Industrial agriculture is increasingly adopting the same public relations, lobbying and information tactics long used by Big Oil, investigative journalist Amy Westervelt said on the “Real Organic Podcast.” Those strategies help corporations influence research, media and policy, making it easier to “shape the information that voters are getting,” she said.
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.
Media ‘not doing its job’ of holding powerful corporations to account
Think tanks have become one of industry’s most effective policy tools, according to Westervelt.
“They train the people who work there to go on TV shows and radio shows to get these particular talking points out,” she said.
Unlike registered lobbyists, many think tanks operate with little transparency, she added.
“These organizations have loads of money. They have a lot of influence, and they’re not really regulated in any way,” Westervelt said. “They’re pretty good at hiding who funds them.”
She said corporate influence doesn’t stop with think tanks. It also extends into universities, where industry funding can help shape the research that later informs public policy.
While much of her reporting has focused on fossil fuel companies, Westervelt said she increasingly sees similar patterns in industrial agriculture. She described the practice as a form of “pre-lobbying,” in which corporations cultivate the evidence needed to support future policy arguments.
As one example, Westervelt described speaking with a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after an oil company funded carbon capture research.
Researchers were invited to submit project proposals, but one scientist wanted to study “the potential health impacts” of carbon capture pipelines, including “what might happen if it leaks,” she said.
According to Westervelt, the principal investigator instead encouraged him to “look for a more positive project.”
Seemingly small decisions like these can gradually shape which questions get asked — and which never reach the public, she said.
“There’s so many little things like that happening all the time that are keeping … really important ideas just out of the … public square,” she said.
Westervelt said those information gaps are reinforced by powerful technology platforms and a media landscape that often fails to challenge corporate influence.
“You do have now tech companies working really in lock step with these big corporations, helping them to drown out everybody else,” she said. “Letting them juice the algorithm, spend a fortune on … advertising, and really drown out kind of anyone that doesn’t agree with them.”
Meanwhile, she added, “the media is not doing its job kind of holding the powerful to account. That’s just not a thing that is rewarded by newsrooms at this time.”
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