Sheldon Rampton | |
---|---|
Born | Long Beach, California, U.S. | August 4, 1957
Occupation(s) | Editor, author |
Sheldon Rampton (born August 4, 1957) is an American editor and author. He was editor of PR Watch , and is the author of several books that criticize the public relations industry and what he sees as other forms of corporate and government propaganda.
Rampton was born in Long Beach, California. At the age of one, his family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, where his father worked as a musician. Raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), he spent two years in Japan as a Latter-day Saint missionary from 1976 to 1978. Upon returning to the United States, however, he left the LDS Church, influenced in part by Mormon feminist Sonia Johnson. [1]
Upon graduation from college in 1982, Rampton worked as a newspaper reporter before becoming a peace activist. During the 1980s and 1990s, he worked closely with the Wisconsin Coordinating Council on Nicaragua (WCCN), which opposed the Reagan administration's military interventions in Central America and works to promote economic development, human rights, and mutual friendship between the people of the United States and Nicaragua. At WCCN, Rampton helped establish the Nicaraguan Credit Alternatives Fund (NICA Fund) in 1992, which channels loans from US investors to support microcredit and other "alternative credit" programs in Nicaragua. [2]
In 1995, Rampton teamed with John Stauber as co-editors of PR Watch, a publication of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). They were described as liberal, [3] and their writings are regarded by some members of the public relations industry as one-sided and hostile, but their work drew wide attention. [4] ActivistCash, a website hosted by Washington lobbyist Richard Berman, has castigated them as "self-anointed watchdogs," "scare-mongers," "reckless" and "left-leaning." [5] Rampton and Stauber have in turn argued that the ActivistCash critique contains a number of "demonstrably false" claims. [6] According to a review in the Denver Post, their 1995 book, Toxic Sludge Is Good for You, offered "a sardonic, wide-ranging look at the public relations industry." [7]
Rampton is also a contributor to the Wikipedia open content project, and was the person who coined the name "Wikimedia" which later became the name of the foundation that manages Wikipedia and its sister projects. [8] Inspired by Wikipedia's collaborative writing model, Rampton founded Disinfopedia (now known as SourceWatch), another CMD project, to complement his PR Watch work to expose what Rampton perceives as deceptive and misleading public relations campaigns. [9] [10]
After leaving the Center for Media and Democracy in 2009, Rampton became a website developer, joining an open government initiative led by New York State Senate chief information officer Andrew Hoppin. [11] [12] In 2010, Hoppin and Rampton co-founded NuCivic, an open source software company, [13] [14] which they sold in December 2014 to GovDelivery, a software services company now known as Granicus. [15] [16] Rampton currently works as a software engineer at Granicus. [17]
John Stauber is an American progressive writer. Stauber has co-authored five books about government propaganda, private interests and the public relations industry. His work includes one book about how industry manipulates science, one about the history and current scope of the public relations industry, and one about mad cow disease, which predicted the surfacing of the disease within the United States.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to public affairs:
In public relations and politics, spin is a form of propaganda, achieved through knowingly providing a biased interpretation of an event or campaigning to influence public opinion about some organization or public figure. While traditional public relations and advertising may manage their presentation of facts, "spin" often implies the use of disingenuous, deceptive, and manipulative tactics.
The Rendon Group is a public relations firm headed by John Rendon.
Edward Louis Bernays was an American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, and referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He worked for dozens of major American corporations, including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and nonprofit organizations.
A video news release (VNR) is a video segment made to look like a news report, but is instead created by a PR firm, advertising agency, marketing firm, corporation, government agency, or non-profit organization. They are provided to television newsrooms to shape public opinion, promote commercial products and services, publicize individuals, or support other interests. News producers may air VNRs, in whole or in part, at their discretion or incorporate them into news reports if they contain information appropriate to a story or of interest to viewers.
Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing Is Turning America Into a One-Party State is a book by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber of the Center for Media and Democracy. It was published in 2004.
Citizens for a Free Kuwait (CFK) was an astroturf operation established by the Kuwaiti government to persuade the American public to look favourably on US military action in the Persian Gulf. Its principal payment was to public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, who were associated with the false testimony to the US Congress given by Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ.
Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future is a book written by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. It is published by Jeremy P. Tarcher Inc. of the Penguin Group. The book focuses on the role experts hired by public relations firms play in quieting public fear with inaccurate or incomplete information when dangerous toxins from industrial processes are released into the environment.
The NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language is an award given since 1975 by the Public Language Award Committee of the National Council of Teachers of English. It is awarded annually to "writers who have made outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse."
Steven J. Milloy is a lawyer, lobbyist, author and former Fox News commentator. Milloy is the founder and editor of the blog junkscience.com.
The Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) is a non-profit think tank working on social and lifestyle issues. It is based in Oxford, but is not part of, and has no relationship to, Oxford University.
Most textbooks date the establishment of the "Publicity Bureau" in 1900 as the start of the modern public relations (PR) profession. Of course, there were many early forms of public influence and communications management in history. Basil Clarke is considered the founder of the PR profession in Britain with his establishment of Editorial Services in 1924. Academic Noel Turnball points out that systematic PR was employed in Britain first by religious evangelicals and Victorian reformers, especially opponents of slavery. In each case the early promoters focused on their particular movement and were not for hire more generally.
Robert Mullen Company was a public relations company in Washington DC. The firm was founded in 1952 by Robert R. Mullen, who was a campaign press secretary for Dwight D. Eisenhower and information director for the Marshall Plan. A Watergate committee report revealed that the Robert Mullen Company had in at least two instances been a front for CIA operations abroad, in addition for former CIA intelligence case officer and head of the White House plumbers E. Howard Hunt.
The Shared Values Initiative was a public relations campaign created by the U.S. State Department and directed by Charlotte Beers, a former Madison Avenue advertising executive, to persuade viewers to be more aware, open and accepting of America by dispelling myths about the treatment of Muslims. The propaganda campaign was launched soon after September 11, 2001 and was intended to sell a “new” America to Muslims around the world by showing that American Muslims were living happily and freely in America without persecution. Although initially thought to be a success by the U.S. Government and Charlotte Beers’ team, the $15 million initiative was regarded as a failure.
The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) is a progressive nonprofit watchdog and advocacy organization based in Madison, Wisconsin. CMD publishes ExposedbyCMD.org, SourceWatch.org, and ALECexposed.org.
The following is a list of public relations, propaganda, and marketing campaigns orchestrated by Edward Bernays.
Lisa Graves is a progressive activist who is the executive director of True North Research and president of the board of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). She served as executive director for CMD from 2009 to 2017, when she left to co-found Documented Investigations. Graves also serves on the advisory board of U.S. Right to Know, and has previously advised UnKoch My Campus and the Bill of Rights Defense Fund.
The Power Principle is a non-profit documentary movie directed by Scott Noble and released online for free. The film makers explore how, in their view, the US establishment promotes a culture of fear in order to secure increased military expenses, year after year. The film claims the US government and the military-industrial complex, together with the US media developed a powerful propaganda machinery in order to scare and convince the public that US invasions like those in Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983), US support for brutal mass-killings, terror campaigns like those in Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1965), El Salvador (1979), US-designed assassination plots like those in Nicaragua (1981) and in huge parts of Latin America and support for overthrowing democratically elected governments like those in Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973) were needed in order to prevent the spread of communism, using mainly the domino theory.
Emma L. Briant is a British scholar and academic researcher on media, contemporary propaganda, surveillance and information warfare who was involved in exposing the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal concerning data misuse and disinformation. She became Associate Professor of News and Political Communication at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia in 2023. Before this she was an associate researcher at Bard College and taught in the School of Communication at American University. Briant became an honorary associate in Cambridge University Center for Financial Reporting & Accountability, headed by Alan Jagolinzer, and joined Central European University, as a Fellow in the Center for Media, Data and Society in 2022.
There isn't likely to be much corporate support there. These guys come from the far side of liberal. Saying so is not to detract from their exhaustively detailed reportage and calmly convincing tone; indeed, the book is generally light on rhetoric, and there's hardly a radical quoted.Chisun Lee, "The Flack Catchers", Village Voice , April 10, 2001.