Sharon Beder - Global spin: the corporate assault on environmentalism

If you care a fig for either democracy or environmentalism, then Global Spin is a book for you. It is a thoroughand thoroughly shockingaccount of the sophisticated techniques being used around the world to undermine environmentalism and reset the agenda to status quo.New Internationalist

In her excellent book, Sharon Beder traces the rise of this backlash [to the call for action on global climate change]: the funding of think-tanks, the promotion of the Wise Use movement and the creation of an artificial grassroots movement sometimes dubbed astro-turf.Hugh Warwick, New Scientist

Beders analysis is comprehensive, steely and clinical. She lifts the lid on an elaborate tapestry of lies, deceit, intimidation and destruction. Harold Pinter, Financial Times

This lucid and well-documented book makes a convincing plea for a new wave of environmentalism.Publishers Weekly

The books scope ranges from case studies of corporate activism to analysis of the nature of PR, and though it never explicitly asks who controls our minds, it is impossible to come away from the book without that question ringing in your ears.Katharine Ainger, Fourth World Review.

Global Spin is outstanding. Sharon Beder has taken the taboo subjects of propaganda and censorship in free societies and exposed their insidious threat. This is such an important book that I would put it on every school curriculum John Pilger

I have read many publications detailing the spread of anti-environmentalism and can confidently say this is the best publication on the topic to date. It is a well-researched, informative and bold critique of the counter-movement against environmentalism.Tim Boston, Alternatives Journal

GLOBAL SPIN

Revised edition

The Corporate Assault

on Environmentalism

Sharon Beder

This revised edition first published in the UK in 2002
by Green Books Ltd
Foxhole, Dartington, Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EB
www.greenbooks.co.uk

Sharon Beder original edition 1997
Sharon Beder revised editions 2000, 2002

The right of Sharon Beder to be identified as author
of this book has been asserted by her in accordance
with the UK Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted
or reproduced in any form by any means
without permission in writing from the publisher

Typeset at Green Books

Cover design by Rick Lawrence

A catalogue record for this book is
available from The British Library

Paperback format ISBN 1 903998 09 3
PDF format ISBN 978 1 907448 18 8
ePub format ISBN 978 1 907448 19 5

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Richard Gosden who advised me, encouraged me and commented on an earlier draft of the book. The research for this book was also aided by a small Australian Research Council (ARC) grant awarded through the University of Wollongong. I have adapted chapters 15 and 16 in this revised edition from articles that were originally published in PR Watch.

Foreword

The book you are holding is the first I have come across to deal with the real environmental crisisthe one that consists not of decaying eco-systems, ozone depletion and global warming, but of the corporate domination of what we are able to hear, see, know and think; the crisis that lies in the fact that the modern mass media system is not a medium for the free discussion of ideas and viewpoints, but is deeply embedded in, and dependent on, the wider corporate status quo, and on the related capacity of corporate communications and economic power to boost facts, ideas and political choices that are conducive to profit maximization, and to stifle those that are not.

In this situation, specific environmental issues can hardly be considered the centrallet alone the soleproblem for environmentalists, given that corporate domination makes the raising of public awareness and concern for these issues all but impossible. After all, it hardly matters whether a person is bleeding to death, poisoned, or dying from hypothermia, if some kind of obstacle is preventing all medical aid from reaching the patient. The real problem, for now, is the obstacle that prevents the public from coming to the aid of the environment.

The medias involvement in preserving the current status quo is, of course, not confined to the treatment of environmental issues. As the writer Gore Vidal has said:

The bullshit just flows and flows and flows and the American media is so corrupt and so tied into it that it never questions it.

One of the most significant developments in technology in recent years has been the mobile phone, which is now almost ubiquitous in the Western world. The journalist Richard Ingrams (in a break from the usual media complicity) noted in the Observer :

When the newspapers are obviously doing so well out of all this [mobile phone] advertising, it is not so surprising that they tend not to give much coverage to the growing evidence that mobile phones are not only anti-social but extremely dangerous.

In February 1999, Wireless Technology Research (WTR)a leading surveillance and research organisation funded by the US telecoms industrypresented findings based on six years of research into the safety of mobile phones. The WTR found that the rate of death from brain cancer among users of hand-held phones was higher than the rate of brain cancer death among those who used phones that were kept away from the head. The risk of a benign tumour of the auditory nerve was fifty percent higher in people who reported using cell phones for six years or more. The risk of rare tumours on the outside of the brain was more than doubled in cell phone users as compared to people who did not use cell phones.

Nearly two years later, Tim Radford of the Guardian felt able to write that there was no evidence of a health risk in the use of mobile phones. This remarkable claim was echoed in the New Scientist, and on the BBC and ITN news.

Since then, on 11 July 2001, Dr Gerard Hyland from the Department of Physics at Warwick University (UK) and the International Institute of Biophysics in Germany, submitted to the European Parliaments Industry, Trade, Research and Energy Committee, a report which declared: There is documented evidence that long-term (involuntary) exposure to microwave radiation of intensities between that received near an active phone and that found in the vicinity of a base-station does cause serious illness, such as leukaemia and lymphoma, in certain exposed people.

Although the Independent had reported Dr. Hylands views in 1999, neither it, nor the Guardian, the Observer, or any of the major broadcast media, covered the release of this damning report. Hyland wrote that the public quite justifiably remains sceptical of attempts by governments and industry to reassure them that all is well, particularly given the unethical way in which they often operate symbiotically so as to promote their own vested interests, usually under the brokerage of the very statutory regulatory bodies whose function it supposedly is to ensure that the security of the public is not compromised by electromagnetic exposure!

Such examples of manipulation and deception that Sharon Beder discusses in this book have recently come together in spectacular fashion, to promote support for a National Missile Defence (NMD) system, and to downplay the seriousness of climate changeabout which Sharon has written a new chapter for this edition of Global Spin.

The ultimate origins of NMD lie in the experience of Cold War propagandists, who made a fortune from massively hyping the Communist menace. As historian Mark Curtis has shown, secret planning documents from the Cold War era are often explicit about the absence of any real threat from the Soviet Union. Noam Chomsky quotes Cold War analyst John Lewis Gaddis: