S3, Ep1 | The Father of Public Relations

Montage of ads:

[music]

If you watch TV, or listen to the radio, or podcasts, or use social media, or read newsletters, or get your news online … in other words if you are a human in America today consuming media in any form, you’ve probably heard or seen some variation of these ads. They’re everywhere. Which makes sense. The oil industry is embroiled in lawsuits over its role in delaying action on climate change. Teenagers all over the world are striking for climate policy. Every Democrat running for president has a climate plan *and* a position on the Green New Deal.

So companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP – they’re worried about their image. They want consumers to think of them as “green” companies, not polluters. And the American Petroleum Institute, their trade organization, wants everyone to remember that natural gas is a “clean energy.”

But Oil propaganda is nothing new. In fact it’s been a part of the industry almost since it began. The American Petroleum Institute? You know, the guys you hear in all the news podcasts, like The New York Times’ The Daily or Vox’s The Weeds:

[quick clip]

They’ve been around for more than 100 years. And their strategy hasn’t actually changed all that much in those years, according to environmental sociologist Bob Brulle, who you might remember from Season 1:

Brulle2.mp3 [01:19:24]  the American way of life and everything good about America. You know, apple pie, mom, the flag. Fossil fuels. And you know, and so by implication, what they do is they basically say any attack on fossil fuels is an attack on our way of life. [01:19:47][20.3]

[20.6]

Part of what has enabled the fossil fuel industry to operate the way it does is exactly this sort of propaganda. It has given the industry social license. It’s created the conditions for science denial to thrive. And it works in really subtle ways too … it’s the reason you’ll hear even  those who WANT to act on climate say things about protecting oil companies while you do it.

So that’s the story we’re going to tell this season: the creation of Big Oil’s big propaganda machine, and why it’s still so effective today.

[music up]

I’m Amy Westervelt and this Drilled, Season 3: The Mad Men of Climate Denial

[Naomi Tobacco, up to marker]

Naomi “The important thing that we thought we had discovered in our research the thing we thought people needed to understand was that actually the roots of the story are not found in the fossil fuel industry, they’re found in the tobacco industry.”

That’s Naomi Oreskes, Harvard science historian and Merchants of Doubt author. Since Oreskes first uncovered the link between Big Tobacco and climate denial, it’s been sort of accepted wisdom that Big Oil copied Big Tobacco and that’s that.

But that’s not quite the whole story. Big Oil definitely copied SCIENCE denial from the tobacco industry’s playbook, Oreskes has proven that thoroughly. Just like tobacco funded studies about all the OTHER causes of lung cancer to create doubt about it’s product really being so bad, the oil guys funded research on all the other potential causes of global warming, long after they knew the primary culprit was fossil fuels.

BUT, there’s more to Big Oil’s strategy than science denial. A lot more. Big Oil started trying to influence the public a LONG time before it got into the scientific spin game. In fact, Big Oil wrote the playbook on American propaganda in general. A lot of the techniques that we still see today: fake news, disinformation campaigns, even changing the vocabulary we use to talk about things — like how we went from “the greenhouse effect” to “global warming” to “climate change”–all of that and more was created for the benefit of the oil industry.

Science denial is one front in Big Oil’s idea war, and it’s an important one. But it’s not the only one.

Here’s Bob Brulle again:

Brulle: the lion's share of the effort that these guys are spending money on, is not on science denial. Yes, they spend this much on science denial. And I'm not saying that that isn't important and doesn't count. But they're spending probably five or 10 times more on all this corporate promotion advertising.

When oil companies and trade groups like the American Petroleum Institute pay public relations firms, it’s not just for advertising or even for dealing with the media, it’s also for less obvious tactics that aim to create a generally positive view of the industry. If that sounds like some sort of psychological warfare … it is. There’s a long history of military intelligence experts getting into the P.R. biz, many of them on behalf of Big Oil. Over the past century, multiple generations of these guys have built an extensive, you could say well-oiled…publicity machine. That machine has shaped American opinions on the environmental impacts of oil and the importance of the fossil fuel industry. It’s that apparatus that the courts are beginning to call into question today, *and that the public is finally starting to see, too. And it all started more than 100 years ago with the first oil tycoon, John D. Rockefeller.

[John D. Rockefeller clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0DuV1wpDhY]

There he is, on his 93rd birthday with his round little glasses, sounding like a TRUE AMERICAN. Patriotism! Morality! The common good!

Now John D Rockefeller WAS a very religious guy but this image here is really the result of decades worth of grooming and management from the world’s first P.R. guy. The foundations of modern P.R. in general, and the fossil fuel propaganda machine in particular, were built around rehabilitating the Rockefeller family’s image, back in the early 1900s. And specifically to counter the work of one woman. An investigative journalist, one of the first “muckrakers,” a woman named Ida Tarbell.

