Fw: Great New Book Exposing PR Giants like Milloy's Junk$cienceGroup

[Guest guest]

This sounds like a book I can appreciate, and right up our alley.....take a

look.

Patty

From: ilena rose <ilena@...>

Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2001 11:00 AM

Subject: Great New Book Exposing PR Giants like Milloy's " Junk$cience " Group

(Note: These same authors did a great job exposing the lies behind implants

fed by the PR machine. Ilena )

Trust Us, We're Experts : How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With

Your Future

by Sheldon Rampton, Stauber

Hardcover - 256 pages (December 22, 2000)

J P Tarcher; ISBN: 158542059X

Editorial Reviews: Amazon.com

Fearless investigative journalists Sheldon Rampton and Stauber (Toxic

Sludge Is Good for You! and Mad Cow U.S.A.) are back with a gripping exposé

of the public relations industry and the scientists who back their

business-funded, anti-consumer-safety agendas. There are two kinds of

" experts " in question--the PR spin doctors behind the scenes and the

" independent " experts paraded before the public, scientists who have been

hand-selected, cultivated, and paid handsomely to promote the views of

corporations involved in controversial actions. Lively writing on

controversial topics such as dioxin, bovine growth hormone, and genetically

modified food makes this a real page-turner, shocking in its portrayal of

the real and potential dangers in each of these technological innovations

and of the " media pseudo-environment " created to obfuscate the risks. By

financing and publicizing views that support the goals of corporate

sponsors, PR campaigns have, over the course of the century, managed to

suppress the dangers of lead poisoning for decades, silence the scientist

who discovered that rats fed on genetically modified corn had significant

organ abnormalities, squelch television and newspaper stories about the

risks of bovine growth hormone, and place enough confusion and doubt in the

public's mind about global warming to suppress any mobilization for action.

Rampton and Stauber introduce the movers and shakers of the PR industry,

from the " risk communicators " (whose job is to downplay all risks) and

" outrage managers " (with their four strategies--deflect, defer, dismiss, or

defeat) to those who specialize in " public policy intelligence " (spying on

opponents). Evidently, these elaborate PR campaigns are created for our own

good. According to public relations philosophers, the public reacts

emotionally to topics related to health and safety and is incapable of

holding rational discourse. Needless to say, Rampton and Stauber find these

views rather antidemocratic and intend to pull back the curtain to reveal

the real wizard in Oz. This is one wake-up call that's hard to resist.

--Lesley

Sheldon Krimsky, Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy, Tufts

University, and author of Hormonal Chaos

This book makes the best case I know for complete disclosure of the

financial conflicts of interest....

See all editorial reviews...

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All Customer Reviews

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A toolkit to save us all from the PR tar-pits, December 29, 2000

Reviewer: Misha from San Francisco, CA

A lot of people know that the mass media spin stories, people, events, and

opinions. But few of us can get an inside look at how the PR and opinion

industries work with the mass media. How they use science, social science,

and pseudo-science to sell toxic products, to ignore their devastating

impacts, and to undermine democracy coldly, deliberately, and cynically.

This powerhouse of a book is first aid for those of us weary of all that,

but still hoping for a sane, reasonable way to respond and arm ourselves

with the real truth.

In /Trust Us, We're Experts/, Sheldon Rampton and Stauber continue as

America's number one watchdogs of the PR industry. This book gives you

permission to smell something stinky in the fishy proclamations of

media-hyped experts who are wooing our wallets...even when it's packaged as

roses, peddled in big showy bunches and enthusiastically delivered to your

door using everything from direct mail to the Internet to letters to the

editor of your local newspaper to products carefully and expensively placed

in your supermarket. And the book leaves the reader with a sense of passion

and hope, rather than feeling defeated. What an accomplishment!

/Trust Us, We're Experts/ is meticulous in detail, painstaking in its

research, unrelenting in its patient disentangling of complicated issues.

Yet it's hugely, easily, fabulously readable, the kind of book I kept

quoting portions of out loud to anybody within earshot. The kind of book

where you howl aloud on public transit, and people lean over and ask what

you're reading, and before you know it, a cluster of folks are engaging in

a spontaneous citizen-to-citizen democracy-building session. Just the kind

of thing the big PR firms fear, because citizens armed with the truth stop

listening to spinmeisters paid handsomely to tell them what and when to

buy.

What I liked best about /Trust Us, We're Experts/: it's immediate and

concrete-not a heady bunch of theory. The authors' examples come from

today's news-global warming, genetic engineering of food, big tobacco,

pharmaceuticals, Microsoft, and more. Never mind what you've heard about

conspiracies or subliminal programming-Rampton and Stauber show how the

most powerful engineering of consumer awareness operates right under our

noses, but cloaked in wiggle words, misinformation, and outright lies.

How can we get clear of the tar-pits of opinion, packaged as fact, that

" neutral " " third-party " " experts " have flung us into? Read this book, and

you will walk away with a tar-pit-rescue toolkit that the La Brea Coast

Guard would envy. I give it five stars, though want Rampton and Stauber to

know they're not finished yet, and must keep writing for years and decades

to come! Thank you, authors, for this book.

Michele Gale-Sinex

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

" Trust Us, We're Experts " a must-have for activists, December 28, 2000

Reviewer: Orr (see more about me) from Moab, UT

Actually, " Trust Us... " is a must-have for anyone interested in the growing

use--and misuse--by big industry of technical experts and scientists to

avoid citizen oversight and regulation of corporate practices that harm

public health, safety, and the environment.

Stauber and Rampton are back, after two previous hits (one on the dark side

of the PR industry and the other on the coverup of Mad Cow disease) with a

third book that is already destined to be a classic.

Activists need this book to understand the way science and technology are

used, not to inform and educate, but instead to " baffle'em with bulls--t. "

In this brave new world of PR spinmeisters and scientists-for-hire, Stauber

and Rampton are telling it like it is. You CAN trust them--the

" experts " --to expose the underbelly of modern corporate political

manipulation!