco by that point, and what it cost the firm in tobacco billings it more than made up for in good PR and newย clients.

The firm did continue to apply the same strategies for Big Oil for several more years though, including, as Daniel Edelmanโ€™s biography puts it, โ€œputting a human face on Big Oil for the American Petroleumย Institute.โ€

American Petroleum Institute ad: Leading the world in oil and gas production. I vote to keep it going. With the right policies we can produce, refine and supply, more oil and naturalย gas.

Amy Westervelt: Edelman picked up where Ivy Lee had left off, continuing to tie the extraction of oil, coal, and gas to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, And again, itโ€™s hard not to see the roots of Edelmanโ€™s World War II work in the approach the firm crafted for Big Oil. Suddenly anyone who wasnโ€™t pro-oil wasย anti-American.

Daniel Edelman died in 2013, but the firm that bares his name continued to apply the same tactics that he’d been using effectively for decades. In 2014, Greenpeace leaked several documents that showed an aggressive campaign that Edelman had come up with for TransCanada to push the Keystone pipeline. It includes all the same tactics weโ€™ve talked about here: aggressive opposition research, fake grassroots groups, attacking the messenger, and a big nationalistic messaging push. In 2015, the firm announced that it would no longer be working with coal companies or any company that denied climate science. By that point, they’d already lost not only executives but also clients, and the reputational risk was just too great. However, that same year, Edelman spun off its internal advertising group, Blue, which continued to work for the API.

American Petroleum Institute ad: More secure American jobs opportunity and economic growth for our children and grandchildren, that’s why this election I’m voting for Americanย energy.

Amy Westervelt: For all the rah rah America stuff the oil industry pushes, these campaigns often work to subvert democracy. In his most recent research, environmental sociologist Bob Brulle found that the biggest indicator of fossil fuel PR spend was the likelihood of any sort of climate legislationย passing.

Bob Brulle: When you look at their public relations spending, the more the more Congress starts to have hearings and write bills dealing with climate change, the more they start spending on public relations the next year. In other words, you start having hearings this year. Next year, you’re going to have a public relations onslaught from the oil companies, telling you how good they are, how they’re so responsible and good corporate citizens, and that whatever problem it is that you’re talking about, theyโ€™re right on top of it and handling it. And the hidden messages is: so therefore, there’s no need to regulate us atย all.

Amy Westervelt: In some cases they move even faster. As the Washington Post just reported, the oil guys just dropped a $1million targeted ad buy the day after a couple of current Democratic candidates said they might ban fracking. And in 2008, when Demcrats won control of all branches of the government heading into the global climate negotiations in Copenhagen, they were spending preemptively. The API alone spent a whopping $75 million withย Edelman.

Bob Brulle: I don’t think there’s any other way to call it other than propaganda, which is a one sided message designed to create a certain impression, that’s exactly what it was. And it’s very focused, targeted, extremely well done and apparently prettyย effective.

Amy Westervelt: So we went from Ivy Lee working with Standard Oil to World War I propaganda to Lee advising Hitler and Goebbels to Daniel Edelman learning the tools of the trade by studying and countering the Third Reichโ€™s propaganda in World War II, and bringing those tactics right back to Bigย Oil.

Next time weโ€™ll meet another key architect of the propaganda apparatus, Herb Schmertz, the PR legend who took on Mobil Oil after Edelman. And guess what? Schmertz also started out in military intelligence. He wound up adding so many new bells and whistles to the propaganda machine that weโ€™re gonna spend two episodes delving into his story. See you then.

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