Booked on Planning

Dark PR

• Booked on Planning • Season 3 • Episode 22

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Could corporate disinformation be quietly steering our perceptions and political actions? Join us as we engage with Grant Ennis, the author of "Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Undermines Our Health and the Environment." Ennis sheds light on the sophisticated strategies corporations use to manipulate public narratives and divert attention from crucial political actions. We discuss how framing influences discourse and underscores the significance of organized political movements in driving genuine change, rather than being sidetracked by superficial solutions and the misleading promise of panacea frames.

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Stephanie Rouse:

you're listening to the booked on planning podcast, a project of the nebraska chapter of the american planning association. In each episode we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked on Planning. Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked on Planning. In this episode we talk with Grant Ennis about his book Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Undermines Our Health and the Environment. This book was an eye-opening read into the tricks and smokescreens put in place by companies that trickle down and impact how planners are able to create thriving communities.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Yes, it certainly was eye-opening, and once you learn about these different frames, you can't stop seeing them in everyday life. Unsurprisingly, corporations really know how to use these frames to distract the general public from advocating for real change, and it's pretty amazing how effective they are.

Stephanie Rouse:

Grant shows the nine devious frames through three areas transportation issues, diabetes and climate change. In each of these areas, he makes the argument that starting at the bottom, picking away at small changes or individually working towards change, is not effective. We need to work together and go for changing policy at the top level. This may seem like more work, with many individuals working together. It has more potential than individuals changing their own habits.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Just like anything, though right, we have to come together to let our governments know that we are no longer okay subsidizing corporate activities that actually hurt us. So let's get into our conversation with author Grant Ennis on his book Dark PR how Corporate Disinformation Undermines Our Health and Environment. Grant, welcome to the Booked on Planning podcast. We're happy to have you on to talk about your book, dark PR how Corporate Disinformation Undermines Our Health and the Environment.

Grant Ennis:

Thank, you very much for having me, Jennifer. Very good to be here with you. Health and the environment.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Thank you very much for having me, jennifer. Very good to be here with you. You start out your book by laying out the nine devious frames that corporations use to distract the general public. Can you start by explaining what a frame is in this context and how that impacts political action or, ultimately, inaction, potentially?

Grant Ennis:

Corporations use framing and frames in order to shape our discourse and the way we talk about things. So a very famous example of that could be like pro-choice or pro-life, accident versus crash or collision, climate change or global warming or any number of different kind of ways of talking about a given issue. So corporations will focus, group and actually get people to discuss and talk about these kinds of different ways of presenting information and narratives and then see which ways of talking about things lead to less or more political support for what they want or don't want, which allows them and enables them to influence our politics. Because if they can influence people the voters, the constituents to be less supportive and more supportive, that's going to shape then what politicians do in turn.

Stephanie Rouse:

So your first three set of frames are the big lies denialism, post-denialism and normalization. While reading these, it reminded me of the Vision Zero movement, especially because one of the three example issues is road safety. Under normalization, you note, the big lie is the transportation field framing road deaths as accidents, which you just mentioned, and this language is shifting, with the Vision Zero movement and the campaigns calling out this as being a misframing of the issue and instead using the term crashes. Do you see this as a step in the right direction or are we still missing the mark?

Grant Ennis:

I think it's a great step in the term crashes. Do you see this as a step in the right direction or are we still missing the mark? I think it's a great step in the right direction. It's probably one of the best examples we have, not just in planning and in road safety and in looking at cars, but across all different kinds of areas. It's probably the best example we have of an activist movement really shaping the narrative.

Grant Ennis:

For the most part, the word accident is disappearing from the way that people that work in this space talk about crashes because we now call them crashes. We know from research from people like Peter Norton that the word accident was something that was introduced into the way we talk about crashes in the early 1900s by the automobile industry. At the time people were calling them motor murderers and all of these other kind of really extreme names for crashes, and the automobile industry worked with newspapers around the country to get people to call them accidents to make them normalized. We've seen that when people use the word accident rather than crash, people are less likely to be politically involved. So the campaign to get people to stop saying accident, to start saying crash more often has really been very successful. I know many people still call them accidents, of course, but we've done a really really pretty good job in this community of changing our language and, yeah, I think it is a really good step in the right direction.

