Introduction to the United States Edition of Secrets and Lies
As public relations companies export techniques for manipulating democracy around the globe, citizens in every country urgently need to share knowledge of these tactics and how to deal with them. Secrets and Lies is a rare and detailed exposé of how modern PR companies can influence politics. It is as relevant to understanding politics across the world as in your street…
In a fifth-floor office in the nation’s capital, a small group of dedicated men and women spent years writing press releases and letters to the editor about rainforest logging, lobbying the government, studying green publications, reading reports of environmental meetings and planning for the next protest. But they were not environmental activists. They had a very different role.
Their job was not to build the environmental movement but to undermine it. Meticulous plans were devised to counter and undo the efforts of environmental campaigners and, at the same time, they invisibly co-ordinated their own campaign to win government support for continued rainforest logging. Working as paid corporate activists, they were the staff of a public relations company.
The client in this case was a logging company owned by the New Zealand government, but it could have been any issue and almost any country. This book is about the tactics PR companies can use to pursue the political goals of any client able to pay their fees. It is pay-politics, where any cause, no matter whether it is unworthy or self-interested, can become a significant political campaign with the assistance of the invisible PR activists.
What follows is an insider’s view of the dirty deeds of a gigantic transnational propaganda firm. The unscrupulous tactics it and other PR companies use were developed to counter US activists, but have since been exported world wide, in this case to the island nation of New Zealand in the South Pacific. While the locations and personalities may be foreign, this should only emphasise the familiarity of the PR politics, which influence most of the news we see and many of the political issues affecting our lives.
The PR professionals employed to manipulate politics usually succeed in operating in secrecy. The difference in this case was that some people involved in the PR campaign decided that the logging company had gone too far and that the public had a right to know. They broke their employee secrecy agreements so that the story could be told.
New Zealand is not a place you would expect to be a case-study of anti-environmental politics. Americans mostly see New Zealand as ‘clean and green’, an unspoilt country remote from the world’s industrial pressures and environmental problems. But there are pressures for rainforest logging throughout the world, and the political techniques employed to support this exploitation – including anti-environmental PR tactics – naturally follow. In New Zealand the subsidiary of the public relations company Shandwick had been employed by the state logging company to “neutralise” its environmental opposition.
For decades there has been controversy over logging of New Zealand’s temperate rainforests. These forests are very ancient, containing plant and animal species that have existed for over 150 million years. For 80 million years the islands of New Zealand have been cut off by ocean from the rest of the world, creating in effect a biological museum, more closely resembling forests of the dinosaur era than any others on earth.
The modern environment movement in New Zealand grew out of a 1970s campaign that succeeded in stopping wholesale clearing of the natural beech forests on New Zealand’s West Coast. The battles continued through the 1980s over logging of rimu forests, with some forests saved and others cleared and planted in pine trees. Then, when most New Zealanders would have presumed that logging native forests was settled and a thing of the past, proposals appeared to dramatically expand the scale of the West Coast logging.
It would not seem unreasonable to most people that the government agency doing the logging, Timberlands West Coast Ltd, would seek advice on a public relations strategy. Most members of the public, even those who opposed the logging, would probably accept a government agency putting its side of the story in a public policy debate. If Timberlands published a glossy annual report, wrote a few letters to the editor, addressed public meetings or took politicians and media on tours of their logging operations, most would have little objection. The provision of information is essential to an informed debate and government accountability. But much, much more was going on.
The anti-logging campaigners gradually became aware of a concerted and often aggressive counter-campaign, going far beyond what appeared normal or reasonable. It seemed that anyone who supported them prominently would receive legal threats or some other response designed to deter them from advocating their views. There was a growing but ill-defined sense that there was a deliberate campaign to paint their mainstream concerns as extreme and unreasonable and that Timberlands was secretly co-ordinating a pro-logging campaign against them. But it was hard to prove and, in the absence of hard evidence, open to being dismissed. When Timberlands was accused of employing the kind of anti-environmental public relations tactics seen in other countries, the company’s chief executive officer dismissed the suggestion as ‘conspiracy theories’.1
One of the authors of this book, Nicky Hager, wondered if the tactics appearing in the forestry debate were signs of the type of anti-environmental PR he had read about from the United States. He decided to make a project of breaking through the secrecy surrounding the Timberlands campaign and began looking for insiders who would be willing to talk about what was really going on. New Zealand is a good place to seek secret information like this. It is an old joke in New Zealand that, within minutes of meeting, two strangers will discover people they know in common. The same applies to finding insiders. Eventually determined researchers will hear about their neighbour’s friend’s cousin who works in the very organisation they are studying – and find that he or she may be willing to meet for a drink.
