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IT'S really fascinating to see a propaganda campaign unfold in real time. When I first saw the document from Public Affairs Engagement, a company based in Washington DC which was revealed by the Mail & Guardian two Fridays back, it took me just a few minutes to identify its nature.
It read a whole lot like the many documents revealed in books like Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry, the well-known book by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton which gave such an incredible, rollicking rundown of how industries like Big Tobacco and Big Agriculture have used canny public relations tactics to avoid the consequences of harmful behaviour.
But the documents published in these exposes were after the event – documents unveiled in court cases showing what tactics Big Tobacco used to create doubt about the science around the harm of smoking, long after the PR campaigns were over and the protagonists had moved on to something else.
The Public Affairs Engagement (PAE) document was right up to the minute; this campaign was about to roll out.
My first port of call, always, is to ask: “Who are you?”
PAE is headed up by James K Glassman (ambassador, no less). Glassman has a long Republican pedigree – he served under George W Bush as under-secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, and served as chair of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which runs USA government-funded international broadcasting.
He was the founding executive director of Bush’s so-called action-oriented think tank, the George W Bush Institute.
You can get a flavour of the man, I think, from a couple of the things he has said.
In April 2003, he rubbished protests against the brand-new Iraq war: “Actually, the military might and presidential resolve of the United States are already stopping the war in Iraq. Stopping it by destroying its regime.
"This is not what Sean Penn, Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, Howard Dean, Jacques Chirac, Jude Wanniski, Pat Buchanan, Wallace Shawn, Robert Novak and their pals had in mind, but it is the best way to end a war - by defeating an enemy that threatened the peace of the world...”
In 1998, he said of smokers: "Understand that careful analysis by Harvard's Kip Viscusi and other scholars has found that, already, smokers save society 32 cents per pack, because they die earlier and don't incur Social Security costs.
"Taxes, on average, provide another 53 cents. So, someone smoking a pack a day already contributes about $310 a year to the general welfare..."
Now, let’s look at a couple of things his company said in its document, the same document where it states that “lies and distortions” by NGOs must be countered: “South Africa is one of only twelve countries where the mortality rate for children under five has increased since 1990.”
Applause, applause. I can’t fault you on the logic – this is ‘letterlik’ true. But that year – 1990 – is carefully chosen, isn’t it? In 1990, we were a long way off facing the tidal wave of HIV and Aids.
We still had to plough our way through the court case against Big Pharma which enabled us to get anti-retrovirals (ARTs) at affordable cost; the denialist years; and the prolonged battle to get just one step further, in the form of Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMCT), before we rolled out the largest ART programme in the world, and started down the come-back trail.
So yes, a graph of our child mortality would show that it rose astonishingly while nothing was being done to prevent children being infected in the womb or immediately after birth. But it would also show this:
October 7 2013 EurekAlert report: “Over the past decade, South Africa has made a dramatic reversal in child survival—mainly because of improvements in HIV/AIDS care, reports a study in AIDS, official journal of the International AIDS Society…
“Depending on the data source, the researchers estimate that mortality in South African children under five has decreased by six to 10 percent per year since 2006. The proportion of under-five deaths due to AIDS has fallen to between 11 and 24 percent… the rate of improvement since 2005 has been impressive—the fourth-fastest globally…”
In the same breath, the PAE document states that: “South Africa’s record in fighting HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis is poor, and the reasons have nothing to do with patented drugs.”
Really? In September last year, health-e reported that South Africa now has 2.5 million people on treatment for HIV – as mentioned, that’s the largest such programme in the world.
What’s more, we cover two-thirds of our ARV costs ourselves – while neighbours like Malawi and Mozambique, which are among the nine other countries taking the brunt of the HIV and Aids epidemic and its partner, TB, have about three-quarters of the cost funded by donors.
Health-e also notes that “the country has made huge strides in scaling up ARV access for co-infected patients – far outpacing other countries with similarly large epidemics like India and Nigeria.
“South Africa has also become the world’s largest provider of preventative isoniazid TB therapy to HIV patients. An estimated 370,000 people living with HIV now receive the anti-TB drug to prevent the development of active TB. In South African studies, the provision of preventative TB therapy to people on ARVs halved their risk of death.”
