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In the early 1970s, a group of medical researchers decided to study an unusual question. How would a medical audience respond to a lecture that was completely devoid of content, yet delivered with authority by a convincing phony?
To find out, the authors hired a distinguished-looking actor and gave him the name Dr. Myron L. Fox. They fabricated an impressive CV for Dr. Fox and billed him as an expert in mathematics and human behavior. Finally, they provided him with a fake lecture composed largely of impressive-sounding gibberish, and had him deliver the lecture wearing a white coat to three medical audiences under the title "Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education." At the end of the lecture, the audience members filled out a questionnaire.
The responses were overwhelmingly positive. The audience members described Dr. Fox as "extremely articulate" and "captivating." One said he delivered "a very dramatic presentation." After one lecture, 90 percent of the audience members said they had found the lecture by Dr. Fox "stimulating." Over all, almost every member of every audience loved Dr. Fox's lecture, despite the fact that, as the authors write, it was delivered by an actor "programmed to teach charismatically and nonsubstantively on a topic about which he knew nothing."
Examples of sophisticated disinformation are more difficult to identify because they are more effectively disguised, but they have been exposed more than once in the post cold war era.
Today, well-funded, highly-organized disinformation and misinformation operations are using similar tactics throughout government, academia and all facets of media. The only difference is that many of the players are credentialed propagandists, not actors, although many of them should win academy awards for the amount of myths they are attempting to pass off as facts.
Bought and paid for propaganda is now masquerading as scientific progress. The pursuit of truth in modern scientific query is marred by greed, profit and only a concept of truth built on the assumption of an unexamined good.
The US Government and industries continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to promote propaganda (now called "social marketing"), assigning government- or industry-funded propagandists (also known as social marketers, social scientists, and thought leaders) who use their academic credentials and smiles to promote a product or idea that you don't want. Websites like Wikipedia and CDC.gov are largely controlled by faceless and nameless industry and government propagandists who ensure that what's posted does not challenge the industry or governmental dogma.
It strokes your narcissism," says Erick Turner, a psychiatrist at the Oregon Health and Science University. There is the money, of course, which is no small matter. Some high-level KOLs (key opinion leaders) make more money consulting for the pharmaceutical industry than they get from their academic institutions. But the real appeal of being a KOL is that of being acknowledged as important. That feeling of importance comes not so much from the pharmaceutical companies themselves, but from associating with other academic luminaries that the companies have recruited. Academic physicians talk about the experience of being a KOL the way others might talk about being admitted to a selective fraternity or an exclusive New York dance club. No longer are you standing outside the rope trying to catch the doorman's eye, waiting hungrily to be admitted. You are one of the chosen. "You get to hobnob with these mega-thought leaders and these aspiring thought leaders," Turner says. "They make you feel like you're special."
Turner is a former drug reviewer for the Food and Drug Administration. He worked at the FDA for three years, after six years as a fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health. In 2003, after taking an academic position at Oregon, he began giving talks on behalf of pharmaceutical companies--Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, and Bristol-Myers Squibb. "I left the FDA, and I felt kind of frustrated that I had all this knowledge about how clinical trials work, and I felt there wasn't much of anything I could do with it," he says. "It felt like a demotion going from bossing big pharma around, where you tell them to jump and they ask how high, and then suddenly you are way on the other end of the food chain.
The Evolution of Social Marketing
According to social marketing expert Nedra Kline Weinreich, propaganda in the health communications field has rapidly changed since 1970. It has evolved from a one-dimensional reliance on public service announcements to a more sophisticated approach which draws from successful techniques used by commercial marketers, termed "social marketing." Rather than dictating the way that information is to be conveyed from the top-down, public health professionals now claim to listen to the needs and desires of the target audience themselves, and build the program from there. This focus on the "consumer" involves in-depth research and constant re-evaluation of every aspect of the program. In fact, "research" and evaluation together form the very cornerstone of the social marketing process.
Social marketing was "born" as a discipline in the 1970s, when Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman realized that the same marketing principles that were being used to sell products to consumers could be used to "sell" ideas, attitudes and behaviors. As described in their report Social Marketing: An Approach to Planned Social Change (1971), social marketing ostensibly "seeks to influence social behaviors not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society." This technique has been used extensively in international health programs, especially for HIV, vaccine programs, and is used in the United States for such diverse topics as drug abuse, heart disease, organ donation, and global warming. Although drug companies generate billions of dollars in annual profits, vaccines remain so dangerous that pharmaceutical lobbyists convinced Congress to indemnify manufacturers when they kill, cripple, and maim thousands of Americans each year. So while manufacturers claim to make these products for the public good, there is little evidence that the vaccine industry benefits anyone but the industry itself.
