Energy firms, health insurers deftly use others to spread propaganda
I usually don’t pay a lot of attention to the songs on a restaurant’s playlist, but when “The Old Rugged Cross” came on at the Manassas, Virginia, Cracker Barrel as I was traveling to Tennessee recently, I put my fork down and listened.
Hearing the hymn took me back nearly half a century to my childhood in Kingsport, Tennessee. Every Sunday morning, we listened to the “hymn program” on WMCH, a Christian radio station, as we got ready for church.
I couldn’t resist Googling WMCH to see if it was still around. I was happy to find that not only is it still on the air, it now has much broader reach, thanks to the Internet.
But when I streamed it, instead of a gospel quartet, I heard a radio talk show host mock environmentalists who want more laws and regulations to address climate change. I was told that the earth hasn’t really been getting warmer and that, even if there is a little more CO2 in the atmosphere, it’s God’s way of helping to restore the rainforests.
The hymns on WMCH are, unfortunately, now few and far between. Filling the big gaps between them is propaganda—or “messaging” if you prefer the corporate PR term—designed to get people to think, act and vote in certain ways.
Just days earlier I had participated in a discussion at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism on this very issue. We had just watched Merchants of Doubt, the new Robert Kenner documentary about how oil and gas industries, among many others, finance propaganda campaigns to influence public policy by creating doubt in the minds of American citizens and the people they elect to public office.
Almost all of us are completely oblivious to these campaigns. The special interests behind them go to great lengths to hide their involvement. During the health care reform debate, for example, America’s Health Insurance Plans, a large Washington-based trade group I used to work with—I was a member of its strategic communications committee—funneled more than $100 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to fund the Chamber’s anti-reform advertising campaign. Insurers knew that the TV ads would be more credible if people believed the Chamber of Commerce had paid for them.
There’s more to this story. Click here to read the rest at the Center for Public Integrity.
This story is part of Wendell Potter commentary. Former CIGNA executive-turned-whistleblower Wendell Potter writes about the health care industry and the ongoing battle for health reform. Click here to read more stories in this blog.
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Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
