Front Groups: A History

The earliest documented example of a "front group" was the the work of Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud who is widely considered the "father of public relations." Bernays began working as a press agent for theatres, hotels and other businesses in 1913. At the time, he was editor of the Medical Review of Reviews, a monthly magazine owned by a college acquaintance. He discovered that the then-famous actor Richard Bennett was interested in producing a play titled "Damaged Goods," which Bernays described as "a propaganda play that fought for sex education." It discussed sexual topics, such as prostitution, that were considered unusually frank for their day. Bennett was afraid that the play would be raided by police, and he hired Bernays to prevent this from happening. Rather than arguing for the play on its merits, Bernays cleverly organized a group that he called the "Medical Review of Reviews Sociological Fund," inviting prominent doctors and members of the social elite to join. The organization's avowed mission was to fight venereal disease through education. Its real purpose was to make "Damaged Goods" acceptable to the public, and apparently the plan worked. The show went on as scheduled, with no interference from police.

"This was a pioneering move that is common today in the promotion of public causes -- a prestigious sponsoring committee," notes PR industry historian Scott Cutlip. "In retrospect, given the history of public relations, it might be termed the first effort to use the front or third party technique." It was a technique that Bernays would return to time and again, calling it "the most useful method in a multiple society like ours to indicate the support of an idea of the many varied elements that make up our society. Opinion leaders and group leaders have an effect in a democracy and stand as symbols to their constituency."

Bernays helped jump start sales of bacon, a breakfast rarity until the 1920s, by enlisting a prominent doctor to solicit fellow doctors' opinions on the health benefits of a hearty breakfast and by arranging to have famous figures photographed eating breakfasts of bacon and eggs. To sell bananas on behalf of the United Fruit Company, he launched the "celiac project," republishing and disseminating a 20-year-old medical paper which found that eating bananas cured children with celiac disease, a disorder of the digestive system.

"Mr. Bernays has … created more institutes, funds, institutions, and foundations than Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Filene together," observed the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, a nonprofit educational organization that flourished in the years following World War I. "Typical of them was the Temperature Research Foundation. Its stated purpose was 'to disseminate impartial, scientific information concerning the latest developments in temperature control as they affect the health, leisure, happiness, and economy of the American people.' A minor purpose -- so minor that rarely did Mr. Bernays remember even to mention it -- was to boost the sales of Kelvinator refrigerators, air-condition units, and electric stoves."

The tobacco industry, another early Bernays client, also relied heavily on expert testimonials to tout its products, recruiting opera singers and doctors to claim that cigarettes soothed the throat and aided digestion. Advertisements of this type became so ubiquitous that Bernays spoofed one of his industry rivals by creating a front group called the "Tobacco Society for Voice Culture" which mockingly claimed that its mission was to "establish a home for singers and actors whose voices have cracked under the strain of their cigarette testimonials."

The Third Man

Beginning during the buildup to the Second World War, front groups also were employed increasingly by extremist political parties, as a way of mainstreaming their political views. This practice continues today, but corporations and their public relations firms continue to be far the most common sponsors of front groups for the purpose of shaping public opinion.

A front group is an example of what is known in the PR trade as the "third party technique." The idea behind the term is that when one person (the "first party") wants to persuade someone else (the "second party") to believe or do something that benefits the first party, it helps if the message comes from a seemingly disinterested, independent source. As Daniel Edelman, the founder of Edelman PR Worldwide, has stated, "A third party endorsement can position a new brand so that it's poised for great success or, conversely, can blunt a serious problem before it gets out of hand and proves disastrous for a particular product or for a company overall."

Front groups constitute an attempt to manufacture a third party, creating the appearance of independence while in fact the so-called independent voice is actually beholden to some hidden or rarely-mentioned sponsor. How effective is this strategy? According to a survey commissioned by the Porter/Novelli PR firm, 89 percent of respondents consider "independent experts" a "very or somewhat believable source of information during a corporate crisis." Sometimes the technique is used to hype or exaggerate the benefits of a product. Other times it is used to create doubt about a product's hazards, or about criticisms that have been made of a company's business practices. You used to see this technique in its most obvious and crude form in the television commercials that featured actors in physicians' lab coats announcing that "nine out of ten doctors prefer" their brand of aspirin. But advertisements are obvious propaganda, and the third party technique in its more subtle forms is designed to prevent audiences from even realizing what they are experiencing. "The best PR ends up looking like news," bragged one public relations executive. "You never know when a PR agency is being effective; you'll just find your views slowly shifting."

