Volts podcast: Amy Westervelt on disinformation and propaganda

In this episode, journalist and researcher Amy Westervelt discusses the history of the public relations industry in the US and the ubiquitous, if largely unacknowledged, role it has played, and still plays, in shaping how Americans think about the environment. Amy has tons of great stories!

Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Amy Westervelt, October 27, 2021

(PDF version)

David Roberts:

In recent years, there’s been a lot of talk about America’s polluted information environment — the ubiquity of disinformation — driven by social media and “fake news.” What is less discussed is that purposefully crafted disinformation designed to shape public opinion to the benefit of the wealthy and powerful is nothing new. In fact, it’s almost as old as the country itself.

Amy Westervelt, a long-time, award-winning environmental journalist, has spent her career uncovering disinformation and exposing the methods of those who generate and spread it.

She’s perhaps best known as the host of Drilled, a “true-crime podcast about climate change” that has spent six seasons (so far) exposing the propaganda generated and spread by the fossil fuel industry. And she’s editor-in-chief of the Drilled News site.

She’s also the founder of Critical Frequency, a woman-run podcast network, as well as the co-host of the climate podcast Hot Take with climate essayist Mary Annaïse Heglar (it’s currently on hiatus; returning next year), the co-host or producer of several other podcasts (including Scene on Radio and Crooked Media’s This Land), and the author of Forget Having It All, a 2018 book on the challenges of motherhood in the US.

Now Westervelt has a new project, launching today: Rigged.

The foundation of the site is a treasure trove of original documents, some dating back more than a century, about the founding and growth of the modern public relations industry and its development of tools of mass persuasion.

Atop that database is a series of pieces charting the landscape, offering a glossary of disinformation techniques, profiles of the (anti-)heroes of the business, and stories on various inglorious chapters in disinformation history, from chemicals to railroads to tobacco to fossil fuels.

It is equal parts fascinating and horrifying — fascinating that the tools of disinformation are so well and publicly documented; horrifying that they are still working so effectively.

Here’s just one fun fact: Edward Bernays, one of the pioneers of early 20th century opinion shaping, coined the term “public relations” because the Germans, he said, had “given the word propaganda a bad name.” You can also thank Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, for men wearing wristwatches, women smoking, and bacon being a standard part of American breakfast. These stories are wild.

I’ve been admiring Westervelt’s work from afar for years, so I was psyched to talk to her about Rigged, the long history of disinformation, the many ways the fossil fuel industry has shaped public opinion, and why the US left seems so incapable of dealing effectively with disinformation to this day.

Amy Westervelt, welcome to Volts.

Amy Westervelt:

Hi, thanks for having me.

David Roberts:

Glad you could squeeze me in between your dozens of projects. Let's start with the newest one. Tell me about Rigged: How did you come to be doing this, why are you doing it, and what would you like it to accomplish?

Amy Westervelt:

A little more than a year ago now I did a season of my other podcast, Drilled, looking at the history of fossil fuel propaganda. When I first started Drilled, I was just going to do one six-part season about the origins of climate denial. Then, in the course of doing that, I started thinking, climate denial is such a dumb tactic; why did it work? It's dumb to just be like, “Nuh-uh.” It's not a genius strategy. Of course, it's telling people what they want to hear, like this problem might not be that bad and maybe we don't need to do anything drastic. But I also felt like there must be more to it.

So I started to look at what the industry was doing before; it's not like they just started doing PR when global warming was researched. The more I dug into that, the more I realized that they really spent a lot of time and thought to shape how people view the world in general, and especially how people view environmental issues, for a really long time, before anyone was talking about climate change.

That has a lot to do with, once this issue appears, how we actually process and deal with it. But in the course of doing that, I also found all this stuff about what the PR firms and the PR people who were working for Big Oil were doing for all these other industries at the same time, and it seemed important to me for people to understand that this is a longstanding system and set of strategies that really was created to circumvent democracy.

The modern PR industry comes about when you have journalists criticizing America's captains of industry for the first time, you have the vote expanding beyond just land-owning white men; this is the late 1800s and early 1900s, the dawn of the 20th century. The US government passes its very first regulation on business in 1887. So there are all these reasons that industry across the board is saying, “Oh, wow, we really need a way to get a handle on this thing that's getting away from us.” I call it “creeping democracy.”

A lot of these early PR guys are working for coal and rail and oil and tobacco all at the same time, and then quickly, chemicals joins that list, too. So the reason that we see these strategies replicated in multiple industries is not that an oil executive is studying the moves of a tobacco executive; it's that they're using the same PR firms.

In the case of oil and tobacco, John W. Hill was working for the American Petroleum Institute and all the tobacco companies at the same time, and he encouraged them to talk to each other. He got the tobacco guys to join the API. The oil companies were co-defendants of the tobacco companies during the tobacco litigation, because they helped to create the cigarette filter. That was all brokered by their PR and spokespeople.

I felt like all this documentation sitting on my desk wasn’t doing anyone any good there. I started to digitize a lot of it, and I thought, DocumentCloud is kind of hard to navigate, so I should put this on a website that guides people through it. Then I thought, there's a significant number of people who, even if they believe we should act on climate, will never listen to a climate podcast, because they have a certain idea in their minds of what that means; so I'm going to do a companion podcast that looks at