Nine Out of Ten Doctors Prefer...

Think about how many times you've heard an evening news anchor spit out some variation on the phrase, "According to experts..." It's such a common device that most of us hardly hear it anymore. But we do hear the "expert" -- the professor or doctor or watchdog group -- tell us who to vote for, or what to eat, or when to buy stock. And, most of the time, we trust them.

Now ask yourself, how many times has that news anchor revealed who those experts are, and where they get their funding, and what constitutes their political agenda? If you answered never, you'd be close.

That's the driving complaint behind "Trust Us, We're Experts," a new book co-authored by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton of the Center for Media and Democracy. Unlike many so-called "experts," the Center's agenda is quite overt -- to expose the shenanigans of the public relations industry, which pays, influences and even invents a startling number of those experts.

The third book co-authored by Stauber and Rampton, "Trust Us" hit bookstore shelves in January. We caught up with John Stauber, who is currently on a nationwide publicity tour, to ask him a few questions about the book, the PR industry and the egregious manipulation of facts for corporate profit.

AlterNet: What was the most surprising or disturbing manipulation of public opinion you reveal in your book?

Stauber: The most disturbing aspect is not a particular example, but rather the fact that the news media regularly fails to investigate so-called 'independent experts' associated with industry front groups. They all have friendly sounding names like 'Consumer Alert' and 'The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition,' but they fail to reveal their corporate funding and their propaganda agenda, which is to smear legitimate heath and community safety concerns as 'junk science fearmongering.'

The news media frequently uses the term 'junk science' to smear environmental health advocates. The PR industry has spent more than a decade and many millions of dollars funding and creating industry front groups which wrap them in the flag of 'sound science.' In reality, their 'sound science' is progress as defined by the tobacco industry, the drug indsutry, the chemical industry, the genetic engineering industry, the petroleum industry, and so on.

AlterNet: Have you taken heat from the PR industry about this or any of your previous work?

Stauber: We are occasionally attacked in print by PR professionals, but the more prevalent attitude shared with us off the record is to compliment our work, and tell us that we have an accurate portrayal of the business of propaganda, but that in fact all that goes on in the PR world is even worse that we can imagine. I always respond by telling the PR worker that they should write their own book, bare their soul and educate the public about their years of propaganda for firms like Edelman, Burson-Marsteller, Ketchum and the rest. But that usually short circuits the conversation.

AlterNet: Is the public becoming more aware of PR tactics and false experts? Or are those tactics and experts becoming more savvy and effective?

Stauber: The truth is that the situation is getting worse, not better. More and more of what we see, hear and read as 'news' is actually PR content. On any given day much or most of what the media transmits or prints as news is provided by the PR industry. Its off press releases, the result of media campaigns, heavily spun and managed, or in the case of 'video news releases' its fake TV news -- stories completely produced and supplied for free by former journalists who've gone over to PR. TV news directors air these VNRs as news. So the media not only fails to identify PR manipulations, it is the guilty party by passing them on as news.