The premise of Miller and Dinan's book, laid out in the Introduction, is that PR was created to "take the risk" out of democracy. They point out that PR is overwhelmingly carried out for vested interests, mostly corporations, and that it is not open and transparent about its means or its clients. In its drive to persuade the people that the corporate interest is identical with the public interest, it relies on misinformation, lies, and dirty tricks. One common tactic is the "third-party" technique, in which seemingly independent people or organizations are used to spread a corporate message. The third parties do not disclose their funding or affiliations, and much of the public (and, I'd add, much of the media) has a "blind spot" that prevents them from looking behind the mouthpiece to the source.

Miller and Dinan hope that their book will shine a light into some of the dark corners of covert corporate influence. To that end, it brings together 16 chapters by different writers and activists describing some of the ways in which corporations have deceptively used PR and spin to subvert democracy and work against the public interest. Some of these are summarized below:

***David Miller tells the story of how industry interests, with their friends in government, twisted and tried to discredit research casting doubt on the food safety of farmed Scottish salmon. The research found that the salmon contained dangerously high levels of toxic PCBs, but the message that reached the public after the corporate spin doctors had done their job was that the salmon was perfectly safe to eat.

*** In his chapter, "Biotech's Fake Persuaders", GM Watch's Jonathan Matthews show how corporate interests are using the poor and disenfranchised as fronts to push the pro-GMO message.

***Andy Rowell recounts how oil company Exxon paid lobby groups, think-tanks and front organizations (which did not disclose their corporate affiliations and funding) to cast doubt on manmade climate change, thus disrupting the formation of coherent government policy to combat it. Several of these organizations, including the Institute of Economic Affairs and the International Policy Network, will be familiar to GM Watch subscribers as also having promoted GMOs.

***Olivier Hoedeman tells how Brussels is packed with over 15,000 corporate lobbyists who influence and even write EU policy on matters that affect us all, but who do not have to disclose details of their funding or activities.

***William Clark gives his account of how from the mid-1980s, the US led a concerted campaign to promote a pro-US, pro-corporate orientation among policy makers in Britain. The campaign involved the setting up of supposedly independent think-tanks that co-opted the principles and rhetoric of the political Left for US and corporate interests. These think-tanks pushed neoconservative free market policies into the traditionally socialist Labour Party. They did an effective job in filleting out Labour's old Left sympathies, to such an extent that before the 1997 election, British voters were treated to the sight of "New Labour" leading lights reassuring the CEOs of major corporations that a Labour government would not rock the boat for big business. The right-wing co-option of Labour created a situation in which British voters have a false choice between one lot of neocons or the other lot of neocons (my conclusion, not Clark's).

Despite such fascinating material, Miller and Dinan's book is a bit of a curate's egg, good in parts but... In some places, for instance, it seems that both the books' sociologist editors and the publisher's in-house editors could have worked harder to bring clarity to over-complex passages. Also, while some of the articles are impeccably referenced (stand up, Miller, Matthews and Rowell), there are some serious omissions which the editors should have picked up on. A case in point is Clark's assertion that Shell is "a major Demos funder". This is sufficiently controversial to deserve a reference.

I also found that one or two of the chapters raised more questions than they seemed to answer. In Lubbers' chapter, for instance, we're told that even after the man who infiltrated CAAT had been exposed as a paid spy, he was still able to go on working for the Disarm DSEi campaign. There's an obvious question here, but seemingly, it wasn't asked. This chapter also left me wanting more information and advice from the spied-upon NGOs themselves. Presumably, they learned bitter lessons from the experience, but we are not told what they are. This would be useful to know since, as Lubbers notes, an all-too-common response to the possibility of infiltration is paralysis.

These are, however, relatively minor cavils given the scope and depth of the investigations carried out by the writers of this book. Without their painstaking research, much of what is detailed here would have remained, as it was always intended to be, hidden from public view.

Miller and Dinan conclude their book by calling for an end to privileged access to government by corporate interests. To this end, they want legislation enforcing transparency for lobby groups of all persuasions. Corporations would have to declare which think-tanks, institutes, and front groups they fund. "Third-party" lobbying would be made illegal. Exposing the truth about corporate spin and deception, point out Miller and Dinan, will roll back corporate power and lead to democratic renewal.
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Claire Robinson is an editor at GM Watch.  Original version here