Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy

Recommended by BILL McKIBBEN on the EZRA KLEIN SHOW
"A book that every citizen needs to read." -JILL ABRAMSON, author of Merchants of Truth

A gripping account of the corporate propaganda that has invaded our media, our democracy, and now the very nature of truth itself-from investigative reporter and Drilled podcast host Amy Westervelt.

Whether it's the tobacco industry lying about the health dangers of cigarettes, Big Pharma burying studies that make its products less marketable, or Big Oil misleading the public on the dangers of the climate crisis, we all know corporations use doubt and science denial to avoid responsibility. So why do we continue to let them get away with it?

In Brought to You By, Amy Westervelt exposes the plot hidden within the familiar story of science denial. Over the last century, Big Industry has built a vast apparatus of think tanks, lobbyists, sponsored university labs, and obliging news networks to con the public and fool decision-makers, poisoning the informational ecosystem and warping the nature of truth along the way.

With her signature wit and incisiveness, Westervelt shows how the masterminds of corporate misinformation-people like Herb Schmertz, the public relations pioneer who made Mobil "the thinking man's oil company," Richard Edelman, the PR guy who helped the dairy industry vilify oat milk, and David Petraeus, the disgraced spy chief using counter- insurgency tactics to discredit climate science, have ushered in an era of unprecedented corporate control.

Only by exposing this well-oiled machine can we begin to repair the social contract; reclaim truth and democracy; and redraw the lines between corporate speech and individual speech, a lie and an opinion, a dollar and a word.