The breakthrough came in 1999 when some people offered to help – and eventually helped far beyond our expectations. They felt uncomfortable about the tactics they were involved in implementing and, once approached, decided that the public had a right to know. What began as quiet meetings ended in decisions to really spill the beans. The people concerned decided that their duty to the public outweighed their obligation to Timberlands to help keep what they felt were unethical activities secret.
Over the following weeks, they photocopied hundreds and hundreds of pages of confidential documents, eventually handing over what may be the most comprehensive set of PR papers ever to reach the public anywhere in the world (see p. 240 for more on leaking). If you can imagine how much paper someone was able to photocopy between 10 p.m. one evening and 6.30 a.m. the next morning – non-stop – that was the size of the largest group of documents that came to make up what are now known as the Timberlands Papers.
These leaked papers gave a near-complete picture – from the inside – of an anti-environmental PR campaign. There were numerous PR strategy papers, piles of correspondence between Timberlands and its PR advisers, copies of legal advice about attacking critics and, tying the story together week by week, the minutes of the Friday morning teleconferences between Timberlands and the PR companies it employed to assist in its political campaign. This is very rare. There has probably never been such a detailed exposure of what goes on behind the glossy face of a PR campaign. The public deserves to know how ugly it looked.
The papers showed that the environmentalists’ suspicions, far from being unfounded, underestimated the scale of the PR campaign against them. Here was detailed planning of how to cause trouble for the environmental groups and anyone who helped them: researching their vulnerabilities and deciding on the best tactics for countering them. Here were matter-of-fact discussions about infiltrating environment groups to acquire information that could assist the campaign.
There were bizarre examples, such as a PR consultant sitting in that fifth-floor office in Wellington writing letters in the voice of annoyed West Coasters, tired of outside interference in their lives – letters which Timberlands had arranged to get ‘its’ community action group to sign and post off to newspapers and to a Cabinet minister who was thought not to be ‘on side’.
There was so much material in the Timberlands Papers, revealing in breathtaking detail the cynical world of public relations, that we decided to tell the story in this book. Covering all aspects of the company campaign, it serves as a textbook case of anti-environmental public relations strategies.
There is a bigger story too. The Timberlands Papers document the campaign for just one client of a couple of medium-sized PR companies. Reading through the Timberlands story, it is sobering to consider the impact the collective efforts of the whole PR industry have on every other issue, and what this means for the functioning of democratic society. The effect of these PR strategies is to undermine public participation in issues and avoid democratic decision-making if it is contrary to the interests of a client with a healthy bank account.
Politicians are accustomed to judging public concern about an issue by, for instance, the number of letters to the editor or how much the issue is in the news. But if a company or government agency can simply and invisibly spend a great deal of money to get its PR company to write dozens of letters to the editor, cultivate ‘independent’ supportive spokespeople and orchestrate news stories from sympathetic journalists, then the ordinary democratic processes are easily subverted.
This is precisely what Timberlands and Shandwick did. Most letters to the editor in favour of logging could be traced straight back to Timberlands and its PR firms, nearly all the voices speaking publicly in favour of logging turned out to have been orchestrated by Timberlands and nearly every news story sympathetic to Timberlands was revealed to have been arranged by the company. Almost every seemingly spontaneous sign of support for Timberlands’ logging originated with the company.
The pro-logging campaign included manipulating the news media, cultivating political allies to act as spokespeople and lobbyists for its interests and attempting to buy local public support through sponsorship funding. The company set out to orchestrate a national political campaign in favour of logging where otherwise there would not have been one.
Where does this leave democracy, as politics becomes increasingly manipulated by public relations? As this book will show, the survival of the democracy depends on exposing the public relations. It also depends on recognising the PR tactics when they are used in public debates and not being discouraged by them. We wrote this book as an example of PR campaign but also as an example of how to counter it.