Corporate Propagandist Richard Berman Secretly Taped Bragging About How He Smears Progressives [View all]

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http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/corporate-propagandist-richard-berman-secretly-taped-bragging



One of corporate America’s most notorious political hitmen, Richard Berman, whose ugly campaigns almost always rely on smears and fake front groups that hide sponsors’ identities, has been secretly tape-recorded bragging about his dirt-filled tactics.

“Think of this as an endless war,” told a group of oil and gas industry executives at a June meeting of the Western Energy Alliance in Colorado Springs, as he sought to raise $3 million for a campaign called “Big Green Radicals” aimed at environmentalists and fracking opponents. “You can either win ugly or lose pretty.”

Berman’s remarks were secretly recorded by an attendee who gave them to the Center for Media and Democracy. His speech was filled with the inflammatory rhetoric and bruising tactics that he has used for decades in corporate propaganda campaigns to smear, discredit and destroy public-interest causes and groups. As a lengthy profile in AlterNet detailed, Berman—labeled Dr. Evil by CBS’s 60 Minutes—is known for pioneering a toxic mix of front groups, distortion-filled attacks, ridicule and bullying to stoke prejudice and hatred as a means of turning public attention and regulators away from clients’ business practices.

Berman has gone after a who’s who of progressive causes: fast food workers seeking raises, advocates pushing for higher minimum wages, any union organizing effort, lawyers defending the right to a trial by jury, animal rights groups concerned about treatment of animals; environmentalists worried about mercury in fish, nutritionists worried about trans fat in diets, physicians worried about how high-fructose corn syrup induces obesity, and more. He came to Colorado this past June to build on a new anti-fracking campaign that already has run aggressive ads in Pennsylvania, Colorado and Washington, D.C., CMD reported.