Jennifer Hiatt:

The second set of frames you discuss you label as the panacea frames silver boomerangs, magic and the treatment trap. These are all somewhat more solutions-oriented frames that are supposed to make people feel like we can do both. We can both advocate for change and cure diabetes. But you point out that political will is a zero-sum game and we can't normally just do both. So can you explain what these frames are and how they limit our ability to impact the political change?

Grant Ennis:

Yeah. So take, for example, autonomous cars versus reducing subsidies for driving. Many people don't know, but we subsidize driving to an enormous extent. I don't have the numbers in front of me right now, but it sometimes reaches up to like 50% of the cost of driving is subsidized by government. And if you're thinking, how do we influence policies to end those driving subsidies, how do we get government to stop doing that? Well, we need an organized political movement and we need that movement to really focus on that change that we want to see. We need that movement to really focus on that change that we want to see.

Grant Ennis:

Now, if the automobile industry or the road lobby recognized that, what they would then do is try to undermine that right.

Grant Ennis:

They wouldn't want this political movement to be undercutting their business model so they might introduce some kind of magical frame so like don't worry about subsidies for driving, we can make it so that driving won't be a problem, you know it won't kill as many people because we're going to introduce autonomous cars, you know. So autonomous cars would be like the, what I would call the magic framing for reducing road death, and the automobile industry would really, really promote it in order to undermine an effort to reduce those driving subsidies. Now you might have somebody say well, why can't we do both? When you have framing, when you have politics, you have a situation where the decision is zero sum You're either going to reduce those driving subsidies or you're not. And so if you introduce autonomous cars into the discourse, it means you're going to be demanding action to reduce those driving subsidies less. That's what we see from framing research. So anytime you hear we can just do both, what that's going to lead to is less of what you want, less of what's actually really important.

Jennifer Hiatt:

So I finished this book about a month and a half ago and once you read it and you've laid it out so clearly, it's so hard to be able to look past the panacea frames. Now, Every time somebody starts talking about politics, you can identify it immediately. You're like oh, I see what you were talking about, Grant.

Grant Ennis:

Yeah, it's very hard to unsee this stuff, absolutely.

Stephanie Rouse:

So, speaking of organized political movements, planners often struggle with positive change, like Complete Streets campaigns, because we just lack the public support, and it's pretty limited. How can we combat the dark PR that's behind much of this pushback by road lobbyists to shed light on the true issues and the need for change?

Grant Ennis:

In order to respond to all of this framing, all this effort by industry to undercut our efforts for complete streets or other efforts, I think we need to do more to reduce the propaganda out of industry. I think we need to reduce the amount that these kinds of narratives are being amplified, and part of that is that right now we have a lot of stuff legal that shouldn't be legal. We have a lot of kind of stuff legal that shouldn't be legal. We have a lot of kind of lobbying that just shouldn't be legal. But we also subsidize this lobbying and we subsidize this propaganda. So all of the billboards from the automobile industry that are all around the United States and other countries, those are subsidized, those are being written off as operational expenses and they're tax deductible. It shouldn't be tax deductible for people to do PR campaigns against the public health of, like, the American people or people in any country. It's incredibly counterintuitive and unjust and just wrong upstream and really do more to regulate what is effectively lobbying, like indirect lobbying through the constituency. We shouldn't allow for propaganda just to be out there like that.

Grant Ennis:

Secondly, I think we can do a lot more to focus our efforts. We can focus a lot more on driving. I think we focus a lot on cars, but if cars just existed as something that people drove in races or something and nothing more, we wouldn't really have a problem with it. The problem is really driving. Todd Littman, who's up in Vancouver, does a really good I believe he's in Vancouver does a really great job of talking about vehicle miles traveled or vehicle kilometers traveled quite a lot and I think we can do a lot more to focus on the incentives for vehicle kilometers traveled. And the people that are working to prevent highway construction around the world preventing high-speed road construction I think are really doing a great job of that. What is the name of the organization? I believe it's the Freeway Fighters Network, but there's a couple of really good organizations that are doing great work to really focus on the things that will work very well to achieve change, and I think we need to see more of that.

Jennifer Hiatt:

One of your examples of shifting the blame from corporations to individuals was the Keep America Beautiful campaign. Obviously, I was very familiar with the Keep America Beautiful campaign, but I actually did not have any idea that that media campaign was originally financed by some of our biggest single serving package producers. And this is just one way that PR can spin a story, shifting blame from corporations to individuals. And we see it all the time. You're supposed to be the change you want to see in the world, which I'm not saying you shouldn't but that's not really probably going to fix the root problem, as you were talking about earlier. We're subsidizing actions that we should not be, so why is this such an effective frame?

Grant Ennis:

I think that the individualized framing from the Keep America Beautiful campaign or for the Nut Behind the Wheel campaign or the carbon footprint, all of these individualized narratives are probably one of the best of the techniques used by industry to undermine political will for meaningful action.

Grant Ennis:

The lean in the famous lean in thing that we've been telling women that they need to do. This narrative has been found, through really good research, to reduce women's likelihood to fight for political change. The more we tell women they just need to lead in, the less likely they think we need government action for equality and the more likely they think women other women just need to stand up and speak up louder in meetings and then, all of a sudden, we'll have equal pay. I mean, it's shocking. And we have the same kinds of research for other issue areas. We know that the carbon footprint leads to less support for political action on climate. The more people hear individualized narratives about road death, the less likely they are to demand complete streets or even to think that they're acceptable. This framing is excellent and used by almost every industry for a long time, and it's something we need to do a lot more to push back on, I think.

Stephanie Rouse:

Yeah, along those lines. You say in the book that collective action is our ethical obligation, but that it's not the same as individual action on the same issue. So a bunch of us making the choice to bike to work rather than drive isn't actually moving the needle, and I'd always thought that, you know, if we could just get a critical mass of people cycling to work, then that'll raise the issue to our local governments, who will then fund more on-street bike infrastructure and help push that forward. But it's not the case. Can you expand a little more on why individual actions aren't the way forward?

Grant Ennis:

Yeah. So I like to distinguish between aggregate action, or what I call aggregate action, and collective action. So collective action is when people organize into groups and then those organized groups demand political action. That's collective action. It's the idea that groups of people are more than just the sum of their parts. Aggregate action is a bit different. No-transcript. True.

Grant Ennis:

You imagine a bunch of I don't know Germans 2,000 years ago trying to defend themselves against the Romans and you imagine they said to themselves you know what would be great to make sure that the Romans don't conquer us. Why don't we divide? We can call it divide and defend. You know like that would be ridiculous. You know, obviously, that the famous catchphrase is divide and conquer, used by the Romans to divide up the Germans. When you don't coordinate, when you don't organize, when you don't develop structures to your organization in order to then take that organization forward to achieve change, you're just a bunch of isolated actors in aggregate and you're not ever going to have the power to really achieve change. You're just a bunch of isolated actors in aggregate and you're not ever going to have the power to really achieve change. We know that. We know.

Grant Ennis:

I think the first critical mass was in San Francisco? I believe no, I probably have that wrong, but San Francisco definitely had a very early critical mass and it didn't really have excellent bike infrastructure for a very long time. I don't know if it does today. I don't think it's going to be comparing to the Netherlands or something like that. These places where you see critical mass or where I've seen it or heard of it, you don't see a lot of great bike infrastructure. You look at, like the Netherlands, you look at other places that have really excellent bike infrastructure. Now Paris, for example, they have lots of people riding bikes which they didn't used to see before that infrastructure was put in place.

Jennifer Hiatt:

So, and speaking of that collective action, in the book you identify seven elements of successful past movements deployed to create political change. So can you break down how that model moves from the aggregate to collective process or collective action?

Grant Ennis:

People need to organize. In order to organize, they need to trust each other. So that's the first thing that I say, that people really need to see. The second thing that needs to happen is groups need to form. So people that trust each other form these kinds of small, member-led, self-funded groups. Those groups fund coalitions. Those coalitions come together in alliances, those alliances come together in movements and then those movements have very subsidies.