Weinreich presents one example of a Marketing Mix Strategy for a breast cancer screening campaign for older women, where funding would come from governmental grants, such as from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), or the local health department, foundation grants or an organization like the American Cancer Society. Most Americans have no idea that all three of these organizations are funded directly or indirectly by the pharmaceutical industry, and social marketers have no responsibility to confirm the reliability and credibility of the products or services they promote.
So while Merck may have paid $4 billion to settle thousands of lawsuits related to drugs that kill, cripple, and injure thousands, social marketers are tasked with promoting these reckless campaigns, relying heavily on entrepreneurial researchers (i.e. "junk scientists") and bearing no responsibility when their campaigns and products harm consumers.
It is an article of faith among pharmaceutical executives that KOL's are a critical part of any marketing plan. According to a 2004 study of the 15 largest pharmaceutical companies, the industry spends just under a third of its total marketing expenditures on KOL's. So important are KOL's that new businesses have emerged solely to recruit, train, and manage them. The reason they are so important is their role in managing the discourse around a given product. Equal parts scientific study, commercial hype, and academic buzz, this discourse will begin years before a drug or device is brought onto the market, and will usually continue at least until the patent expires. If a company can manage the discourse effectively, it can establish the desperate need for its drug, spin clinical-trial results to its advantage, downplay the side effects of a drug, neutralize its critics, and play up the drug's off-label uses. (Drug companies are prohibited from promoting a drug for conditions other than the ones for which the FDA has approved it, but because these off-label uses are often highly profitable, many companies have found creative ways of getting around the prohibition.) Virtually all physicians are on the receiving end of this communication, but only a relatively few deliver it. If the industry can influence those few, then it can also influence the rest.
Organized and Professional Disinformation Operations
Well-funded and highly-organized disinformation operations are in full-swing throughout the internet. From social media to forums and comment boards. Even professional websites that have only one purpose: Defame, distract, and destroy the truth.
However organized, the tactics are very predictable in a world filled with lies and half-truths. This, sadly, includes every day news media, one of the worst offenders with respect to being a source of disinformation.
Disinformation campaigns are launched against those seeking to uncover and expose the truth and/or the conspiracy.
Websites such as Quackwatch.com, skeptic.org.uk, skepticblog.com, sciencebasedmedicine.org, skepticalraptor.com, debunkingdenialism.com, geneticliteracyproject.org among many others, exist only to promote synthetic and organic disinformation on almost any topic that does not concur with mainstream thought.
They consist of media-savvy corporate propagandists and pseudo-journalists who front the opinions and positions of chemical corporations and pharmacetical companies while they pretend to be independent journalists interested in science.
People can be bought, threatened, or blackmailed into providing disinformation, so even "good guys" can be suspect in many cases.
A rational person participating as one interested in the truth will evaluate that chain of evidence and conclude either that the links are solid and conclusive, that one or more links are weak and need further development before conclusion can be arrived at, or that one or more links can be broken, usually invalidating (but not necessarily so, if parallel links already exist or can be found, or if a particular link was merely supportive, but not in itself key) the argument. The game is played by raising issues which either strengthen or weaken (preferably to the point of breaking) these links. It is the job of a disinfo artist to interfere with these evaluation... to at least make people think the links are weak or broken when, in truth, they are not... or to propose alternative solutions leading away from the truth. Often, by simply impeding and slowing down the process through disinformation tactics, a level of victory is assured because apathy increases with time and rhetoric.
It would seem true in almost every instance, that if one cannot break the chain of evidence for a given solution, revelation of truth has won out. If the chain is broken either a new link must be forged, or a whole new chain developed, or the solution is invalid an a new one must be found... but truth still wins out. There is no shame in being the creator or supporter of a failed solution, chain, or link, if done with honesty in search of the truth. This is the rational approach. While it is understandable that a person can become emotionally involved with a particular side of a given issue, it is really unimportant who wins, as long as truth wins. But the disinfo artist will seek to emotionalize and chastise any failure (real or false claims thereof), and will seek by means of intimidation to prevent discussion in general.
It is the disinfo artist and those who may pull their strings (those who stand to suffer should the crime be solved) MUST seek to prevent rational and complete examination of any chain of evidence which would hang them. Since fact and truth seldom fall on their own, they must be overcome with lies and deceit. Those who are professional in the art of lies and deceit, such as the intelligence community and the professional criminal (often the same people or at least working together), tend to apply fairly well defined and observable tools in this process. However, the public at large is not well armed against such weapons, and is often easily led astray by these time-proven tactics. Remarkably, not even media and law enforcement have NOT BEEN TRAINED to deal with these issues. For the most part, only the players themselves understand the rules of the game.
Sources:
The Secret Lives of Big Pharma's 'Thought Leaders'
Welcome to The Propagandists
Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation
A Sophisticated Disinformation Operation
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