Journalist Amy Westervelt has spent years documenting how the oil industry used public relations, think tanks and university partnerships to shape public opinion and influence public policy.
But in a recent interview on the “Real Organic Podcast,” Westervelt said she increasingly sees many of those same tactics in industrial agriculture.
“I am finding so many parallels in the agriculture space,” said Westervelt, host of the investigative podcast “Drilled” and author of the forthcoming book, “Brought to You By: Inside Big Oil’s Total Information War.”
She said large agricultural companies, like their counterparts in the fossil fuel industry, have established research centers that help generate academic support for policies that benefit industry.
“It’s like they need a certain amount of … credible information from academics to be able to make the policy argument for certain things,” she said.
Throughout the interview, Westervelt suggested these efforts are part of a broader corporate strategy designed not simply to influence markets, but to shape public debate before policy decisions are ever made.
‘Corporations start to have multiple problems with democracy’
Westervelt traced the origins of modern corporate public relations to the early 20th century, arguing that growing public scrutiny prompted businesses to rethink how they protected their interests.
“Corporations start to have multiple problems with democracy” as new laws, investigative reporting and broader voting rights threatened business interests, she said. That’s when you see “the birth of corporate PR.”
Rather than simply selling products, corporations sought to mold public opinion before voters could demand greater oversight, according to Westervelt.
“These companies need a way to shape the information that voters are getting in a way that will make them more likely to vote against their own interests and in the interests of the corporations that have a lot at stake,” she said.
Over time, industries refined those tactics, using increasingly sophisticated methods “to try to shape the context that they’re operating in and to deal with … ‘creeping democracy,’” Westervelt said.
Hellbound and Down 