[“Tarbell” clip]

So Tarbell started digging into Standard Oil at the dawn of the century. She was a pretty established journalist and biographer at this point so she set about writing what she thought would be a biography of John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil. And she was determined and dogged in her pursuit of information.  She would track down archives of documents, then go to get them and find that they’d all been destroyed. But she kept at it and she found people inside the company that would talk to her and she did find some documentary evidence. And what she ended up putting together was a NINETEEN-part series on Standard Oil and basically how John D. Rockefeller had scammed his way into a monopoly — at the time he controlled everything from drilling to refining, pipelines to railroads.

[“Tarbell” clip]

He had put hundreds of hardworking independent producers out of business, he’d been given an unfair competitive advantage, and the public was outraged. So was President Theodore Roosevelt.

By 1906 the Department of Justice filed an antitrust claim against Rockefeller. Five years later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil had in fact violated antitrust laws and needed to be broken up.

Then, just a few years after THAT, Rockefeller's SON was in the news, also getting bad press, this time at the company's mine in Colorado.

[Guthrie]

You may have heard that famous Woodie Guthrie song. It was written about a massive strike at Rockefeller’s coal mine in Ludlow, Colorado. In the summer of 1913, United Mine Workers began to organize the eleven thousand coal miners employed by the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. Initially workers asked to meet with management to air their grievances — low pay, long and unregulated hours, and the fact that they were only allowed to live and trade in the company town … that meant everything they bought was just paying money back to the company they worked for. And it gave the company an enormous amount of control over their lives. Even though those rights had already been LEGALLY granted to workers, Management wasn’t having it, so a month later, eight thousand Colorado mine workers went on strike. Of course, first Rockefeller evicted them from their company-owned homes … proving the entire point of why company towns weren’t great for workers. On strike and homeless, the miners and their families set up a tent city near the mine. By 1914, 1200 people were living in that camp. It was a huge protest, but that wasn’t necessarily new at this point in history. What made the Ludlow strike infamous was what Rockefeller did to bust it.

[machine gun sound effects]

Private security guards and the national guard showed up at the protest camp with machine guns. They lit tents on fire and sprayed the camp with bullets, killing 22 protesters, including women and children.

[SFX]

A riot broke out, including more guns on both sides. And by the end of it, more than 60 people had died.

It wasn’t long before every paper was painting Rockefeller as the villain here.

[Guthrie back up]

First the trust thing and now this? He was everything Americans were coming to hate about bosses.

In desperate need of some good P.R., Rockefeller hired this guy:

[Ivy clip]

Ivy Ledbetter Lee is widely considered the father of public relations. Rockefeller initially hired him to help handle the fallout from what journalists, including Ida Tarbell, had started calling “The Ludlow Massacre.” And Lee did such a good job, they wound up working together for the rest of his life.

In his handling of Ludlow, the first thing Lee did was create an entirely fake story. He claimed the strikers weren’t really workers, they were plants from the labor unions. In Lee’s telling, labor organizer Mother Jones had orchestrated the whole thing. And for some reason he threw in that Jones … 82 at the time … was running a nearby brothel. Sure, why not? When he was asked about this story decades later, Lee said “what are facts anyway, but my interpretation of what happened?”

Lee’s approach worked. He coached Rockefeller on how to talk, how to behave in public to make himself likeable, “one of the people,” which charitable projects to take on. The press never knew what hit em. And when Rockefeller died, he was remembered as a kindly philanthropist, a hardworking industrialist, and a true-blue American.

Standard Oil’s progeny, of course, became today’s oil giants: Exxon (now ExxonMobil), ConocoPhillips, and Chevron. And just like you can draw a straight line from Standard Oil to Chevron and ExxonMobil today, you can see Ivy Ledbeter Lee’s fingerprints all over the oil industry’s disinformation campaigns today. It’s the same tactics Lee used to rehabilitate Rockefeller’s image way back then: fake news, “crisis actors,” corporate philanthropy as a P.R. move, all to shift the public’s focus away from a company’s bad behavior.

[carbon capture ad]

So who exactly was Ivy Ledbetter Lee? What did he end up doing for Rockefeller and Standard Oil in the years following the Ludlow Massacre? Why did he love Russia so much? And what exactly made him so good at propaganda that a certain German dictator came calling just 20 years later?

[Hitler clip]

We’ll get into all of that and more next time.

[music up]

Credits:

Drilled is part of the Critical Frequency Podcast Network. The show is reported, written and produced by me, Amy Westervelt. Julia Ritchey is our editor. She also plays the role of Ida Tarbell in this episode. Our managing producer is Katie Ross. Sound design, scoring and mixing by Bhi Bhiman. Rekha Murthy is our editorial advisor. Naomi LaChance is our fact checker. Special thanks to Richard Wiles. Drilled is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Institute for Sustainable Governance and Development, and its Center for Climate Integrity. We appreciate their support. You can find Drilled on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t forget to leave us a rating or review, it really helps the show! AND you can visit our new website DrilledNews.com for climate accountability reporting across multiple verticals. You can also sign up for a couple of great newsletters there and get additional information and behind-the-scenes photos from this season. And we’ve finally pulled the trigger on a dedicated Drilled twitter. So if you follow me on there, consider giving Drilled a follow too. We’re at WeAreDrilled.