Jonathan GreenbergInvestigative journalist, author, and new media executive
GET
UPDATES FROM JONATHAN GREENBERG
Ten
Grassroots Lessons From Monsanto's Swift-Boating of the Prop37/Label GMO
Campaign
Posted: 11/11/2012 3:00 pm
The populist campaign to label genetically
modified food has been successfully Swift-Boating by Monsanto and the largest
pesticide and junk food companies on earth. Our consumer movement made the
costly mistake of arming itself with peace signs and love beads for what turned
out to be a gunfight with a ruthless, assault rifle-equipped enemy.
What can we do about it? We can learn from our
mistakes for the next necessary round in our struggle for food safety and
environmentally responsible agriculture. Ronnie Cummins, the fiery head of the
Organic Consumer's Association (the top fund collector for California's Prop 37
to label GMO's), made it clear that when it comes to GMO labeling, citizens are
not giving up. "Dirty money and dirty tactics may have won this
skirmish," Cummins said, "but they will not win the war."
The big problem that we, the American People,
now have is that big money has come to dictate political speech in America.
Like a cancer spreading across our nation's body politic, the mega-corporate
financing of deceptive TV ad campaigns has become the predominant manner in
which a majority of voters are "educated." Or, more frequently,
mis-educated.
In 2004, multi-millionaires supporting George
Bush's re-election created "Swift Boat Vets for Truth." They spent
many millions advancing expertly-crafted, lying TV ads stating that
presidential candidate John Kerry, a Purple Heart-winning combat officer who
had volunteered to fight in Vietnam, betrayed his country. These well-financed
lies shifted the national campaign "narrative" to Kerry's
justification of his wartime record, away from the clear facts that President Bush
lied to the American people to get them into an unpopular war in Iraq. And away
from irrefutable evidence that his politically powerful father pulled strings
so that he could evade military service during the Vietnam War.
Eight years later, more
than $45.6 million was
spent using Swift Boat tactics to defeat Prop 37. Multi-billion dollar
corporations financed a relentless barrage of deceptive, fear-mongering ads,
all of them bankrolled by tax-deductible contributions from the world's largest
pesticide and junk food companies. The top three funders alone, Monsanto (who
brought us, and declared safe, Agent Orange and DDT), Du Pont, and Dow Chemical
(of Bhopal fame), spent almost double the $8.7 million that the advocates of
Prop 37 raised.
The Swift Boat style ads
uprooted the Label GMO narrative from consumers "Right to Know," to
the No on 37 Campaign's carefully-crafted, fear-inducing
slogans of a "Deceptive Labeling Scheme," and
"Shakedown Lawsuits," and 'Higher Grocery Bills." With
Monsanto-financed junk science, "experts," data, and a million dollars
a day of TV ads, No on 37's propaganda successfully "re-educated"
millions of Californians.
Despite a poll at the beginning of this year
finding that 91 percent of Americans support labeling genetically modified
(GMO) food, Prop 37 was defeated on Election Day by a vote of 53 percent to 47
percent.
Although I have
collaborated with funders, volunteers and few staffers of the California Right
to Know Prop 37 campaign, the views expressed here are solely my own. I write
this a veteran communications
professional who created and funded the http://www.KnowGMO.org effort
of "People Powered Media to Counter Deceptive Corporate Ads."
In a nutshell, we need to take
off the kid gloves. The
next time we head into the public ring with some of the highest paid, most
sinister corporate propagandists on earth, we are going to need to hit a lot
harder than the Prop 37 campaign's multi-million dollar TV ad blitz, whose
motto was, "Food is Love. Food is Life. Food is Family."
Next time let's disregard the in-house polling
in which citizens suggest that they do not want to vote for a negative
campaign. If that were true we would have won this vote in a landslide. If we
have evidence of likely health hazards -- which we do with GMO's -- we should
not be afraid to warn people about them.
We also need to use grassroots volunteers -- not
to raise money, but to spread awareness, using their authentic voices. And we
should expect to be outspent and outgunned, as companies like Monsanto will buy
ten times the ads we can, insist on better time slots for them, and pay their
advertising experts ten times what we will. We should refute their lies the day
they appear, and use the social networks of our supporters and what advertising
we have, to control the narrative and bring it back to public health concerns.
