Amy Westervelt, long-time climate reporter and founder of the podcast Drilled, conducted a years-long and worldwide investigation into what might be called the Public Relations Industrial Complex (the military insinuation is deliberate and warranted). The just-published result is “Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy.”
Yale Climate Connections spoke with Amy Westervelt last month via Zoom.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. If you purchase a book through a link on this page, a percentage of the proceeds funds our journalism.
Yale Climate Connections: Broadly speaking, you tell the story of public relations. When does PR begin?
Westervelt: If you’ve heard anything about the history of PR, you have probably heard about Edward Bernays, who was Sigmund Freud’s double nephew (his mother was Freud’s sister, and his dad was Freud’s wife’s brother), which is very weird and very Freudian. He becomes the guy who bakes a lot of subtle psychological thinking into advertising and PR.
But there’s a guy who came before him: Ivy Ledbetter Lee. He worked for Pennsylvania Railroad, but they also loaned him out to the Rockefellers to deal with a labor strike at a coal mine in Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914. He invented the press release. Get out in front of the story and tell the media your thoughts on things first, Lee taught; that’s the way to control the story.
Lee looked for other ways to get corporate messages out to the general public. When he was working for the railroads, he created the Bureau for Railway Economics and staffed it with credentialed economists. They wrote papers about how bad regulation of the railroads would be for everybody. Ivy Lee would get these printed and then send them to reporters. He would also leave the printed pamphlets on benches in train stations and on seats in trains. All to get people thinking, “Oh, you know, maybe we shouldn’t be regulating business in this way.”
Yale Climate Connections: PR is also connected with propaganda techniques developed in World War I and World War II, when there were major efforts by states to shape public opinion.
Westervelt: Yes. Ivy Lee gets pulled into the Creel Commission because people are starting to notice his work. Because Woodrow Wilson had run on a platform of keeping the U.S. out of war, his government had to make a real effort to sell it to the American public. The Creel Commission pulled together journalists, theater people, and artists to sell the war. Lee ends up meeting Edward Bernays, who was doing theater PR at the time, through the Creel Commission.
A lot of PR guys were involved in military propaganda or were trained in military intelligence and then used those skills to engage in psychological warfare against American citizens. I know that sounds really dramatic, but it’s true.
Yale Climate Connections: You point out at one point that PR people can be divided into two types: the people who want their name over everything and the people who want to stay in the background and operate unseen. Tell us about figures who exemplify these types.
Westervelt: My favorite of the loving-the-limelight type of PR guy is Herb Schmertz, hands down. He was the VP of Public Affairs for Mobil Oil for 20-plus years. He, too, did some time in the military, doing intelligence work, before he got involved in PR. He had also worked as a labor lawyer.
Mobil initially hired him to do labor law. But then they discovered that he was friends with the Kennedys, and they thought, wow, it would be pretty useful for an oil company to have close ties with the Democratic Party. So they pulled him into the public affairs office. There he began thinking about what he, who had helped run political campaigns, could borrow from politics to help Mobil.
This is the early ’70s. There’s an oil embargo; people are waiting in line at gas stations. There are conspiracy theories about the oil majors having secret tankers of oil, sitting offshore, in a bid to artificially raise prices. Everyone’s really pissed off at them. Herb Schmertz gets assigned the task of fixing this for Mobil.
And he does a masterful job. He creates a whole persona for Mobil. He decides he wants it to be the “Thinking Man’s Gasoline.” He invents the advertorial with The New York Times.
The writers and creatives who worked for Schmertz at Mobil said that he made the PR department feel like a super cool media outlet or PR agency. They attracted really good talent. They were good writers. They made cool artwork. They sponsored Masterpiece Theater: “Brought to you by Mobil.” That was huge! It spawned a lot of copycat stuff from Exxon and Chevron.
And Schmertz loved to be on TV himself, especially to criticize the press. He got invited on serious news shows, like Ted Koppel and 60 Minutes, to give his critique of the media and what they were doing wrong. He was really influential in creating the false equivalence idea in the press [that it’s not fair to criticize a company without giving it an equal voice].
Yale Climate Connections: And the other type?
Westervelt: In terms of the quiet master behind the scenes, there’s Earl Newsom, who was the PR guy for Standard Oil of New Jersey, which today is Exxon, from like 1919ish to 1969.
He was an early tester of polling, of market research. “What do people think about oil? About oil companies in general? About us, in particular?” They ended up developing a bicycle care toolkit for schools because they wanted young kids to develop a positive association with Standard and for their parents to associate Standard with their children’s safety.
I found an archive of Earl Newsom’s where you could see his billables. He’s billing the company close to a million dollars a year for PR in 1919 and 1920. That is a lot of money at that point! But he’s also doing a lot.
[But unlike Schmertz,] Newsom did not want to be quoted in the press. He did not like people writing about what he was doing. Instead, he very quietly shaped a lot of the world.
After Standard and Exxon, Newsom ended up working for Ford, Campbell Soup, Procter and Gamble, Eli Lilly. It’s important to remember that these guys got hired by one company, but then they or their ideas moved to other companies and industries. The tactics that they use don’t end when the project ends. And that shifts, warps how people understand certain things.
Yale Climate Connections: One thing that comes through clearly in your book is that these are not just public relations efforts on behalf of single companies or problems. There’s something like a prime directive underlying everything that they do: the defense of the free market and capitalism and the discrediting of government management and regulation. This goes back to World War II.
Westervelt: Yes. In fact, Earl Newsom mapped out a post-WWII strategy for businesses. They’re very concerned about government control of the means of production and pricing during the war. They’re worried that that’s going to continue, because people like the way the system’s working. People think the government is looking out for them, while corporations are just out for themselves. Businesses need to make sure that people don’t continue to think that way after the war is done.
