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Journalist Amy Westervelt has spent years documenting how the oil industry used public relations, think tanks and university partnerships to shape public opinion and influence public policy.
But in a recent interview on the “Real Organic Podcast,” Westervelt said she increasingly sees many of those same tactics in industrial agriculture.
“I am finding so many parallels in the agriculture space,” said Westervelt, host of the investigative podcast “Drilled” and author of the forthcoming book, “Brought to You By: Inside Big Oil’s Total Information War.”
She said large agricultural companies, like their counterparts in the fossil fuel industry, have established research centers that help generate academic support for policies that benefit industry.
“It’s like they need a certain amount of … credible information from academics to be able to make the policy argument for certain things,” she said.
Throughout the interview, Westervelt suggested these efforts are part of a broader corporate strategy designed not simply to influence markets, but to shape public debate before policy decisions are ever made.
‘Corporations start to have multiple problems with democracy’
Westervelt traced the origins of modern corporate public relations to the early 20th century, arguing that growing public scrutiny prompted businesses to rethink how they protected their interests.
“Corporations start to have multiple problems with democracy” as new laws, investigative reporting and broader voting rights threatened business interests, she said. That’s when you see “the birth of corporate PR.”
Rather than simply selling products, corporations sought to mold public opinion before voters could demand greater oversight, according to Westervelt.
“These companies need a way to shape the information that voters are getting in a way that will make them more likely to vote against their own interests and in the interests of the corporations that have a lot at stake,” she said.
Over time, industries refined those tactics, using increasingly sophisticated methods “to try to shape the context that they’re operating in and to deal with … ‘creeping democracy,’” Westervelt said.
Media ‘not doing its job’ of holding powerful corporations to account
Think tanks have become one of industry’s most effective policy tools, according to Westervelt.
“They train the people who work there to go on TV shows and radio shows to get these particular talking points out,” she said.
Unlike registered lobbyists, many think tanks operate with little transparency, she added.
“These organizations have loads of money. They have a lot of influence, and they’re not really regulated in any way,” Westervelt said. “They’re pretty good at hiding who funds them.”
She said corporate influence doesn’t stop with think tanks. It also extends into universities, where industry funding can help shape the research that later informs public policy.
While much of her reporting has focused on fossil fuel companies, Westervelt said she increasingly sees similar patterns in industrial agriculture. She described the practice as a form of “pre-lobbying,” in which corporations cultivate the evidence needed to support future policy arguments.
As one example, Westervelt described speaking with a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after an oil company funded carbon capture research.
Researchers were invited to submit project proposals, but one scientist wanted to study “the potential health impacts” of carbon capture pipelines, including “what might happen if it leaks,” she said.
According to Westervelt, the principal investigator instead encouraged him to “look for a more positive project.”
Seemingly small decisions like these can gradually shape which questions get asked — and which never reach the public, she said.
“There’s so many little things like that happening all the time that are keeping … really important ideas just out of the … public square,” she said.
Westervelt said those information gaps are reinforced by powerful technology platforms and a media landscape that often fails to challenge corporate influence.
“You do have now tech companies working really in lock step with these big corporations, helping them to drown out everybody else,” she said. “Letting them juice the algorithm, spend a fortune on … advertising, and really drown out kind of anyone that doesn’t agree with them.”
Meanwhile, she added, “the media is not doing its job kind of holding the powerful to account. That’s just not a thing that is rewarded by newsrooms at this time.”
‘Godfather of greenwashing’ invents strategy to distract from corporate pollution
To illustrate how these tactics evolved, Westervelt pointed to the chemical industry’s response to Rachel Carson’s landmark 1962 book, “Silent Spring.”
The book challenged the widespread use of pesticides and raised public concerns about their effects on wildlife, the environment and human health. It also helped spur creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and passage of major environmental laws, including the Clean Water Act.
“It was really the first real questioning of … why we were using all these chemicals so widely, what impact they might have, how little we actually knew about the impact that they might have,” Westervelt said.
She said Carson’s work also prompted people to consider “the impact on … animals and the environment but also on health and, [in] particular, children’s health.”
The industry’s response was swift.
Chemical companies “were scared. They were calling it Pearl Harbor for the chemical industry,” Westervelt said. “The corporate PR guys kind of come to the rescue.”
