Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy/The Fake Parade

[nosmokes]

Looks like I've found my next addition to my NF reading list. Even though it concerns events from '02 I highly reccommend the article in part 2. The tactics used then by big biotech and Ag multi-nats are nothing if not more refined and sophisticated now.
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original-gmwatch

1.Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy - Claire Robinson
2.The Fake Parade - Jonathan Matthews

NOTE: Item 2 gives a flavour of the material in the biotech chapter of Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy.
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1.Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy: Corporate PR and the Assault on Democracy
Edited by William Dinan and David Miller
Pluto Press, 2007 (Available http://www.spinwatch.org) Review by Claire Robinson

The premise of Miller and Dinan's book, laid out in the Introduction, is that PR was created to "take the risk" out of democracy. They point out that PR is overwhelmingly carried out for vested interests, mostly corporations, and that it is not open and transparent about its means or its clients. In its drive to persuade the people that the corporate interest is identical with the public interest, it relies on misinformation, lies, and dirty tricks. One common tactic is the "third-party" technique, in which seemingly independent people or organizations are used to spread a corporate message. The third parties do not disclose their funding or affiliations, and much of the public (and, I'd add, much of the media) has a "blind spot" that prevents them from looking behind the mouthpiece to the source.

Miller and Dinan hope that their book will shine a light into some of the dark corners of covert corporate influence. To that end, it brings together 16 chapters by different writers and activists describing some of the ways in which corporations have deceptively used PR and spin to subvert democracy and work against the public interest. Some of these are summarized below:

***Eveline Lubbers describes how arms company British Aerospace paid spies to infiltrate the NGO Campaign Against the Arms Trade when CAAT was opposing the company's plan to sell jets to Indonesia. CAAT had argued that the Indonesian government would use the jets to crush resistance in East Timor. The infiltrator tried to manipulate CAAT in the direction of more violent protests, a tactic which fortunately did not succeed because of the Quaker pacifist origins of the group. The private company that did the spying boasted back in 1996 that they had a database of 148,900 "known names" of CND members, trade unionists, activists and environmentalists.

***David Miller tells the story of how industry interests, with their friends in government, twisted and tried to discredit research casting doubt on the food safety of farmed Scottish salmon. The research found that the salmon contained dangerously high levels of toxic PCBs, but the message that reached the public after the corporate spin doctors had done their job was that the salmon was perfectly safe to eat.

*** In his chapter, "Biotech's Fake Persuaders", GM Watch's Jonathan Matthews show how corporate interests are using the poor and disenfranchised as fronts to push the pro-GMO message.

***Andy Rowell recounts how oil company Exxon paid lobby groups, think-tanks and front organizations (which did not disclose their corporate affiliations and funding) to cast doubt on manmade climate change, thus disrupting the formation of coherent government policy to combat it. Several of these organizations, including the Institute of Economic Affairs and the International Policy Network, will be familiar to GM Watch subscribers as also having promoted GMOs.
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complete article here

[ikojo]

1. I have this book and will commence reading it

once I have moved. Right now moving is my primary obsession.