OK? Just in the spirit of countering 'lies and distortions', gentlemen.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
It read a whole lot like the many documents revealed in books like Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry, the well-known book by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton which gave such an incredible, rollicking rundown of how industries like Big Tobacco and Big Agriculture have used canny public relations tactics to avoid the consequences of harmful behaviour.
But the documents published in these exposes were after the event – documents unveiled in court cases showing what tactics Big Tobacco used to create doubt about the science around the harm of smoking, long after the PR campaigns were over and the protagonists had moved on to something else.
The Public Affairs Engagement (PAE) document was right up to the minute; this campaign was about to roll out.
My first port of call, always, is to ask: “Who are you?”
PAE is headed up by James K Glassman (ambassador, no less). Glassman has a long Republican pedigree – he served under George W Bush as under-secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, and served as chair of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which runs USA government-funded international broadcasting.
He was the founding executive director of Bush’s so-called action-oriented think tank, the George W Bush Institute.
You can get a flavour of the man, I think, from a couple of the things he has said.
In April 2003, he rubbished protests against the brand-new Iraq war: “Actually, the military might and presidential resolve of the United States are already stopping the war in Iraq. Stopping it by destroying its regime.
"This is not what Sean Penn, Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, Howard Dean, Jacques Chirac, Jude Wanniski, Pat Buchanan, Wallace Shawn, Robert Novak and their pals had in mind, but it is the best way to end a war - by defeating an enemy that threatened the peace of the world...”
In 1998, he said of smokers: "Understand that careful analysis by Harvard's Kip Viscusi and other scholars has found that, already, smokers save society 32 cents per pack, because they die earlier and don't incur Social Security costs.
"Taxes, on average, provide another 53 cents. So, someone smoking a pack a day already contributes about $310 a year to the general welfare..."
Now, let’s look at a couple of things his company said in its document, the same document where it states that “lies and distortions” by NGOs must be countered: “South Africa is one of only twelve countries where the mortality rate for children under five has increased since 1990.”
Applause, applause. I can’t fault you on the logic – this is ‘letterlik’ true. But that year – 1990 – is carefully chosen, isn’t it? In 1990, we were a long way off facing the tidal wave of HIV and Aids.
We still had to plough our way through the court case against Big Pharma which enabled us to get anti-retrovirals (ARTs) at affordable cost; the denialist years; and the prolonged battle to get just one step further, in the form of Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMCT), before we rolled out the largest ART programme in the world, and started down the come-back trail.
So yes, a graph of our child mortality would show that it rose astonishingly while nothing was being done to prevent children being infected in the womb or immediately after birth. But it would also show this:
October 7 2013 EurekAlert report: “Over the past decade, South Africa has made a dramatic reversal in child survival—mainly because of improvements in HIV/AIDS care, reports a study in AIDS, official journal of the International AIDS Society…
“Depending on the data source, the researchers estimate that mortality in South African children under five has decreased by six to 10 percent per year since 2006. The proportion of under-five deaths due to AIDS has fallen to between 11 and 24 percent… the rate of improvement since 2005 has been impressive—the fourth-fastest globally…”
In the same breath, the PAE document states that: “South Africa’s record in fighting HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis is poor, and the reasons have nothing to do with patented drugs.”
Really? In September last year, health-e reported that South Africa now has 2.5 million people on treatment for HIV – as mentioned, that’s the largest such programme in the world.
What’s more, we cover two-thirds of our ARV costs ourselves – while neighbours like Malawi and Mozambique, which are among the nine other countries taking the brunt of the HIV and Aids epidemic and its partner, TB, have about three-quarters of the cost funded by donors.
Health-e also notes that “the country has made huge strides in scaling up ARV access for co-infected patients – far outpacing other countries with similarly large epidemics like India and Nigeria.
“South Africa has also become the world’s largest provider of preventative isoniazid TB therapy to HIV patients. An estimated 370,000 people living with HIV now receive the anti-TB drug to prevent the development of active TB. In South African studies, the provision of preventative TB therapy to people on ARVs halved their risk of death.”
OK? Just in the spirit of countering 'lies and distortions', gentlemen.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
