Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry

This book is like a Michael Moore movie. Like it or hate it, you'll find that the topics this book poses are worth exploring in conversation. Additionally, it'll bring you to look at the media in a different way.

Read this to learn about the "darker side of PR". Great and easy read.

iKnow

It's hard to be an idealist in an age of corporate spin, where everything bad is now good for you. Fortunately for the public at large, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton have written a meticulously researched, hard-hitting, cynical look at the PR (public relations) industry and how its influence sometimes works against the public good. I found myself particularly surprised at the duplicity utilized by The Body Shop (a store I used to frequent), as well as other notable American corporations. I also highly recommend their other book, "Trust Us, We're Experts!"

Once again, John Stauber has written a book that tells it like it is, and this one ought to be a bestseller. Readers who can accept these truths may also want to read a couple highly detailed yet fascinating exposes of toxic sludge that is supposed to be good for us. First, "Fluoride Deception" by Christopher Bryson. Yup, that fluoride in your water and toothpaste is a poisonous wasteproduct turned to profit through shrewd public relations strategies. Secondly, read "The Whole Soy Story" by Kaayla Daniel. This is even more of a shocker. It's on how we've all been sold on the idea that soy is good for us. Did you know that soy protein and lecithin are waste products -- toxic and sludgy leftovers from vegetable oil and margarine making that the soy industry decided to make profitable? Because no one other than a few vegetarians and hippies wanted to eat that toxic sludge, we all had to be manipulated into believing that they are good for us. And now soy's in so many foods that it's hard to escape it. Thanks to John Stauber's books including "Trust Us, We're Experts,"I'm wary of experts and now know enough to follow the money.

In addition to the fact that this book reads like a thriller, the content and specific examples that are used in this book are so eye opening that it might make you depressed or even nauseated.

Americans are flooded with a propaganda campaign so efficiant that it would make the NAZIs jealous. This book expalins in vivid detail the actual manipulation tactics that are used by the energy, pharmacuetical and tobbaco industries (among others) to blind us into submission and hypnotize us into believing their products are not only safe but are intimately tied to your youth and vitality.

An earlier post for this book made the comment that the authors shouldn't explain the actual manipulation strategies, but the dangerous PR firms allready know how to use them. The rest of us should know these strategies so we can recognize their tactics when we are confronted with them.
Highly recomended book.

Where oh where do I begin? Toxic Sludge... takes a jaded look at the public relations industry, and exposes more than a few objectionable practices perpetrated on behalf of (mostly) corporate America's pursuit of the Almighty Buck.

I say 'mostly' because, however distressing it may be to informed and intelligent citizenship, even the United States Government and more than a few foreign regimes solicit the services of these most nefarious snake oil salesmen. Let's face it, you really do not consume the services of PR firms in order to foster good relations with your customers, you go to them when you have done something bad, and you want it covered up, or at least 'spinned' in the 'right' direction. You solicit the help of PR flacks and keep them on juicy retainers in order to look good, and not to be good. When the doo-doo hits the fan, whose a corporate ne'er do well gonna call? The PR company, that's who.

Toxic Sludge... contains twelve chapters of absorbing reading. From countermeasures directed at censoring information thoroughly in the public domain, keeping books off the bookshelves and dissenting voices from being heard, to infiltrating shoe-string activist organizations, fomenting criminal insurgency and subverting (and ultimately perverting) any and all attempts to relay the facts, the authors provide example after example of very well-financed government and corporate interests actively frustrating (and quite often foiling) intelligent and inormed democratic participation in the political and economic process. As Mark Dowie, the author of the introduction says, in an environment rife with PR, facts can not survive, nor can the truth prevail.

Some of the strategies and tactics PR firms used with giddy abandon on often unsuspecting targets truly shocked me, for many tools and tricks from the PR Playbook share an eerie resemblance to CIA methods and operations. In fact, more than a few PR players and heavy hitters get their inspiration from millitary strategists such as von Clauswitz, and cross-fertilization between PR firms and the upper levels of government and corporate America impart a uniquely acidic aggressivity and practiced slickness to their campaigns against their opponents. Some of their more colorful operations reminded me of the FBI's use, via its infamous COINTELPRO initiative, of agent provocateurs against student groups, anti-Vietnam war protestors and civil rights activists during the late sixties and early-mid-seventies. This unholy alliance between government, corporations and PR firms, combined with their incestuous linkages to the ad industry, make for one formidable and thorougly intimidating opponent.

The book contains a veritable smorgasbord of eminently quotable quotes and delightful (and very distressing) anecdotes. In this vein, my personal favorite is the story of how PT Barnum, of circus fame, got his start. He put on display an old, black slavewoman, and billed her as 'George Washington's childhood nursemaid', and get this- he claimed that she was one hundred and sixty years old. Barnum made certain that he got the woman in the news as often as he could, and it did not matter what the papers said, as long as his name was spelled right. Of course, Barnum made a killing, the woman died, an autopsy was performed for the benefit of more than a few skeptics, and gee whiz, it turned out that she could not have been more than eighty.

Barnum, of course, handled the situation like the PR pro he was. When the truth was finally revealed, he went public, and said he was shocked, truly shocked, at the way the woman had deceived him!

And that anecdote, in essence, describes the modus operandi of the PR professional. PR pros turn the truth inside out. While they greatly prefer subtlety, they will stoop to other, more brutish tactics in service of their cause. PR groups can obtain favorable coverage of their worldview, much like Barnum did, and can readily obtain the willing cooperation of government agencies, as well as current and former high ranking government officials and politicians to do their questionable bidding.

The PR firm has proven itself to be at times a sinister, vicious octopus with many tentacles in some of the most unlikely places. As such, it behooves any concerned citizen to read this book and take notice of this beast as he or she participates in the marketplace of ideas.