Grant Ennis:

And we demand it now, you know, very explicit, very clear, very concrete In the climate change now, these kinds of large demands, while obviously good things are not going to lead us towards anything tangible, it's not giving us some kind of immediate way forward. So then the final seventh element is political will. The moment that we can achieve that to use the phrase you used, stephanie, critical mass of political will that's when we really see that change happen. To kind of put it more concretely, I like to just say that we need to organize and demand change. So instead of seven, we could say there's two big, high level items we need to be organized and we need to be specific in our political demands.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I think it's interesting that the core requirement of that is that we trust each other, because in today's society, every action you see is meant to diminish trust, like when you watch a video on TikTok or whatever you know. You hear one side and then immediately the next side's like no, you're a liar, that's not right, this is right. So how do we push through that, just to get to the trust level?

Grant Ennis:

I think that's the really big question. I think in places that are low density and that people don't walk very much, that people have to drive to get everywhere, it's really quite tough daily and regular basis going to meetings, getting involved in community projects, going to parties. More meeting a lot more people in conditions that would allow for friendships to grow. It's tough. These kinds of places rural areas, but even more so suburban areas fully incentivize people to not trust one another, to not come together. In those contexts it's really difficult.

Grant Ennis:

I think the same recommendation is true, though, even if you're in a better built environment. The solution really needs to be meet more people, interact with more people, get to know more human beings and then, from there, either allow yourself to be organized with other people are pulling you into things, or rope other people into the cause. Pull people together to have regular meetings either around a certain cause or around a common concern that you might have, or just to get together and to form a political base to identify and discuss these issues, if you want, and then later take some kind of action.

Stephanie Rouse:

So I'm wrapping up one of my classes that I teach here at the University of Nebraska called Community in the Future, and we basically get in throughout the course of the semester into the topic that you just described of communities that are spread out, very suburban, where you're not interacting with your neighbors, are really poor at creating the sense of community and you're not able to bump into your neighbors as you're walking to get groceries or just wandering around your neighborhood, that you're kind of isolated in your vehicle and so there's less opportunity to build those connections. And then in the book you point out that this is a problem that's little known but has been documented for quite a while now.

Grant Ennis:

Why do you think that is called the Big Myth? She'd previously written a book called Merchants of Doubt, which is very good, very important book, but her new book, the Big Myth the full title is the Big Myth how American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. Documents how industry efforts over the last, say, 150 years have worked to promote the idea that private business is better for us than a strong government, that libertarian, neoliberal, right-wing values libertarianism especially are core to American identity. And one of the ways that they did that was by financing a television show called Little House on the Prairie, which some of you may know. Maybe younger people might not know about. It's a show, as the title describes, about a family living alone in a house on a prairie, but the key word is really like alone and with the prairie around them, so very low density. This is a family that doesn't need to call the plumber, it doesn't need to call an electrician, they don't need to buy anything to really get by. They can grow all their own food, they can completely engage society without the government existing to help them.

Grant Ennis:

And this show, this Little House on the Prairie, and other concurrent efforts that were going on in the same time built up this idea that low density housing is good. I mean, I'm now extending on the book's arguments, but it definitely made this seem as a good thing. So industry used this kind of what I would call post-denialist framing to show low density living as really healthy and happy. I don't know to what extent it was invented by industry, but I'm sure it was amplified by it. The idea of the American dream of being the low density house, the low density neighborhood, the single family home with the white picket fence, later with the car, of course, I think in this kind of context car, of course, I think in this kind of context where low density living, the single family, one story home, is being promoted as this fantastic, wholesome thing, it's really hard to identify it and fight back against it as something that could be a problem, let alone even understand that we don't have a choice.

Grant Ennis:

Like the entire time Little House on the Prairie was happening, zoning codes were being written around the United States and in other countries Ireland, canada, australia, new Zealand. They don't always call it zoning codes, but effectively it acts like zoning codes around the world. These kinds of policies were being put in place which basically made it so. The single family home is the only way to live. It's illegal, for example, in the United States, most cities in the United States, over 70% of land. It's illegal to build an apartment there. And so I think, because zoning codes are so opaque and difficult to understand that even many planners don't really get them, and because single family zoning and single family homes have been promoted in the media as some kind of wonderful, wholesome thing, it's quite difficult to identify that they're a problem and then, secondly, to fight back against it.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I think it's very funny that you bring up Little House on the Prairie, because Stephanie and I are in Lincoln, nebraska, and I grew up in the middle of rural Nebraska. So, stephanie, I don't know if you were forced to read Little House on the Prairie starting in the third grade. Well, we were, so between third and fourth grade we read all of the books and it kind of became a little passion project for me. And it turns out that those books were never the reality in the first place. They were written by Laura Ingalls Wilder, but they were actually co-authored and probably more strongly written now by her daughter, rose Wilder, who was an independent little family out on the prairie.

Jennifer Hiatt:

We didn't rely on anyone, no government intervention, which could not have actually been further from the truth of what was really happening at that point. Because if you think about how the American West was built, it was on the promise of government land that the government was going to give you land, and there were so many subsidies being provided to the farmers to go out and settle that land. So I think it's very interesting that we're basing this concept of this idyllic way to live in this single family, kind of away from everybody, on a myth that never really actually happened. How can we un-teach that lesson? I guess Go back and be like no, you guys are wrong, we're always wrong.

Grant Ennis:

Definitely. I mean it's shocking. I remember watching that TV show as a kid and thinking, wow, it looks so nice. It sounds like a great way for this little kid to grow up. And then reading this book, the Big Myth. I might be remembering it wrong, but I think you would know more than me. But I think that in fact the original drafts of the story were quite horrific and most of those elements were written out, like the family, many of the children died of dysentery or snake bite or something, but all of that was written out to create this idyllic house on a prairie experience. Is that right?

Jennifer Hiatt:

Yes, so the oldest daughter went blind from dysentery and it's touched on. But then she's a heroic character that's built through that adversity right, like they didn't need a doctor, they didn't whatever. And so there are a lot of stories that were cut out of what it was actually like to live on a prairie farm at the time, so they're not even sharing the reality of it. It's very interesting.

Grant Ennis:

Shocking.

Stephanie Rouse:

So a lot of your book is making the case that this is an issue and pointing out all of the different myths that go behind dark PR. And then you, at the end of the book, give some recommendations for readers to check out of what to do next and how to fight back on this issue. And our last question is always what you would recommend for our listeners. So, whether it's books from that list for taking the next steps to combat dark PR or what other books have you found helpful that our listeners should check out?

Grant Ennis:

So one of the books that I recommended at the end of the dark PR I would strongly recommend to anybody interested in organizing. It's called no Shortcuts Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlvey Excellent, excellent book. She covers the ways that we need to get together and organize. It's mainly focused on union organizing but it covers a really broad discussion about organizing principles and the way that large scale change can really happen. A follow up that I didn't recommend in the books I hadn't read it yet was If we Burn by Vincent Bevins, and similarly it talks about organizing but it looks at the last, I think, 15 years of global social movements and it looks at how many of them have been organized in using the term he calls horizontally.

Grant Ennis:

So rather than having a hierarchy, they follow this kind of like libertarian, anarchist principle of we don't need to have any leaders, we can be kind of leaderless networked groups, and he shows how over the last 15 years all these social movements that engaged in that method really failed and the organizers themselves acknowledged like if we were to do this again, we would organize more vertically, having clearer hierarchies. The last book I would recommend really strongly is the one I mentioned before Naomi Watts' book the Big Myth. It really changed my thinking on the effort by the business community around the world to influence the way that we think about business and the way that we think about business's role in guiding our lives, and in the way that subsequently, we believe that we don't need government to do anything.

Stephanie Rouse:

All right, well, grant, thank you so much for joining us on Booked on Planning to talk about your book Dark PR how Corporate Disinformation Undermines Our Health and the Environment.

Grant Ennis:

Thanks for having me, stephanie. Thanks Jennifer.

Jennifer Hiatt:

We hope you enjoyed this conversation with Grant Ennis on his book Dark PR how Corporate Disinformation Undermines Our Health and the Environment. You can get your own copy through the publisher or click the link in the show notes to take you directly to our affiliate page. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you.

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