The Father of Public Relations

[MUSIC] If you listen to Drilled, you know this kind of story. A harm everyone warned about. A system that failed to act and people left paying the price. Now imagine it's not oil or emissions, it's your drinking water. Safe to drink is the new four-part podcast investigating one of the largest contamination events in New Hampshire's history. From the Pulitzer Prize finalist document team at New Hampshire Public Radio, this series is about a town that discovers its water is contaminated with PFAS, the so-called forever chemicals. Officials say it's safe, families getting sick aren't convinced. Hosted by NHPR climate change reporter Mara Hoplamazian, safe to drink examines, what happens when contamination is slow, science is uncertain and accountability keeps slipping away. It's about regulatory failure, corporate influence, and environmental harm, hiding in plain sight. If you care about why these crises keep happening, follow safe to drink on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. [MUSIC] Some farms grow food. This one grows fuel. Natural gas and oil companies are successfully meeting the demand for greater energy. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions to their lowest levels in a generation. And should there were the change? Yet again, on natural gas can step in to keep the power flowing and the light shining, no matter the four cars. Innovating to meet the energy demands of today and tomorrow. 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 are 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. And every Democrat running for president has both a climate plan and a position on the green new deal. So companies like ExxonMobile, 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, they want 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 Voxes, The Weeds. Today, the US is leading the world of producing natural gas and oil while reducing emissions at the same time. 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 Bruehl, who you might remember from season one. The American way of life and everything good about America, you know, apple pie mom, the flag fossil fuels. And so by implication, what they do is basically say any attack on fossil fuels isn't attacking our way of life. 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 to nile 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 oils, big propaganda machine, and why it's still so effective today. I'm Amy Westerville, and this is Drilled, season three, The Mad Men of Climate Nile. 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 this story are not found in the fossil fuel industry. They're found in the tobacco industry. That's Naomi Oreska's Harvard Science Historian and Merchants of Doubt Author. Since Oreska's 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 to Nile from the tobacco industry's playbook. Oreska's has proven that thoroughly, just like tobacco funded studies about all the other causes of lung cancer, to creep doubt about its 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 strategy than science to Nile. A lot more. Big oil started trying to influence the public a long time before it got into the scientific spin game. In fact, the oil industry 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 to Nile 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 Bruehl again. The lion's share of the effort that these guys are spending money on is not on science to Nile. Yes, they spend this much on science to Nile. And I'm not saying that that isn't important and doesn't count, but they're spending probably five or ten 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 PR business, 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 starting to call into question today and that the public is finally starting to see too. And it all started more than a hundred years ago with the first oil tycoon, John D. Rockefeller. Now on this my birthday, I desire to reaffirm my belief in the fundamental principles upon which this country was founded, liberty, on selfish devotion to the common good and belief in God. There he is on his 93rd birthday with his brown 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 PR guy. The foundations of modern PR 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. Investigative journalist, one of the first muck rakers, woman named Ida Tarpael. This is supreme wrongdoing cloaked by religion. There is but one name for it, hypocrisy. So Ida Tarpael starts digging into standard oil at the dawn of the century. She was a pretty established journalist and a biographer at this point, so she said about writing what she thought was going to be a biography of John D. Rockefeller and standard oil. And she was really determined and dogged in her pursuit of information. She would track down these archives of documents and then go to pick up a box and find that all the documents had 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 eventually too. And what she ends up pulling together with all of that is a 19-part series on standard oil and basically how John D. Rockefeller had scammed his way into a monopoly. At the time he controlled everything about oil from drilling to refining pipelines to railroads. Rockefeller and his associates did not build the standard oil company in the board rooms of Wall Street banks. They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail as being age and price cutting. Rockefeller 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 anti-trust claim against Rockefeller. Five years later the US Supreme Court ruled that standard oil had in fact violated anti-trust laws and needed to be broken up. And 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. ♪ Niners out of doors ♪ ♪ Out from the houses of the company old ♪ - You may have heard that very famous Wengus re-song who's 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 11,000 coal miners employed by the Rockefeller owned Colorado Fuel and 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, 8,000 Colorado Mine Workers went on strike. Of course, first Rockefeller evicts them from their company owned homes, which was the entire point of why company towns aren't great for workers. On strike and homeless, the miners and their families set up a tent setting near the mine. By 1914, about 1,200 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. 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. 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. First, the trust thing, and now this, he was everything Americans were coming to hate about their bosses. In desperate need of some good PR, Rockefeller hired this guy. - To the Rockefeller listen to me patiently, pleasantly, and calmly until I'd finished my eloquent presentation of the crime. - I be led better, Lee, is widely considered the father of public relations. Rockefeller initially hired him to help handle the fallout from what journalists, including Ida Tarbel, had started calling the Ludlow massacre. And lead did such a good job. They wound up working together for the rest of his life. In his handling of Ludlow, the first thing lead did was create an entirely fake story. He claimed the strikers weren't even really workers. They were plants from the labor unions. In Lee's story, labor organizer Mother Jones had orchestrated the whole thing. And for some reason, he threw in that Jones was running a nearby brothel. She was 82 at the time, so not likely. When he was asked about this story decades later, Lee said, quote, "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, how to seem like one of the people, even which charitable projects to take on. The press never knew what hit him. 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 Exxon Mobile, Conoco Phillips, and Chevron. And just like you can draw a street line from Standard Oil to Chevron and Exxon Mobile today, you can see Ivy-led better-leaves fingerprints all over the oil industry's disinformation campaigns. It's the same tactics Lee used to rehabilitate Rockefeller's image way back then. Fake news, crisis actors, corporate philanthropy as a PR move, all to shift the public's focus away from a company's bad behavior. The company that's working to bring affordable, scalable carbon capture to industries around the world. So who exactly was Ivy-led better-leaves? 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 a few years later? [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] We'll get into all of that and more next time. The oil companies, especially Standard Oil, and then later on through API, were really the beginners and probably the greatest institutionalized effort at developing corporate propaganda to support their industry. Drill is part of the Critical Frequency Podcast Network. The show is reported, written, and produced by me, Amy Westerville. Julia Richie is our editor. Our managing producer is Katie Ross. She also created this season's incredible artwork, sound design scoring and mixing by B. Eman. Rick Amurthy is our editorial advisor. Naomi LaShawns is our fact checker. Special thanks to Richard Wiles and to our first Amendment attorney, James Wheaton, and the first Amendment project. Drill is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development. We appreciate their support. You can find Drill on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget to leave us a rating review. It really helps the show. And you can follow us on Twitter now at We Are Drilled and visit our new website, DrilledNews.com, for climate accountability, reporting, newsletters, and behind-the-scenes stories from this season. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. [MUSIC PLAYING] If you listen to Drilled, you know this kind of story-- a harm everyone warned about-- a system that failed to act, and people left paying the price. Now imagine it's not oil or emissions. It's your drinking water. Officials say it's safe. Families getting sick aren't convinced. Hosted by NHPR climate change reporter, Mara Hoplamazian, Safe to Drink examines, what happens when contamination is slow, science is uncertain, and accountability keeps slipping away. It's about regulatory failure, corporate influence, and environmental harm, hiding, and plain sight. [MUSIC PLAYING]