Featured at
Writers Read: Grant Ennis, author of
Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment.
His entry begins:
I’m reading the pre-release English translation of Dr Mélissa Mialon’s Big Food & Co: How the Pursuit of Profit At-All-Costs Harms Our Health. It’s excellent. Dr. Mialon names names and “brings receipts” in exposing the corruption of the global food environment. She pulls no punches in showing that the charities that we expect to be on the side of public health are captured by industries that harm us all, and through her unflinching critique provides...[read on]
About
Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment, from the publisher:
“Think global, act local!” “Be the change you want to see in the world!” “Every little bit counts!” We can all get on board with such sentiments, right? That, of course, is exactly what corporate spin-masters across the world are banking on. By weaponizing such seemingly innocuous yet powerful narratives, change becomes a 
matter of personal choice, something each of us must slave away at day by day: switching off lightbulbs to save the environment or exercising to shed the weight we’ve gained from consuming junk food. All the while, the corporate welfare tap continues to flow, with over $6 trillion worth of annual subsidies dished out to industries that directly contribute to the deaths of over 5.5 million people each year through diabetes, road deaths, global warming, and other crises. But such framing is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the corporate disinformation playbook. This playbook is the dark matter of activist work: the unseeable element shaping harmful spin across all issues. It has never been reverse engineered – until now. In Dark PR, Grant Ennis – drawing on his decades of experience working in the environmental, philanthropy, and public health sectors – reveals exactly how multinationals go about hoodwinking and manipulating us. In doing so, he lifts the lid on the nine devious frames contained within the cross-industry corporate disinformation playbook: through denialism, normalization, victim-blaming, multifactorialism, and a variety of other tried-and-tested tactics, corporations divert citizens’ attention away from the real causes of global problems, leading them into counter-productive blind-alley “solutions” like ethical consumerism and divestment. Sadly, though, buying Fair Trade chocolate has not and never will save the world. Only by collectively organizing to lobby our governments can we break this destructive cycle of lies and deadly incentives and reclaim control of our lives.
Learn
more about Dark PR at the publisher's website, and
connect with Grant Ennis on LinkedIn.
The Page 99 Test: Dark PR.
Writers Read: Grant Ennis.
--Marshal Zeringue
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