TRUST US, WE'RE EXPERTS!: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Futures.

• Author: Dempsey, Joe
• Position: Review

TRUST US, WERE EXPERTS!: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Futures

by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

J. P. Tarcher, $24.95

In 1935, As CONGRESS BEGAN Investigating lung disease among workers digging silica at Hawk's Nest, W. Va., an organization known as the Air Hygiene Foundation emerged to question the disease's severity, suggesting that quack doctors who diagnosed workers with the disease deprived them of their only livelihood.

AHF's campaign, described by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber in Trust Us, We're Experts! How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With }3ur Future, succeeded on two levels. First, it downplayed silicosis so well that it has been until recently regarded as a disease of the past (even though the National Institute for National Safety and Health estimates that 100,000 workers are still at risk).

Secondly, since AHF appeared to be independent and scholarly but was actually funded by industry, it paved the way for what public relations professionals today call the third-party technique--funding a seemingly independent expert or nonprofit organization to dispute findings that may harm an industry.

Working from news reports, interviews, PR industry promotional materials, and many leaked internal documents, this follow-up to 1995's Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies, and the Public Relations Industry includes countless examples of the third-party technique influencing (distorting) debate on public issues ranging from bankruptcy reform and the Microsoft anti-trust case to the potential dangers of genetically modified foods.

But Potemkin nonprofits are only one problem. There's plenty of other biased and distorted information out there: The book includes tales of questionable scientific rebuttals and legitimate university scientists having to tailor--or bury--research to suit the ends of their corporate sponsors. Opposing a global warming treaty, Sen. Chuck Nagel (R-Neb.) cites the Oregon Petition, supposedly signed by 15,000 scientists skeptical of global warning's severity. To demonstrate how easily names could be added to the list, environmental activists added Dr. Red Wine, John Grisham, and Spice Gift Geri Halliwell.

Rampton and Stauber pay close attention to the interplay of media, corporations, the public, and to a lesser degree, the government. But since they write more to expose than to argue, they sometimes get a little too wrapped up in the tales they're exposing. The middle...