The Tobacco-Oil-Plastic Triangle
John Hill, founder of Hill & Knowlton, was an Ivy Lee devotee who worked for Standard Oil in the 1930s, strategized against labor movements and the New Deal, and wound up representing the American Pet...
27 Helmi 202024min
The Origins of Corporate PR Manipulation
Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, coined the term "public relations" when propaganda started to become a negative term. His specialty was using psychological know-how to manipulate the masses an...
25 Helmi 202026min
Guardian Bans Fossil Fuel Ads: Emily Atkin Talks with CEO Anna Bateson
We'll be back with more Mad Men tales next week, we promise! While we're out chasing leads, listen to this great interview from Emily Atkin with The Guardian's interim CEO Anna Bateson about that publ...
18 Helmi 202022min
Oil Slick, Part 2: False Equivalence and Free Speech
In part two of our episode on former Mobil VP Herb Schmertz, we dig into how Schmertz's approach bred false equivalence, and why he pushed so hard for the extension of First Amendment rights to corpor...
11 Helmi 202015min
Oil Slick, Part 1: Mobil's PR Mastermind and the Rise of the Corporate Persona
Mobil Oil's Herb Schmertz humanized the oil company, creating the "corporate persona," fighting for First Amendment rights to extend to corporations, and laying the groundwork for decades of aggressiv...
4 Helmi 202019min
Psychological Warfare and Big Oil
Daniel Edelman learned the tools of his trade combating Nazi propaganda in WWII, then came home and put his psychological warfare training to work for American industry, including tobacco and Big Oil....
28 Tammi 202020min
The Oil-Nazi-Propaganda Triangle
Ivy Lee worked with Standard Oil and the Rockefellers to establish the American Petroleum Institute in 1919, as well as a petrochemicals partnership with German chemical giant IG Farben. That job took...
21 Tammi 202021min
The Father of Public Relations
In order to understand Big Oil's propaganda machine, and why it's been so effective, we have to go back more than 100 years to Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller and his son, a bloody miners' strike, a...
21 Tammi 202014min
