Secrets and Lies

What can Americans concerned about the environment learn about a campaign to promote clearcutting in New Zealand? This book offers a playbook for a PR effort that could take place anywhere -- and demonstrates the lengths logging firms and governments will go to get what they want. It's a blueprint for an end run around democracy in New Zealand, in Europe, in the United States. Most of us have no way of knowing what goes on behind the news: what isn't true, what we are not being told and who is pulling the strings. This book changes that. Using the example of environmental controversy -- in this case logging of West Coast native forests by the New Zealand state-owned Timberlands West Coast -- Nicky Hager and Bob Burton have produced a remarkable expose of how governments and business interests can use public relations to manipulate political debate. The story that emerges, of unscrupulous PR tactics by the international PR firm Shandwick and a casual policy of telling the public what is useful rather than what is true, serves as a warning and an example of the same forces at work in the United States. Using hundreds of pages of internal PR documents that were leaked by insiders offended at what they saw happening, Secrets and Lies provides a unique window on how PR muscle can steamroll public opinion. We see Timberlands systematically attacking critics, arranging the creation of an 'independent' pro-logging community, group, cultivating allies in academia, government and environmental groups, compromising the independence of politicians and journalists and much more -- all for the unworthy cause of keeping native forest logging going after most New Zealanders believed it should end.