These industries all surely learned from each other at various points in time, but that was mostly because they were working with the same publicists. The history is less that tobacco or oil embraced disinformation first and then passed it on and more that a handful of PR firms and consultants created the disinformation industry, and then put it to work on behalf of whatever industry needed it at any given time.
Today, those same strategies are at work on behalf of those who worry that the response to COVID-19 will undermine capitalism, which is why climate folks keep noting how familiar the whole anti-science component of the right-wing response to the pandemic feels. It's familiar because the exact same strategies are being deployed, in some cases by the same people. Here are a few key examples:
Disinformation strategy #3: Astroturfing
Last weekend, social media was awash in the news that those anti-lockdown rallies in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Colorado were all fomented by rightwing donors. Someone on Reddit figured out all the "re-open the economy" websites were made by one guy in Florida. This is astroturfing 101, and it's a strategy that's been a key tool in the disinformation toolbox for at least 100 years. When coalminers and steelworkers were striking regularly back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, publicists like Ivy Lee, Edward Bernays and John Hill helped create fake protest groups that supposedly represented all the coal miners who just wanted these strikes to be over so they could get back to work. In more recent years, fossil fuel companies have backed fake advocacy groups like the California Drivers Alliance or the Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy to fight against everything from emissions regulations to a carbon tax. Astroturfing is fake activism meant to give the illusion of grassroots opposition to policy. My favourite example is the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition, a petrochemical and plastic manufacturers-backed group that protests bag bans and bag taxes. It's somewhat rare, however, to get a sitting US president supporting and promoting your astroturf campaign, as Trump has done with the fake "re-open the economy" movement.
Season 3 of Drilled gets into these strategies and more in great detail, and you're bound to see in this history the roots of today's pandemic disinformation machine.
This week is Earth Week and a lot of media outlets are focused on solutions to climate change, a conversation that COVID-19 has certainly changed. Which got me thinking: often people act like climate accountability is not a solution, like all we do is point out problems or play the blame game. Sorry for harshing your mellow about carbon capture occasionally, but for the team at Drilled News, accountability is an absolutely necessary part of addressing climate change. How can you move forward functionally if you don't know where things went wrong in the past? How can any technological solution possibly work if it's plugged into the same old system (carbon capture is an excellent example of this, come to think of it)?
Our hope, of course, is that when people learn to recognize these strategies and know what's behind them, they might become less effective. Disempowering the disinformation industry is a necessary part of any climate solution.
This story originally appeared in Drilled News and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
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