Thomas Klikauer for BuzzFlash: The (Un) Scientific Republican
January 7, 2023
By Thomas Klikauer
Perhaps even before Galileo Galilei’s humanity advancing scientific discovery of 1616, science has already been under attack. Only recently, the Taliban banned women from studying in Afghanistan. And then, imagine a world without the double Nobel Prize winner, Madame Curie telling us what radiation is.
Yet, science is also under attack from two more recent forces: corporations and the radical right represented, for example, by the Republican Party. Both – corporations and the radical right – operate with very much the same double propaganda.
On the one hand, the radical right is sowing doubts about science. This is a worthwhile ideologically driven propaganda strategy. On the downside, the truth can only be kept away from the public for so long as we have seen on tobacco, asbestos, green house gases, etc.
Eventually, and this is despite the radical right and best corporate effort, the truth reaches large section of the public. The second strategy is represented by what Trump stooge Kellyanne Conway calls “alternative facts”. These counter-facts are often produced by three groups of people:
· scientists who unwillingly produced findings for corporations;
· paid scientists who are financed – more or less directly – by corporations, euphemistically called as “external funding” for research projects; and
· crypto-scientists and self-appointed experts who present themselves as being scientists.
Undeterred by past experience – smoking does kill! – and by the debunking of their “alternative” facts, both – corporations and the Republican Party – are on course to weaken science and thereby damaging the health of everyone, says David Michaels in The Triumph of Doubt – Dark Money and the Science of Deception.
In a political system that is defined by campaign financing and corporate money, the missing link between corporations and the Republican Party on the one side and science that can be corrupted, is Dark Money.
In a nutshell, dark money is corporate spending that influences, for example, elections (direct dark money) or public debates and science (indirect dark money). Crucial for dark money is that the source of dark money is not disclosed to voters and the public – not even by the Republican Party.
Some non-profit organizations – camouflages corporations or corporate interests via astroturfing, for example – spend dark money on election campaigns and issues of public interest without disclosing who the donors are. Whether hidden or not so hidden, some organizations receive almost unlimited donations from corporations and individuals like the Koch brothers.
Dark money allows corporations to influence democratic decision making, public debate, and even science while nobody knows exactly who owes whom, a favor. Voters and the public in general are kept in the dark about the connections between corporate donor and science. This is particularly evident when favors are paid back in the form of, for example, so-called “scientific” support for the right-wing zeal.
Yet, The Merchants of Doubt also operate the other way around. Whether it’s the tobacco industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the fast food industry, the sugar industry, or the fossil fuel industry, corporate and right-wing interests have repeatedly sought to attack and discredit scientific findings.
Dark money also allows corporations, for example, to hire useful idiots called “experts” who produce impressive-looking crypto-scientific reports issued to the public. Yet, they also publish the results of their well-(corporate)-financed studies.
Often enough, these appear in so-called peer reviewed scientific journals. It is not unusual to see that the peer review process boils down to an old-boys’-network of – quite regularly – middle-aged white men.
As the term “peer review” indicate, these – always framed as “independent” – reviews are done by peers (read: friends, mates, old boys, or worse: hired guns). Simply put, some academic articles are produced inside the corporate-financed science machine. They cook the books. It is camouflaged as a peer review process, while in reality, it follows what has been called, The Science for Profit Model.
And just in case the first recipe doesn’t pan out with the desired results for those who pay for the show, corporate dark money simply finances and commissions a new study. The motto is, let’s try again.
Through external (read: corporate) funding, not just science is manipulated but also what is researched – the very issues that come up and those that go down – as well. This kicks in long before any research project comes into being – or not.
The very same process can, of course, also be used for the manufacturing of doubt in non-corporately- funded science that – more often than not – delivers results that can challenge corporations.
Perhaps this propaganda strategy is applied ever since Silent Spring. In this case, the main propaganda goal is the manufacturing of uncertainty. The playbook for this was applied to tobacco and asbestos. Today, this is applied to global warming.
Dark money seeks to prevent the science of global warming to come to the fore. It needs – by definition – to hide what these mercenary scientists and the firms that hire them are doing.
Given the power and finance behind this propaganda operation, it is not surprising to see that globally, those who support the regulation of corporations based on science are challenged and disputed. Studies in animals are deemed irrelevant, scientific data are dismissed as not representative, and exposure of data are discredited as unreliable.