I am not here to play a blame game. But there
are important lessons that all grassroots efforts in the public interest can
learn from the corporate Swift-Boating of our populist campaign to Label GMO's
in California. Here are my top ten:
1. Make Voters Care!
Proposition 37 started
in 2011 as a grassroots effort by Pam Larry, a grandmother in Chico, California. Working
with others, like the Organic Consumers Association, she mobilized thousands of
activists and a dozen or so progressive organizations and companies to get the
1 million signatures needed to get Prop 37 on the ballot. The bill would have
required food manufacturers to label genetically modified (GM) ingredients on
all packaged foods that already contained food labels. The bill also banned the
use of the word "Natural" on products with GMO's -- the most
unnatural ingredient imaginable.
The key problem, in my opinion, emerged soon
after paid professional campaign managers, led by Gary Rushkin, were brought in
by Prop 37's initial organizers and funders to manage millions of dollars for
organizing, ads and marketing.
At some point late this
summer, the Prop 37 campaign made two poorly-reasoned decisions: to focus the
campaign's messaging and marketing positively, on a consumer's "Right to
Know" what is in their food. And, more importantly, to avoid warning voters of the potential health hazards of
genetically modified food. According to a social media advisor
to the campaign who explained to me why the Prop 37 websites refused to
circulate simple grassroots citizen videos we collected about labeling GMO's,
the campaign would refuse any videos that spoke of health concerns, used the
word Monsanto, or reflected the important work of Jeffery Smith, founder of the
Institute for Responsible Technology and the world's foremost health critic of
GMO's.
Ritch Davidson, a
compassionate communications expert in Northern California familiar with the
campaign's messaging, believed that health considerations should have been
front and center in the Prop 37 advertising. "They're telling us we
have a right to know but not why we want to know," he
said.
2. It's About Our Health and
Safety
As a parent and health-conscious consumer, the
more I learned about the likely impact that genetically modified food has on
our health, the more alarmed I became. My initial rationale for supporting the
labeling of GM food (more than 80 percent of all corn and soy) was because I am
against the dominance of our food supply by a handful of corporations, against
the poisoning of our planet's soil and water by ever increasing reliance upon
pesticides and herbicides, and against the corporate imperialism that supplants
agrarian economies with a reliance on "patented" crops that do not
germinate.
But once I learned about the probable health
risks associated with eating, my concern over eating (and labeling) GM food
increased exponentially. The studies and empirical data that convinced me are
cited toward the bottom of this article. I was amazed at the corruption of the
federal Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.), and its unwillingness to
independently test the health effects of GM food.
Monsanto has managed to
use its money and clout to buy off governmental, scientific, and scholarly
oversight of the health risks of GM food. So in its unwillingness to warn
the public about the health risks of genetically modified food, the Prop 37
Campaign surrendered the most effective weapon it had in its messaging arsenal.
3. Keep It Simple
The most effective, simple political messages
our times have come from the diabolical Republican messaging pros who know can
take the tiniest sliver of fact and turn them into a well messaged,
fear-inducing lie ("Death Panels" for mom, anyone?). Monsanto and the
corporate funders of the Know on 37 Campaign set a line in the sand in
California. They knew that once food manufacturers were made to label GM food
for the ninth largest economy on earth (California), they would insist on
non-GM ingredients (as they have done in Europe).
So the No on 37 Campaign hired Thomas Hiltachk,
a Republican messaging veteran and former tobacco industry PR expert. He wasted
no time in coming up with whopper messaging slogans that would stick -- with a
$40 million TV ad budget pushing the messaging to the public night and day.
Hiltachk blew the
"Right to Know" narrative out of the water. By late August, the top
left corner of the No on 37 website laid it out with these super
simple headlines: "Stop the Deceptive Food Labeling Scheme... Increased
Costs to Consumers. Arbitrary Exemptions. Shakedown Lawsuits. Conflicts with
Science."
So audacious was the No
campaign's messaging that THEY, not the Yes on 37 campaign, trotted out doctors
in TV ads wearing white lab coats expressing concern about the impact that
"deceptive" food labels would have on their patients!
Meanwhile, the CA Right to Know Campaign
promoted the slogans "Right to Know" and "Food is love."
These may sound simple, but they are not direct in what they ask voters to do,
which is to INFER a complex message that voters need to be motivated to
consider (food is love, so label GM food; we have a right to know, so label).
The message itself failed to evoke support for the measure.
Here's an example of a simple, and direct
message that the Yes campaign might have won with:
Don't consumers deserve a
warning label before they eat risky food that has been genetically altered to
contain dangerous built-in pesticides? Vote Yes on Prop 37 to label genetically
modified food.
4. Dump Mr. Nice Guy
I was told by Prop 37 campaign insiders that
they had polled California focus groups and found that people were turned off
my negative campaigning and would be less likely to vote for a Proposition that
used negative messaging.
So the campaign decided to "keep it
positive" with 'Right to Know" and "Food is Love."
What the "Nice
Guys" at the California Right to Know campaign were somehow unresponsive
to, was that Monsanto and its allies were also polling voters to craft their messaging. And the experts, pollsters and ad
creators at the No Campaign had something like ten times the budget, and
compensation, that they did. Their research was tempered with big tobacco and
Republican experience: Swift Boating and appealing to people's fears through
negative messaging works.
Mr. Nice Guy got dumped on Election Day. Grassroots
progressives need to fight fire with fire. In 1988, Public Citizen and the
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) mounted a campaign to ban Alar, a
chemical sprayed on apples to lengthen hang-time. The campaign to ban Alar
focused on the substance's health risks. The NRDC's "Intolerable
Risk" study was broadcast on 60 Minutes, while articles were featured in
women's magazines with headlines suggesting to mothers that their children were
being unknowingly poisoned. This raised consumer concerns and resulted in a
public outcry, forcing the EPA to ban the substance, which was voluntarily
withdrawn by the manufacturer before the ban went into effect.
Was it fear-based,
negative messaging? Yes.
Were they fact-based health risks that consumers deserved to know? Yes.
Were they fact-based health risks that consumers deserved to know? Yes.
Was the campaign successful? Yes.
Was the messaging simple? Poison apples. It
doesn't get simpler than that.
5. Corporate Financed Ads Will
Lie Ruthlessly: Prepare for It
Monsanto's reputation is well known by its past
work, assuring the public that DDT and then Agent Orange were perfectly safe,
based on scientific studies that they conducted and promoted themselves. Since
patenting seeds and stealthily expanding GM crops across the world, Monsanto
has bought off lawmakers, scholars, scientists, universities, and media
conglomerates. They have used their enormous power to intimidate independent
farmers, state legislatures, and entire nations.
That the No on 37 ads would be diabolically
deceptive should not have surprised the CA Right to Know Campaign. The No
experts tipped their hand toward the end of August, well before their ad
barrage started. They bid up and controlled all of the Google keyword searches
for "Prop 37" and "Label GMO's" immediately, linking to a
well-designed website that got all the key slogans and messages across in bold
letters right in the top left of the web page.
The Yes on 37 Campaign should not have been
taken by surprise by the level of deception and dirty tricks they were facing.
Once they saw the new narratives that they would be up against, they should
have prepared for a barrage of ads using these fear based, deceitful messages.
And switched the Yes campaign's messaging to a tougher campaign based on public
health risks.
6. Respond to Lies Immediately
and Effectively
John Kerry's 2004 Presidential campaign was
faulted for not responding more quickly, and effectively, to the Swift Boat
ads. The Prop 37 Campaign took more than six weeks to refute the false
narratives that the No Campaign posted on their website in August. During this
time, visitors to the Prop 37 website had to click through from the home page
to an Info link, and read an entire page of text to INFER how little truth
there was to what Monsanto and its allies were saying.
Even in mid-October,
when the Prop 37 Campaign finally provided a clear point by point rebuttal of
the distorted facts (like a fictitious $400 a year cost to consumers), the
Campaign's website, as you can see here, required a visitor to SCROLL DOWN
to see the rebuttal.
To me, as a veteran web messaging specialist,
nothing illustrates the inadequacy of the Yes on 37 Campaign's work than a
comparison of the campaign website with the No on 37 website. The Yes campaign
took far too long to respond to lies and switch the narrative-and they never
responded effectively.
More than a dozen slick No on Prop 37 TV ads
enjoyed $1 million a day of air time, beginning on October 1. By October 11,
support for Prop 37 had dropped below 50 percent for the first time.
In the last few weeks before Election Day, a few
million dollars were added to the Yes on 37 Campaign to respond effectively to
the negative ads. They released what one major funder called a "powerful
new ad."
It was called "Food is Love." The Yes
Campaign was toast.
7. They Have the Money But We
Have the People: Empower Your Volunteers
We knew from the beginning that the label GMO
campaign would be vastly outspent by the big pesticide giants. They would swamp
us with ads and crafty messaging. They had the money--but we had the people.
There was an almost unprecedented level of
grassroots support for the Prop 37 campaign. Some ten thousand unpaid men and
women across the state volunteered to help. They turned out in droves to help
collect the 1 million signatures it took to get Prop 37 on the ballot.
But once Prop 37 was on the ballot and the real battle against Monsanto and its allies had begun, the Yes Campaign failed to adequately utilize these volunteers. They decided that the best thing volunteers could do was to go out to farmer's markets and hand out literature (a good idea) and to raise money for the campaign to buy TV ads with.
The problem was that most people don't enjoy
asking other people to donate money. Besides which, the amount volunteers could
raise in public was a tiny percentage of the total amount supportive companies
and funders were giving -- and, of course, would not buy enough ads to make any
difference.
The volunteer-as-fundraiser policy became an
obstacle to success when it came to important lawn sign promotion across the
state. The campaign organizers in each county were instructed to demand that
volunteers obtain $10 for each of the 10,000 large Yes on 37 lawn signs that
the Campaign ordered, as well as a dollar or so for each bumper sticker and
button.
But the lawn signs only cost a fraction of $10,
and they should have been as a cheap billboard policy. Volunteers could have
gone door to door and found prominently located houses in their community,
knocked on the door, and asked for permission to put a sign in the lawn. A few
of us did that here in Sonoma County, with 20 donated signs (for which the
donor paid $200), and got a lot more "yes please" responses than
no's. Imagine how much easier it is to knock on a strange door and ask
permission to place a sign than to ask someone for $10 to buy a sign.
After a wasted month warehousing many lawn signs
in coordinator's garages, the Campaign changed its instructions, and asked for
a donation of any amount. It was too little, too late. It would have been more
beneficial to have printed three times as many lawn signs -- and used its
thousands of volunteers to distribute them for free as a cheap billboard
strategy.
8. Mainstream Media is Not Your
Friend
On the right side of the top of the No on 37 web
page is an image of dozens of newspaper front pages with a headline,
"Nearly Every Major Newspaper in California Agrees: No Prop 37."
Many voters paid attention to their local
editorial pages. Those of us who have spent time within the world of corporate
media know how loud the voice of advertisers is on editorial pages -- and how
minimal the voices of grassroots activists and non-advertising citizens can be.
So it was not surprising to see one editorial after another use the deceptive
but well-circulated logic of the No campaign to recommend that people vote
against labeling GMO food.
The Yes Campaign should have coordinated
editorial page visits to each of the 50 largest newspapers by volunteers who
subscribed to those newspapers. Face to face meetings with editorial boards by
local subscribers, not Campaign professionals, might have helped.
More importantly, the Campaign relied far too
heavily on TV advertising to spend its limited money. I never learned what the
media category breakdown for the campaign was, but I was told by an insider
that "every penny we raise is going to TV and radio ads." As far as I
could tell, the Campaign spent little, or nothing, on online ads, failed to
compete in buying Google keyword search ads, and refused to pay for billboard
ads ( one activist I know was turned down by the Campaign for a billboard strategy
and then raised $15,000 herself to purchase more than 200 billboard ads in Los
Angeles).
The purchase of TV ad time is slanted toward the
biggest buyers. When a group like the No on 37 Campaign spends eight or ten
times more than their opposition on a media buy, they get to insist upon
placement conditions (such as "no prime time for them or its no
deal.") As a result, when the first presidential debates played on network
news in Northern California, at least four No on 37 ads appeared on TV, and not
a single Yes ad.
8. Social Networks ARE Your
Friend: Use People-Powered Media
The Prop 37 Campaign felt that it needed to
rigidly "control" their messaging as well as the messaging of
volunteers across their websites and communications channels. The campaign
wanted volunteers to spread their carefully-scripted message, as opposed to
inspiring some of its 10,000 volunteers and 173,000 Facebook "likers"
to become social network bloggers, expressing, in their authentic voices, why
THEY supported labeling GMO's.
In this way, they might
have found more motivated and effective social networkers among their many
supporters. During our KnowGMO.org project's video collection process, we
invited participants to say whatever their opinion was about GMO labeling. Our
concept of "People Powered Media to Counter Deceptive Corporate Ads"
was that we would provide a free tool for Californians to "be the change
they want to see" by replacing deceptive ads with their own actions. They
soon were given a dedicated web page containing that video to share with their
social networks. It was surprising how
varied, and original, many of their responses were. These participants were
each sent a web page with their videos on them to spread through their own
social networks, and nearly all of them did so, enthusiastically.
But the campaign did not want to have volunteers
or supporters record and distribute their own videos. Their Northern California
Field Coordinator, and their Social Network advisor, refused requests to let
Campaign supporters know about the KnowGMO effort. They also did not want (or
"they didn't even want) to use a single one of the free videos we
collected, even after they requested farmer videos (we had collected dozens of
them at markets and the state Grange meeting). The campaign's social media
advisor, and their Northern California field coordinator, explained to me that
all the videos that the Campaign distributed needed to contain Campaign message
points, that they should not reference health risks, or mention the
Corporation-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named (Monsanto).
9. "Not Invented
Here" Has No Place in Grassroots Campaigns
Paid advisors and campaign managers always want
their funders to feel money well spent. That's natural. It becomes problematic,
however, when this need supplants the grassroots nature of a progressive
campaign to create a "Not Invented Here" policy.
The Yes Campaign's TV
ads were professionally produced, but in my view, weakly messaged. To me and
many I spoke to, the most convincing, powerful ads done during this period were
not from the campaign itself, but independent organizational supporters of labeling
GM food. Many activists thought the best ads on the
subject were made by outside groups and viewed on YouTube, like this expertly scripted ad from Nutiva ("if
the food kills bugs, what does it do to us?"), andanotherhilarious one viewed by hundreds of thousands on
Food & Water Watch, which features Bill Maher, Emily Deschanel, and the
cast of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.
These great videos, or shortened versions of
them, never aired on TV, or influenced the messaging of the official Campaign
ads. The Campaign paid little attention to them, focusing instead on airing,
and using its web presence to draw attention to, the less convincing ads that
it created and financed.
10. Maintain Control of the
Narrative
About a week before the Election, I realized
that No on 37 Campaign would win. It was not just the polls, which showed a
dead heat, and a troublesome under 50 percent approval for the Label GMO
measure. But when I engaged friends -- even progressive friends -- and
leafleted at farmer's markets and Costco, I heard one question after another,
like "why is the law poorly written," as well as its "crazy
exemptions," and lawsuits against small farmers. A local Mexican American
bee farmer liked the idea of the law, but was seriously worried about lawsuits
that might come if his bees pollinated GMO flowers and his honey tested
positive for GMO's.
The law did not cover honey or livestock, I
assured him, but facts were beside the point. The conversation had shifted
during the three months I worked on KnowGMO, from the health risks of GMO and
the impact of pesticides, patents, and GM farming on our ecology, over to the
deceptive narratives backed by the No Campaign's $45 million in ads. Monsanto's
Swift Boating of the grassroots had worked.
Next time grassroots
activists need to do better. And there will be a next time, maybe not for a
while in California, but in other states, and even nationally. Already, one
million people have signed a petition lobbying the F.D.A for a
federal labeling law, a strategy backed by the eloquent Gary Hischberg, founder
of Stonyfield Farm.
Next time let's be aware of who we are fighting
with, and how they have stacked the decks against us. As long as pundits can
say that there is no reputable science questioning the health safety of GM
food, the public interest in labeling and restraining its spread will be in
check. We need to spoon-feed them this science, and let them know we will not
be led quietly into the Frankenfood night.
Keep these hyper-linked facts
in mind, and spread the word!
The F.D.A. Has Been Corrupted
The reason that neither our
government food protection agencies, nor independent scientists, can properly
investigate the long term impact of genetically modified food is because
scientific research into food safety, and its effect on public health, has been
hijacked and corporatized. What little scientific research exists is largely
industry-funded, therefore data is manipulated and evidence unsavory to the
corporations is suppressed. GM foods are given an automatic GRAS (generally
recognized as safe) approval from the FDA, which relies on the very companies that
create GMO's to evaluate their safety for human consumption.
The FDA stated in 1992
that GM foods weren't significantly different than their conventionally grown
counterparts, and therefore were considered safe without any safety testing required. However Jeffrey
Smith, CEO of the Institute for Responsible Technology, cites internal memosrevealing this assessment to be
fraudulent, as FDA insiders were ordered by the White House to promote GMO.
The FDA
executiveresponsible for this decision wasMichael Taylor, the current U.S.
"Food Safety Czar", who also held positions, both in government and
biotech, including Vice President of Monsanto and lawyer for Monsanto, and USDA
Administrator of the Food Safety & Inspection Service. Monsanto and other biotech corporations are notorious for craftily inserting their high-paid executives into
the FDA, USDA and various government regulatory positions, ensuring product
approval while bypassing legal and ethical laws.
The Health Risks of GM Food Are
Frightening
The No on 37 campaign repeated the message that
GM foods are "safe" ad nauseum. The Right To Know campaign decided to
run away from this claim instead of refute it - an unnecessary move considering
the wealth of information available regarding the potential health risks
associated with GM foods.
Multiple animal studies
done by The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM)
indicate that genetically modified foods may cause serious health
complications, such as infertility, alternation of liver function, changes in
metabolism, accelerated aging, disruption of the intestinal system, and
substantial immune changes, including changes in the regulatory proteins
associated with allergies, asthma, and inflammation. The AAEM advises all
physicians to prescribe non-genetically modified foods, as well as educate all
patients on the potential dangers.
In a recent French study published
in The Food & Chemical Toxicology Journal, the
first to be conducted over a lifetime in rats (two years vs. the two months
studied by Monsanto funded studies), those fed GM corn suffered from severe
liver and kidney damage, and disturbingly large cancerous tumors. 70 percent of
females died prematurely.
Possibly most
troublesome is the fact that materials in GM soy may continue to live on inside
a consumer's belly, long after it has been ingested. The biotech industry claims
that dangerous pesticide toxins from GM food break down inside the digestive
tract, and therefore do not pose a health risk. This declaration was soundly
refuted by a recent Canadian study published
by theReproductive Toxicology journal, which showed two
dangerous GMO toxins, detectable in the blood of nearly 90 percent of pregnant
women and 100% of their fetal cord blood.
Numerous doctors and
public health organizations have spoken publicly about the dangers posed to our
health and the health of the environment. Jeffrey Smith has recorded numerous doctor
interviews describing how prescribing GMO-free diets have
created remarkable results. Many patients with chronic, supposedly incurable
gastrointestinal problems, allergies, arthritis, depression, weight issues and
more were able to get off their harmful pharmaceutical drug therapy regimes and
get their lives back. Parents of sick children have
also spoken out about the benefits they've experienced after switching to a
non-GMO diet, and awareness is spreading.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-greenberg/ten-grassroots-lessons-fr_b_2114553.html
