Behind Enemy Lines

public relations

by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton

The excerpts below are taken from a series of confidential "Update and Analysis" reports written for the Chlorine Chemistry Council by PR research firm Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin.

"They are taking us more seriously than we sometimes take ourselves," commented Charlotte Brody, a registered nurse and director of Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste. "I think of myself as jaded," Brody said after reviewing the leaked documents, "but it still takes my breath away to see a professional, totally amoral directive that editorial visits be done because the scientific information that Devra Lee Davis has is too dangerous to go unfiltered."

Brody was also struck by MBD's "recommendations that the chlorine industry should go to health groups and sign them up to defend the benefits of chlorine, without telling them what they are really signing up for, and before we can get to them and talk about how dioxins and other endocrine disrupters are harming their health. MBD doesn't suggest going out and talking about why dioxin isn't as dangerous as we say. Instead, it's a much more clever and insidious strategy, where they sign up people with cystic fibrosis to defend the benefits of chlorine chemistry by suggesting to them that without chlorine there will never be a cure for their disease. They don't even bring up dioxin, but they falsely suggest that we would bring an end to pharmaceutical research."

At the same time, Brody sees grounds for optimism in the fact that a corporate whistleblower had the courage to risk the consequences of releasing MBD's documents to the public. "Things like these documents appear because someone feels it's awful to walk around pretending it's just business. One of our hopes is that people aren't from cyborg land."