She singled out public relations executive E. Bruce Harrison, whom she called “the godfather of greenwashing.”
Rather than confronting environmental concerns directly, Harrison developed a strategy that encouraged companies to highlight voluntary environmental initiatives while shifting attention away from government oversight.
“If corporations just did certain good environmental things that they could redirect the public’s attention to … that would take the pressure off of having to have regulation,” Westervelt said.
The strategy expanded beyond individual companies as industries united under organizations with environmentally appealing names while collectively opposing new regulations, she said.
“Forget any one company doing this. It’s too risky,” Westervelt said, explaining Harrison’s approach. “But if we all come together and fight against the Clean Air Act … then it’ll be less bad. And even better if we call ourselves, you know, the National Environmental Development Association. That sounds good … like we’re doing really good green things,” she added.
“He invents this tactic, and it’s very effective,” Westervelt said.
Corporate capture gives corporations ‘overwhelming advantage’ in marketplace of ideas
Westervelt said the influence campaign extends far beyond public relations firms.
“The subject of my book is … the whole kind of capture, the corporate capture of the information ecosystem,” she said.
That ecosystem includes “the PR and the think tanks and the corporate-captured university research and the management consultancies and the lobbyists and the law firms,” all working together, she said.
Rather than relying on a single communications strategy, corporations reinforce the same messages across multiple channels simultaneously.
“They’ll have the think tank that they fund research at. They’ll have the university that they fund research at,” while also funding influencers, podcasts, lobbyists and strategic litigation, Westervelt said.
“It’s this … ability to attack from kind of all sides that really shapes the context that they’re operating in.”
That coordinated approach gives multinational corporations influence that rivals — and even exceeds — governments, Westervelt said.
“These companies … operate at a level that’s actually so much more powerful than any one government because they are in multiple countries and they have a huge amount of power over what happens in multiple countries at once,” she said.
That imbalance leaves corporations with an overwhelming advantage in the marketplace of ideas, she argued.
“This is why … the corporate free speech issue is such a huge problem,” Westervelt said. Corporations have “a megaphone a hundred times the size of any one person’s voice.”
She warned that such concentrated influence threatens both democracy and individual decision-making.
“I think that’s a big problem for democracy,” she said. “It’s a big problem for individual sovereignty, people being able to have the information that they need to make big decisions about their lives.”
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Politically, ‘Big Ag has been more successful than Big Oil’
Host Dave Chapman asked whether there is much distinction between Big Oil and Big Agriculture; Westervelt said the industries are closely aligned.
“They work together quite a bit,” Westervelt replied. “They show up in a lot of the same rooms. They show up in a lot of the same trade associations.”
In some respects, industrial agriculture has been even more effective politically, she said.
“I think Big Ag has been more successful than Big Oil in blocking certain types of regulation,” she said. “It’s almost more of a non-starter to go against Big Ag than it is to go against Big Oil, which is really saying something because Big Oil has quite a chokehold on the government.”
Westervelt also questioned one of the central arguments used to defend intensive agriculture — that maximizing yields on each acre ultimately benefits the environment by reducing the amount of land needed for farming.
Chapman summarized the concept, saying proponents argue that “if you make agriculture be as intensive as possible so you’re getting the highest possible yield from any piece of land that is possible … you will need less acres in order to feed the population.”
Westervelt suggested that way of thinking reflects a worldview that prioritizes mathematical efficiency over the complexity of natural systems.
That approach resonates with “people for whom looking at life through a spreadsheet just makes a lot of sense,” she said. “The idea that what seems right in a mathematical equation doesn’t map to reality — it’s just very hard for them to compute.”
She said similar reasoning is often used to defend concentrated animal feeding operations, commonly called factory farms, but those claims fail to account for other environmental consequences.
“I’ve heard this applied to animal agriculture,” she said. But that argument “doesn’t account for all of the impacts of that either, like the runoff and the methane and this, that and the other.”
Westervelt concluded that the underlying issue extends well beyond disagreements over energy, agriculture or even politics.
“I think people … are starting to understand … that there’s less of a left-right problem than there is a top-down problem,” she said.
“We might have different ideologies here and there, but … the much bigger problem is the very small percentage of people who are in control of information and wealth and decision-making in this world,” she added.
Watch Westervelt on the ‘Real Organic Podcast’ here:
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