Today, we know that the strategy of the systematic manufacturing of doubt has worked wonders as a public relations tool. Under the ideology of neoliberalism, it has delayed the regulation of smoking costing millions of lives, and it is about preventing the regulation on global warming costing us life on earth – as we know it.
Corporate public relation (read: propaganda) is acutely aware of what they do when admitting, doubt is our product … it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.
Camouflaged by the ideology of what today is called corporate social responsibility, already in 1953, for example, a determined pro-cigarette public relation campaign sought to assure the unsuspecting public that – just as what the cigarette manufacturers told us, public health is paramount.
The PR strategy of corporations includes, of course, that manufacturers never failed to remind everyone that some people who get lung cancer never smoked, and most smokers never develop lung cancer. And they can produce studies to back this up even those published in peer-reviewed academic journals – which are, in turn, also big business.
Furnished with their very own studies – always conducted by “independent” research institutions – corporations have gone well beyond simply funding researchers and putting out press releases. Corporations have become sophisticated in the promotion of its messages.
Yet, behind all this runs the secret script of what is known as regulatory or industry capture of state agencies in charge of regulating corporations and products. At times it is enough to, at least, capture a sizable number of its staff working in government agencies.
Furnished with very generous pro-business (de)regulation, Big Pharma not just pays medical doctors to say nice things and finances pro-pharma research, it also, as the Opioid Scandal shows, created a three-front campaign by opioid producers targeting regulators, physicians, and the public.
It was set up to manipulate existing science and to hire so-called key opinion leaders (a common PR idea) and influencers to promote their products. The system worked beautifully – they got rich. And their propaganda broadcasted by opinion leaders camouflaged the entire project. This sort of propaganda often runs less on accidental misinformation but more on deliberate disinformation.
A textbook example of disinformation propaganda was once delivered by none other than corporate PR giant Hill & Knowlton. The same public relations firm that wheeled out the infamous Kuwaiti girl who helped engineer the Iraq war for no weapons of mass destruction.
Some of those who got rich are the Sacklers and their acquisition, Purdue. Not their pharmaceutical research but their advertising and marketing has made them multi-millionaires. But that was just the beginning. Not much later, they became billionaires. Within a few short years of OxyContin’s introduction, annual sales reached $1 billion. By 2010, it was a $3 billion drug. This is how capitalism works.
Of course, the wealth generated by opioids isn’t limited just to Purdue and its corporate interests. Some of the biggest Big Pharma corporations – e.g. Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals also sells opioids, as well as Teva, and Allergan – have profited from the massive growth in opioid sales.
Beyond the cold and hard, and at times, sobering facts about capitalism and Big Pharma and that opioids have killed tens of thousands and destroyed the lives of thousands more, lurks the profit motive.
Handsome profits – euphemistically camouflaged as shareholder value – have decimated families and whole communities. Pharma corporations are responsible for the first drop in US life expectancy in more than two decades.
In the US, overdoses involving opioids – licit and illicit – had killed 42,000 people in 2016. That number jumped to almost 48,000 people in 2017. Meanwhile, Purdue’s market value stands at $8.3bn. Bingo! Capitalism works for some – while others die.
Purdue’s corporate public relation has been successful in its marketing strategy and in the fruitful indoctrination of the medical profession – never mind all that talk of professionalism, business ethics, and corporate social responsibility.
Camouflaged by business ethics and professionalism, Purdue – just like many others – were able to keep evidence of the growing addiction under wraps. In one case, a “drug went up from $13.50 a tablet to $750 – overnight”.
This is the beauty of neoliberalism, the free market, and rampant deregulation (read: pro-business regulation). Even more sweet is the fact that under George Bush, Ed Foulke and Elaine Chao – later the Secretary of Transportation under Donald Trump – had embraced neoliberalism’s anti-regulatory zeal stopping OSHA’s health and safety work on new safety standards that would have protected workers from toxic exposures.
Unsurprisingly, Trump made an ideological calculation declaring that his White House is primarily interested in deregulation. Under Trump, virtually every health standard OSHA proposed was met with identical claims that it was unnecessary, infeasible, and would cost more than estimated.
None of those claims has proved to be true. The eternal motto of the Republican Party and neighbouring neoliberal demagogues is, never let the facts or science get into the way of a good ideology.