Newsom bypasses the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers — people know that they’re just shills for industry — and goes to the corporations themselves. “General Motors, you guys do an ad on how competition breeds innovation; focus on some of your cool products. Ford, you guys focus on high wages.” It was all very strategic.
Yale Climate Connections: And so we get these lessons about how the economy is supposed to work, which come back again in the ’60s and ’70s when there are new impulses to regulate.
Westervelt: Right. You’ve got the free speech movement on campuses, the anti-war movement, the environmental movement, women’s rights. They’re all pushing back on the tenets of free-market capitalism.
Companies feel like they’re under attack. They’re freaked out about Ralph Nader, in particular. People on the left have talked for years about the Powell memo, the prototype for Project 2025. What people forget is that memo was commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, specifically by the guy in charge of education for the Chamber. He, like many business people at the time, thought that university campuses were turning against free market capitalism. Something had to be done.
Soon you see an explosion of conservative think tanks, and corporations begin sponsoring programs and research at major universities.
Yale Climate Connections: And along the way, you get the intermingling of law and PR, an important development in your story. Let’s talk about the two cases that lay down the markers that greatly empower the PR machine. The first of these arises in the late ’70s, First National Bank v. Bellotti. Why is this case important?
Westervelt: First National is a bank in Boston that wants to advertise against a Massachusetts ballot initiative. The purpose of the initiative itself isn’t important now. The point was that Massachusetts law at the time said that a business couldn’t advertise against a ballot measure unless its interests were materially affected. But rather than arguing that this ballot measure did materially impact its business, First National Bank filed a lawsuit against the state of Massachusetts, claiming that the law infringed on its First Amendment rights. The court in Massachusetts says, absolutely not. The state court of Massachusetts says no. So they appeal to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court almost doesn’t take the case because by the time it gets to them, it’s a moot point. What National Bank wanted had happened; the ballot measure failed. Several of the justices actually agree with Massachusetts’ take on the First Amendment argument, so there’s no point in taking the case. But one justice, Justice Powell, decides that this is really important. In his archive, you can see letters between him and the other justices, in which he pitches them on taking this case. He really wants to engage with its First Amendment argument. This is a guy who, before the Supreme Court, had been a tobacco lobbyist. He had argued that Philip Morris had a First Amendment right to advertise against ballot measures around smoking in public places and the sort.
Eventually he got his way, and they agreed to hear the case. Then he convinces enough of the other justices to rule in favor of the bank, and he writes the decision. But he has to write it fairly narrowly because he couldn’t get the others to agree that the First Amendment protects corporate speech in an unfettered way. He is, however, able to write in this ruling that the First Amendment should be applied to the speech, not the entity. This really blows the lid off the public square. Now corporations can spend as much as they want to promote their ideas, and they can get involved in politics. The only real restriction is that they can’t deal with candidates directly.
Yale Climate Connections: So now the First Amendment applies to corporations as well as people.
Westervelt: Correct. Mobil Oil had done a lot of litigation PR around Bellotti. Herb Schmertz thought the advertorials he was doing for the New York Times should go on TV as well, but none of the TV stations wanted those ads. Ralph Warner, then the CEO for Mobil, advocated for corporate personhood, for the importance of the First Amendment applying to corporations. [Company representatives] wrote a lot about the importance of Bellotti. Then once Bellotti was decided, they did a lot of PR around how great it was. They used it to go after the TV stations that refused to run their advertorials.
And then you get Citizens United. That’s the biggie that everybody kind of knows. The Supreme Court says dollars are speech. We now have unlimited money in politics, and we’re seeing dark money stuff happening in the U.S.
I’m very concerned that one of the climate cases coming up is going to expand [corporate personhood] even further. The recycling logo case — a company is arguing that it has a free-speech right to put the recycle logo on its products even if they aren’t recyclable — could be used for that as well.
Yale Climate Connections: You’re pointing to two cases that arose after you finished your book. We see major corporations working with think tanks that they have created, working with research centers at universities that they have endowed, and working with politicians that they have supported. Then they lobby intensely behind the scenes to make sure that certain cases work their way through the courts — and produce the results that they are seeking.
Westervelt: Yes. The recycling case is trying to challenge the idea that we should even be concerned about the reality, the reliability, of recycling. It would eliminate accountability.
I’ve talked to many, many academics who work at oil-funded research centers at the best universities in the world. The story is the same every single time: They propose a project that somewhat threatens fossil fuel dominance, and they’re told to find a different project. Some of this research makes its way into the IPCC and into international climate negotiations.
Yale Climate Connections: At the very end of your book, you present a wish list of the things we should do to get out of this morass. Let me list a few: mandatory media literacy classes K-12 and in every public university, reverse Citizens United and Bellotti, require funding transparency and conflict-of-interest disclosures on all university research, get rid of think tanks.
Won’t the corporate PR machine simply shut down any effort to enact any one of these recommendations?
Westervelt: Oh, yeah. They absolutely will try to, but I don’t think that’s a good reason not to talk about what we should do. The idea that we can only ever talk about what’s politically achievable right now is exactly what corporations want us to think.
All of the right-wing think tanks have the wildest ideas all the time, and they have zero concern about whether or not they’re achievable. Their thing is, “We’re not trying to pass policy; we’re trying to seed the ground in which policy grows.” Why are we self-censoring? Especially on climate. You can talk about batteries and solar, but that’s it. “Don’t talk about big changes, or people are going to think all climate people are communists.” But they’re going to think that anyway.
As for corporate funding of research, I’m not saying universities should never take that money, but they should do it with their eyes open instead of pretending that it has no impact on what they’re doing or how their work ends up being used.
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