From a PR point of view, the third party technique offers several advantages:

• It offers camouflage, helping to hide the vested interest that lurks behind a message. If Philip Morris were to come out itself and declare that "attorneys need to be stopped from suing tobacco companies," the message would be laughed into oblivion. Similar skepticism is bound to greet Bill Gates when he writes an editorial on his own behalf or a polluting company when it claims that pollution doesn't cause illness. Putting the same message in someone else's mouth gives it a credibility that it would not otherwise enjoy.
• It encourages conformity to a vested interest, while pretending to encourage independence. Sometimes, in fact, the message is designed to look like the very epitome of rebellion. Take, for example, a legendary publicity stunt orchestrated by Edward Bernays, which used suffragettes as third party proxies for the tobacco industry. In 1929, Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco company and charged with the task of persuading women to smoke -- an activity that was then considered "unfeminine" and socially unacceptable. Bernays set out to turn this liability into an advantage by establishing cigarettes as symbols of women's liberation. At his instigation, ten New York debutantes marched in the city's 1929 Easter Sunday parade, defiantly smoking cigarettes as a protest against women's inequality. Bernays dubbed it the "torches of liberty" brigade. "Front page stories in newspapers reported the freedom march in words and pictures," Bernays would recall later. "For weeks after the event, editorials praised or condemned the young women who had paraded against the smoking taboo." Women began lighting up in droves, and a few weeks later a Broadway theater let women inside its heretofore men's-only smoking room.
• It replaces factual discourse with emotion-laden symbolism. Sometimes the identity of the messenger becomes symbolically more important than the content of the message itself. Timber industry consultant Ron Arnold, who founded the "Wise Use" movement as a pseudo-grassroots campaign against environmentalism, explained the rationale behind his use of the third party technique: "The public is completely convinced that when you speak as an industry, you are speaking out of nothing but self-interest. The pro-industry citizen activist group is the answer to these problems. It can be an effective and convincing advocate for your industry. It can utilize powerful archetypes such as the sanctity of the family, the virtue of the close-knit community, the natural wisdom of the rural dweller... . And it can turn the public against your enemies... . I think you'll find it one of your wisest investments over time."

In 1994, Neal Cohen of the Washington-based PR and lobby firm, APCO and Associates, used similar reasoning at a conference organized by the Public Affairs Council, a trade association for some of the nation's top lobbyists. APCO was among the principal PR firms orchestrating the "tort reform" movement, which campaigns against "excessive" consumer liability lawsuits and is heavily financed by the insurance and tobacco industries. On the face of it, Cohen observed, tort reform is difficult to sell to the public. "It's not a very sexy issue," he said. "'Tort' to the average person is dessert, it isn't a legal principle." The whole purpose of tort reform, moreover, is to make it harder for everyday citizens to sue corporations. This is hardly the sort of cause that brings masses into the streets. In fact, he said, people would reject the tort reform movement out of hand if they knew that the insurance and tobacco companies were behind it. "We want to pass a bill in Mississippi," he said by way of example, "and we've got a problem: Our industry can't pass the bill. If the legislators know we're the only industry that wants this bill, it's an automatic killer. And just to make it a little more difficult, we've joined up with one other industry to fund this effort and they are worse than us. People dislike them more intensely and in fact they don't even have any facilities in the state of Mississippi, not to mention the product they manufacture. … In a tort reform battle, if State Farm is the leader of the coalition, you're not going to pass the bill, it's not credible. OK? Because it's so self-serving."

In order to give tort reform any credibility at all, APCO had to figure out a way to reframe the issue, which they did by tapping into the public's distaste for attorneys. "We built a coalition around the concept of 'lawsuit abuse,' " Cohen explained, "and we enlarged the scope of the concept so that people understood how it would affect their pocket book, how it would address their fear, how it would deal with their anger at the legal profession. ... Rule number one for me is stay away from substance. Don't talk about the details of legislation," he advised. "Talk about ... 'lawsuit abuse,' 'trial lawyer greed,' 'increasing jobs.' "

When building a coalition, Cohen advised, "you'd better have a committed leader, a spokesperson, and you'd better train that spokesperson, and it should only be one person. ... And if you can, find somebody who has stature and is not perceived as somebody who is typical. Somebody who ... has the stature with the legislators." If possible, the public should be brought in as well, but as props, not as participants. "We made sure that it was typical people mixed in with large employers and political contributors," he said. "We had 1,500 Mississippians mixed in with who our clients were. ... We had broadened the issue so it was identified ... with a much broader group, and it was focused in as a constituent grassroots issue." But appearances are one thing, reality another. "The problem with broad-based membership is -- don't confuse that with broad-based leadership," Cohen advised. "Broad-based membership is 'What does the public see?' 'What do the legislators see?' Decision-making is, you need a core group, three or so people, who have similar interests and are going to get the job done and not veer off." Other adornments, such as advertising and research-for-hire, help decorate the coalition tree. "We used every tactic we could think of to get a message out there," Cohen said. "We also used polls to get the media's attention. ... We did a research study using a local professor, we spent $5,000 on a study. ... It was to get the media's attention. ... We used television [ads] in part to get the media's attention. ... We also did billboards."

As this example illustrates, the creators of front groups often go to considerable effort to disguise or minimize public awareness of the identities of their sponsors. For this reason, it can be difficult to know when an organization is a front group. Hopefully, the articles and resources on this website can help.

Portions of this article are adapted from Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future, by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber.