Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq

History

Rampton, Sheldon

Stauber, John

World

Hodder

Weapons of Mass Deception reveals: How the Iraq war was sold to the American public through professional P.R. strategies. "The First Casualty": Lies that were told related to the Iraq war. Euphemisms and jargon related to the Iraq war, e.g. "shock and awe," "Operation Iraqi Freedom," "axis of evil," "coalition of the willing," etc. "War as Opportunity": How the war on terrorism and the war on Iraq have been used as marketing hooks to sell products and policies that have nothing to do with fighting terrorism. "Brand America": The efforts of Charlotte Beers and other U.S. propaganda campaigns designed to win hearts overseas. "The Mass Media as Propaganda Vehicle": How news coverage followed Washington's lead and language. The book includes a glossary - "Propaganda: A User's Guide" - and resources to help Americans sort through the deceptions to see the strings behind Washington's campaign to sell the Iraq war to the public.

Weapons Of Mass Deception - Uses Of Propaganda In Bush's War On Iraq

Military

Jeremy P. Tarcher,Inc.

Common Courage’s number one seller blows the lid off of today's multi-billion-dollar propaganda-for-hire PR industry, revealing how public relations wizards concoct and spin the news, organize phony "grassroots" front groups, spy on citizens and conspire with lobbyists and politicians.

Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry

Business & Money

Marketing & Sales

Common Courage Press

Reveals how public relations firms "spin" the news, including their role in controlling political debates and protecting corporations from public scrutiny

Management & Leadership

The human death toll from British mad cow disease is doubling every three years. A version of mad cow disease unique to the U.S. is killing deer across North America; young hunters are dying from it. Did they get it from U.S. deer? Or from U.S. cattle or pigs that were fed "rendered byproduct" from slaughterhouse waste? With a new chapter of their 1997 book, Rampton and Stauber reveal a terrifying tale of governmental neglect and industry malfeasance.

Mad Cow USA: The Unfolding Nightmare

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Examines the reasons the United States is not taking measures to avoid mad cow disease

Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?

Diseases & Physical Ailments

The authors of Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! explores the widespread, devious, and underhanded ways in which industry deceives the public through the use of bogus experts, manufactured facts, and manipulated data. 17,500 first printing.

Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and gambles with Your Future

Biography & History

Tarcher

The authors of Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! unmask the sneaky and widespread methods industry uses to influence opinion through bogus experts, doctored data, and manufactured facts. 
We count on the experts. We count on them to tell us who to vote for, what to eat, how to raise our children. We watch them on TV, listen to them on the radio, read their opinions in magazine and newspaper articles and letters to the editor. We trust them to tell us what to think, because there’s too much information out there and not enough hours in a day to sort it all out.
We should stop trusting them right this second.
In their new book Trust Us, We’re Experts!: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future, Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, authors of Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, offer a chilling exposé on the manufacturing of "independent experts."
Public relations firms and corporations know well how to exploit your trust to get you to buy what they have to sell: Let you hear it from a neutral third party, like a professor or a pediatrician or a soccer mom or a watchdog group. The problem is, these third parties are usually anything but neutral. They have been handpicked, cultivated, and meticulously packaged in order to make you believe what they have to say—preferably in an "objective" format like a news show or a letter to the editor. And in some cases, they have been paid handsomely for their "opinions."
For example:
You think that nonprofit organizations just give away their stamps of approval on products? Bristol-Myers Squibb paid $600,000 to the American Heart Association for the right to display AHA’s name and logo in ads for its cholesterol-lowering drug Pravachol. SmithKline Beecham paid the American Cancer Society $1 million for the right to use its logo in ads for Beecham’s Nicoderm CQ and Nicorette anti-smoking ads.
You think that a study out of a prestigious university is completely unbiased? In 1997, Georgetown University’s Credit Research Center issued a study which concluded that many debtors are using bankruptcy as an excuse to wriggle out of their obligations to creditors. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen cited the study in a Washington Times column and advocated for changes in federal law to make it harder for consumers to file for bankruptcy relief. What Bentsen failed to mention was that the Credit Research Center is funded in its entirety by credit card companies, banks, retailers, and others in the credit industry; that the study itself was produced with a $100,000 grant from VISA USA, Inc. and MasterCard International; and that Bentsen himself had been hired to work as a credit-industry lobbyist.
You think that all grassroots organizations are truly grassroots? In 1993, a group called Mothers Opposing Pollution (MOP) appeared, calling itself "the largest women’s environmental group in Australia, with thousands of supporters across the country." Their cause: A campaign against plastic milk bottles. It turned out that the group’s spokesperson, Alana Maloney, was in truth a woman named Janet Rundle, the business partner of a man who did P.R. for the Association of Liquidpaperboard Carton Manufacturers—the makers of paper milk cartons.
You think that if a scientist says so, it must be true? In the early 1990s, tobacco companies secretly paid thirteen scientists a total of $156,000 to write a few letters to influential medical journals. One biostatistician received $10,000 for writing a single, eight-paragraph letter that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. A cancer researcher received $20,137 for writing four letters and an opinion piece to the Lancet, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and The Wall Street Journal.
Rampton and Sta...

Trust Us We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future

Business Culture

TarcherPerigee

Weapons of Mass Deception reveals: 
<ul>
<li>How the Iraq war was sold to the American public through professional P.R. strategies. </li>
<li>"The First Casualty": Lies that were told related to the Iraq war. </li>
<li>Euphemisms and jargon related to the Iraq war, e.g. "shock and awe," "Operation Iraqi Freedom," "axis of evil," "coalition of the willing," etc. </li>
<li>"War as Opportunity": How the war on terrorism and the war on Iraq have been used as marketing hooks to sell products and policies that have nothing to do with fighting terrorism. </li>
<li>"Brand America": The efforts of Charlotte Beers and other U.S. propaganda campaigns designed to win hearts overseas. </li>
<li>"The Mass Media as Propaganda Vehicle": How news coverage followed Washington's lead and language. </li>
</ul>
The book includes a glossary — "Propaganda: A User's Guide" — and resources to help Americans sort through the deceptions to see the strings behind Washington's campaign to sell the Iraq war to the public.

Penguin Publishing Group

The war in Iraq may be remembered as the point at which the propaganda model perfected in the twentieth century stopped working: the world is too complex, information is too plentiful, and-as events in Iraq reveal- propaganda makes bad policy. The Best War Ever is about a war that was devised in fantasy and lost in delusion. It highlights the futility of lying to oneself and others in matters of life and death. And it offers lessons to the current generation so that, at least in our time, this never happens again. As the team of Rampton and Stauber show in their first new book since President Bush's reelection, the White House seems to have fooled no one as much as itself in the march toward a needless (from a security perspective) war in Iraq. As the authors argue, one of the most tragic consequences of the Bush administration's reliance on propaganda is its disdain for realistic planning in matters of war. Repeatedly, when faced with predictions of problems, U.S. policymakers dismissed the warnings of Iraq experts, choosing instead to promulgate its version of the war through conservative media outlets and PR campaigns. The result has been too few troops on the ground to maintain security; failure to anticipate the insurgency; and oblivious disregard, even contempt, for critics in either party who attempted to assess the human and economic costs of the war. Even now that withdrawal seems imminent, however, the administration and its allies continue their cover-ups: downplaying civilian deaths and military injuries; employing marketing buzzwords like "victory" repeatedly to shore up public opinion; and botched attempts, through third-party PR firms, at creating phony news. The Bush administration entered Iraq believing that its moral, technological, and military superiority would ensure victory abroad, and that its mastery of the politics would win support at home. Instead, it found a morass of problems that do not lend themselves to moralistic, technological, or propaganda-based solutions.

The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stauber, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Stauber, John

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stauber, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq

Weapons Of Mass Deception - Uses Of Propaganda In Bush's War On Iraq

Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry

Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry

Mad Cow USA: The Unfolding Nightmare

Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?

Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and gambles with Your Future

Trust Us We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future

Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq

The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq