Front groups
An organization created or funded by an interested party to speak in public under a neutral or civic name, so that the party's message arrives with someone else's credibility.
The audience discounts a speaker with an interest. A tobacco company saying smoking is safe is a tobacco company; a "research council" or a "citizens' committee" saying it is a source. The front group manufactures the second kind of speaker out of the first kind's money. Its name is chosen for the association it borrows, science, freedom, consumers, families, and its funding is disclosed nowhere the audience will look.
The device is the organizational form of transfer and testimonial: it builds a credible witness to order. Front groups supply the "independent" study, the "concerned citizen" at the hearing, and the expert available for interview, and they are the usual mechanism behind manufactured doubt, astroturfing, and citation laundering. Exploits Authority Bias and Halo Effect.
Historical examples
The Tobacco Industry Research Committee, later the Council for Tobacco Research, was created by the industry in 1954 on the advice of the public-relations firm Hill & Knowlton to fund and publicize research that kept the health question open. It was presented as independent science and dissolved under the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, which found it to have been a vehicle for the industry's litigation and public-relations strategy.
Brandt, Allan M. The Cigarette Century. New York: Basic Books, 2007; Master Settlement Agreement, 23 November 1998, section III(o).
Citizens for a Free Kuwait, presented as a grassroots organization, was funded almost entirely by the Kuwaiti government and run by Hill & Knowlton. It arranged the testimony of a fifteen-year-old "Nayirah" before a congressional caucus describing Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators; she was later identified as the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador, and the incubator account was not substantiated.
MacArthur, John R. Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992; Stauber, John, and Sheldon Rampton. Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995.
In advertising and commerce
The Global Climate Coalition, funded by oil, coal, and automobile companies, spoke for a decade as an association concerned with "the science" of climate change while its own technical advisers had told it in 1995 that the science was settled. The memo emerged in litigation in 2009.
Revkin, Andrew C. "Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate." The New York Times, 23 April 2009; Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.
Find an organization quoted in the news with "institute," "council," "coalition," or "citizens" in its name. Who founded it, when, and with whose money?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
"The Institute for Sound Nutrition says the sugar guidelines are alarmist." The institute's sole funder is a soft-drink trade association.
What to notice. A funded interest speaks through an organization with a neutral name; the name is the device.
A "Coalition of Concerned Residents" opposing the transit line was registered last month at the address of a developer's law firm.
What to notice. Front group and astroturf overlap here; the organization itself, built to order with a civic name, is the front.
"According to the Freedom in Medicine Council..." No member, office, or funding source can be found.
What to notice. An organization that exists only as a name lends its credibility to whoever paid for the name.
Sources
- Stauber, John, and Sheldon Rampton. Toxic Sludge Is Good for You. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995. ISBN 978-1567510607
- Rampton, Sheldon, and John Stauber. Trust Us, We're Experts! How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2001. ISBN 978-1585421398
- MacArthur, John R. Second Front. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. ISBN 978-0520083981
- Brandt, Allan M. The Cigarette Century. New York: Basic Books, 2007. ISBN 978-0465070473