How to Research Front Groups

From Disinfopedia

PR Watch editors Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber have written several books about the public relations industry that can be helpful research sources, in particular Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry and Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future. The Center's website also contains searchable archives of PR Watch, daily news items dating back several years in our "Spin of the Day" section, and a public discussion forum.

The PR trade press is another good source for information. Leading publications include O'Dwyer's PR (www.odwyerpr.com), PR Week (www.prweek.com), and the Holmes Report (www.holmesreport.com). If you have access to Lexis/Nexis be sure to include PR trade publications in your search.

In addition to looking for information on specific companies and their PR firms, you can broaden your inquiry somewhat by finding out what trade associations and coalitions the companies belong to, e.g., the American Chemistry Council, Biotechnology Industry Organization, etc. Often PR initiatives for polluting industries are handled by their trade associations rather than by the companies directly. This gives the individual companies a layer of plausible deniability while enabling their trade associations to play hardball.

These are all avenues for getting at the behind-the-scenes aspects of your story. When talking about PR, there are always two things you want to look at:

1. the behind-the-scenes stage management and orchestration that the audience isn't intended to see, and
2. the onstage stuff intended for public consumption.

When you're looking at the onstage stuff, ask yourself, "Is this information accurate? Is this spokesperson who claims to be independent actually someone who was recruited by an industry with vested interests in the topic at hand?" If you find questionable statements, try going in through the front door and asking some probing questions. Trace statements and claims to their source.

If the topic you are studying involves cover-ups of environmental and public health risks, there may be trial lawyers who have gone after these companies with toxic tort litigation. Depending on the nature of the litigation, they may even have internal company documents that they are free to disclose. The following websites may also be useful for unmasking front groups and industry-sponsored organizations:

• The Internet Archive provides a way of finding web pages that have changed or disappeared:
• Chemical Industry Archives, a project of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), is a searchable collection of 37,000 pages of internal chemistry industry documents, plus reports written by the EWG detailing the industry's "high-stakes, high-priced public relations war against the American public."
• The National Institute on Money in State Politics maintains a database on campaign contributions at the state election level (not federal offices). Visitors can search across states and by issue as well as by candidate.
• Greenwash Information and Resources provides a list of anti-environmental front groups along with links to background information.
• GuideStar.org provides an online database with basic financial data, recent IRS tax statements and sometimes other information about more than 700,000 non-profit organizations.
• Integrity in Science, a project of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, maintains a database of scientists and non-profit organizations with ties to industry.
• MediaTransparency.orgmaintains online databases of people, recipients, and funders of the conservative movement. Their website has a nifty feature called the Fund-o-Meter, which lets you evaluate any web page on the internet against their databases for signs of bias.
• NSI-WHOIS Lookup can be used to find out who is sponsoring an internet domain name.    
• Search Systems maintains a website listing thousands of free, searchable public records databases.
• Legacy National Tobacco Documents Library. As part of the 1998 attorney generals' settlement with the tobacco industry, tobacco companies were required to create online repositories containing millions of pages of internal tobacco industry documents and to make those documents searchable by keywords including the names of any organizations or people that they mention. In addition to tobacco itself, these documents are a great place to look for information in general about people and organizations that front for industry. The Legacy National Tobacco Documents Library, which is hosted by the University of California, San Francisco, offers the most comprehensive single place to search tobacco documents. Separate websites also exist for each tobacco company, as well as for some of its front groups.
• Search PRSA's Past Winning Silver Anvil Awards. The Public Relations Society of America every year awards its Silver Anvils to companies and PR firms to "honor the very best in public relations practices." You can search past award-winning campaigns summaries written by entrants.