Every time it snows and Al Gore is seen in public, deniers rejoice in pretending that Gore’s climate awareness campaign is somehow incompatible with cold weather. At last week’s elite meet-and-greet in Davos, snow in the Swiss Alps in January provided enough irony for deniers to enjoy, as they gleefully and nonsensically tagged Gore on Twitter and trotted out their favorite photoshops of a frozen Gore.
Deniers haven’t done much to hide their fixation on Gore and their particular love for amateurish photoshops of him frozen in ice. But here’s a surprise: there’s a chance some of these images aren’t hastily slapped together in a dank basement by by trolls who are definitely not going to make it to the South Pole to collect a sandwich left for them by an intrepid 16-year-old.
Rather, they could well be a product of a multi-million dollar lobbying and PR firm.
Last week, Bloomberg Businessweek ran a major feature by Zachary Mider and Ben Elgin on DCI Group, a powerhouse of industry astroturfing. It appears that back in the ‘90s, three former flacks for big tobacco started a PR company which pioneered the concept of “idea laundering,” or making corporate lobbying look like grassroots activism. To stealthily push messaging from its industry clients, DCI Group created projects like Tech Central Station, a blog that was essentially one big ad for DCI clients. They took money from companies like ExxonMobil, and produced so-called “journalism” that mirrored industry talking points. Tech Central is where a lot of the deniers we know and love got some early exposure, including Bjorn Lomborg, Chris Horner, David Legates, Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, Steven Milloy, and Willie Soon.
While DCI’s work on climate denial was much less visible once Tech Central shut down, ExxonMobil kept funding the group until at least 2016. (That’s why DCI is one of the groups caught up in the #ExxonKnew cases.)
DCI wields extraordinary influence in DC: the Businessweek piece describes one new hire being “awed” at the reach of the firm into the nonprofit, policy, and journalism worlds in DC. This staffer, Mider and Elgin write, “came to see his former colleagues as puppets—and he had become the one with his hand on the strings.”
In the course of checking up on DCI after seeing the Businessweek piece, we found that one of the first big embarrassments for DCI was when the Wall Street Journal exposed that a hacky, very amateur-looking YouTube video mocking Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth was in fact a DCI product. ABC has non-paywalled coverage, co-bylined by Max Culhane and now-CNN anchor Jake Tapper which included a quaint description of YouTube as “mostly amateur videos, which feature lip-synching, odd performances and funny satires.”
Tapper’s story ends with a warning that is all too prescient, and still all-too relevant: “So next time you're reading something on the Internet from a ‘real person’ pushing a movie or defending an actor's alcohol-fueled rant -- be wary. That real person might actually be a hired gun, selling you an idea through deception.”
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