Ocean Book of the MonthEvery month, The Ocean Project highlights a book focused on our blue planet or environmental sustainability. Books for all age groups will be covered, non-fiction and fiction, prose and poetry. If you have a suggestion, please let us know. 
Trust Us We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Futureby Sheldon Rampton Fearless investigative journalists Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber (Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! and Mad Cow U.S.A.) are back with a gripping exposé of the public relations industry and the sold out scientists who back their business-funded, anti-consumer-safety agendas. In this case there are two kinds of "experts" in question--the public relations spin doctors behind the scenes and the "independent" experts paraded before the public, scientists who have been specifically selected to promote the views of corporations involved in controversial actions. Lively writing on controversial topics such as dioxin, bovine growth hormone, and genetically modified food makes this a real page-turner, shocking in its portrayal of the real and potential dangers in each of these technological innovations and of the "media pseudo-environment" created to obfuscate the risks. By financing and publicizing views that support the goals of corporate sponsors, PR campaigns have, over the course of the century, managed to suppress the dangers of lead poisoning, for example, for decades, silence the scientist who discovered that rats fed on genetically modified corn had significant organ abnormalities, squelch television and newspaper stories about the risks of bovine growth hormone, and place enough confusion and doubt in the public's mind about global warming to suppress any mobilization for action. In Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future, Rampton and Stauber offer a chilling exposé on the manufacturing of "independent experts." Public relations firms and corporations have seized upon a slick new way of getting 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 even a watchdog group. The problem is that these third parties are usually anything but neutral. They have been handpicked, cultivated, and meticulously packaged 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." This book will certainly serve as an eye opener! This book should motivate and inspire us to provide future generations our same experiences outdoors.
|
