The fake persuaders (Old Article)

Detective work ... shows how a PR firm contracted to the biotech company Monsanto appears to have played a crucial but invisible role in shaping scientific discourse.

An article on its website...warns "there are some campaigns where it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your organisation is directly involved... it is possible to make postings to these outlets that present your position as an uninvolved third party..."

So the campaign against the researchers was extraordinarily successful; but who precisely started it? Who are "Mary Murphy" and "Andura Smetacek"?

The Bivings Group says it has "no knowledge of them". "Mary Murphy" uses a hotmail account for posting messages to AgBioWorld. But a message satirising the opponents of biotech, sent by "Mary Murphy" from the same hotmail account to another server two years ago, contains the identification bw6.bivwood.com. Bivwood.com is the property of Bivings Woodell.

When I wrote to her to ask whether she was employed by Bivings and whether Mary Murphy was her real name, she replied that she had "no ties to industry".

... the electoral rolls, telephone directories and credit card records in both London and the entire US reveal no "Andura Smetacek". Her name appears only on AgBioWorld and a few other listservers,

Even the website on which the campaign against the paper in Nature was launched has attracted suspicion. Its moderator...claims to have no connection to the Bivings Group. But ... searching the site's archives ... received the following error message: "can't connect to MySQL server on apollo.bivings.com". Apollo.bivings.com is the main server of the Bivings Group.

"Sometimes only the client knows the precise role we played." Sometimes, in other words, real people have no idea that they are being managed by fake ones.

A common practice in the PR world that long precedes Al Gore's invention is the creation of "independent third parties" and "objective sources" to validate what the PR effort wants validated (or stigmatized).

For many years, they have called radio music DJs and talk radio to tout (or trash) a stock, or an artist, a movie, a product, a political candidate. The DJ almost always knows that he is being "used" and accepts it as part of the game. Indeed, some DJs openly discuss which such "independent" efforts are done skillfully or not.

Most interesting are the political crisis created by the PR effort of a politician, knowingly promoted by the media, and then swallowed by the naive public.

Examples
The naive believe the PR lie that the Vietnam war was "unpopular" back home when in fact, after the '68 convention PR campaign Pro-war Humphrey came in 2d to even more pro-war Nixon with the most pro-war Wallace coming in 3d and the anti-war candidates obtaining less than 1% of the vote. Again in '72 pro-war Nixon trounced pro-appeasement McGovern.

A good example on a local level is how Jane Byrne beat the Chicago Democrat Machine with a masterful PR campaign masterminded by her media savvy husband and implemented by a person who kept popping up on TV and other media as the "independent objective voice of the common man" when in fact he was Jane Byrne's driver, advisor and most effective campaign operative.

Does anyone really think that current issues such as anti-immigrant, pro-immigrant, etc just happened to pop up without someone manipulating the PR campaigns to selectively present facts and ignore others facts... and to create facts that in fact are bogus?

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