By Jon Rappoport
www.insolutions.info

During my 20 years of working as a reporter, I have seen public relations efforts gain more and more power over the press.

I’ve uncovered some simple common denominators when it comes to PR. I’m talking about the kind of PR that provokes reporters into doing pieces that adhere to a planned message.

I’ll boil it down.

First, you have a Group. That Group has some combination of prestige, money, and cultivated authority. It has connections.

The Group has a goal. And it wants the public to agree with the goal.

For example: EVERYONE SHOULD GET VACCINATED.

So the Group formulates a PR plan. It doesn’t operate randomly.

There are meetings and conferences, and a Group leader lays out the steps of the plan.

The plan will involve telling certain stories to reporters. These stories will feature hooks that evoke feelings in the public consciousness. Fear and sympathy, for instance.

Designated members of the Group will contact a list of reporters with these stories. The list is time-tested: the reporters will be friendly. They won’t want to dig deeper or ask embarrassing questions.

Because after all, the stories contain lies.

That’s why there is a need for PR.

A PR agency might be hired, or the PR might be run by the Group’s specialists, who already have good media contacts.

Now, by and large, mainstream medical reporters are lazy when it comes to discovering facts and details on their own. They spend a lot of time talking to experts who can feed them fully formed stories.

Therefore, to serve the reporters, the Group has to have these experts on tap. The experts can be Group members, or they can be friendly outsiders.

BUT THEY MUST BE RECOGNIZED EXPERTS IN THEIR FIELD.

In this case, professors of medicine, researchers, medical bureaucrats, prestigious doctors.

Experts are absolutely vital to the Group’s PR plan. As I say, medical reporters, on the whole, love experts, because then the work is easy. There is no need to question the expert’s reliability or look beyond his statements. There is a rarely a need to find an opposing view to “balance out” the piece.

Medical reporters become pets. They open their mouths, and their owners put food in.

The Group anticipates some degree of resistance from less friendly reporters and from the public. The Group’s plan won’t be a complete cakewalk. But by inundating the friendly reporters with stories that have the ring of authority and evoke fear and sympathy, the Group believes it will carry the day.

Which brings us to the CDC PR plan for inducing millions of Americans to receive vaccinations for Swine Flu. Or any flu.

A 2006 article in Harper’s lays it all out. The author, Peter Doshi, focuses on the 2004 National Influenza Vaccine Summit, a conference at which Glen Nowak (CDC) used slides to present messages the CDC would project to the public through US media outlets.

Doshi writes, “The [CDC] recipe, as Nowak revealed, relies on creating ‘concern, anxiety, and worry’---its main ingredient, in other words, is fear.”

Doshi continues: “Government officials and health experts following the recipe are instructed to ‘predict dire outcomes.’”

This recipe was, in part, based on experience garnered two years earlier. Doshi: “From a 2002 focus group, the CDC determined death statistics in its flu-prevention literature were ‘eye catching and motivating.’ Participants in the study [focus group] believed ‘20,000 deaths was compelling, frightening,’ and ‘should be part of the headline.’”

Doshi continues: “Another way to ‘motivate behavior,’ the CDC recipe notes…is to describe a flu season as ‘very severe,’ ‘more severe’ than previous years, and ‘deadly’…Yet that winter’s flu season was later ruled typical and ‘medium in terms of impact.’”

Then Doshi unleashes a different kind of blockbuster in the article. Speaking to the CDC ‘deadly’ label, he notes: “After looking at more than three decades of data, scientists at the National Institutes of Health last year [2005] concluded, ‘We could not coordinate increasing vaccination coverage after 1980 with declining mortality rates in any age group.’”

The year 2004 was a strange one for the CDC flu-promotion efforts, and it reveals how disconnected CDC PR can be from the notion of truth. Doshi describes the situation:

“…the [CDC] recipe emphasizes that the public must be made to grasp the ‘seriousness of the illness.’ When 50 million doses of vaccine suddenly became unavailable in 2004, Americans understandably panicked…and medical experts predicted a public-health ‘catastrophe.’ The CDC, with its knowledge of PR, downgraded its scary portrayal of the flu [in general] to ‘an annoying illness’ from which most people ‘will recover just fine.’ It stressed the protective benefits of regular hand washing. And once the alleged crisis abated, the agency [CDC] returned to its strident communications plan. By the next fall, the CDC director was publicly stating that the flu is not ‘a benign illness. Many people don’t appreciate that it can result in hospitalization, various complications. For about 36,000 people every year, death.’”

A few final points. The CDC, through one of its departments, the Epidemic Intelligence Service, sometimes nicknamed “the medical CIA,” recruits young doctors who do a period of work in the field, with various health departments, looking into potential disease clusters and possible epidemics.

After this time of service, these doctors, returning to their practices, remain on call. They are trained to remain loyal to the CDC, and it’s likely that, wherever they work---for health agencies, in other government positions, in hospitals---they push the party line. They promote adherence to CDC PR. They are useful PR alumni.

Some years ago, I learned that the CDC sends a certain number of its people to the CIA for training. (I confirmed this with a Health and Human Services employee.) These people return to the CDC with higher security clearances. In 2009, with the PR lines between “epidemics” and bio-terrorism blurring, it’s certain that the CDC-CIA connection has become more solid and unified.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Every (fake) CDC pronouncement of an epidemic or pandemic, by association, becomes a kind of reference point for the CIA, as it promotes (to the Congress) its own need for greater funding to combat potential bio-terrorism.

Having an ally like the CIA can’t be bad for the CDC. When it comes to telling lies and launching propaganda, the CIA has a great deal of experience. And CIA media contacts are legendary.

Jon Rappoport has worked as an independent investigative reporter since 1982. The LA Weekly nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize, for an interview he did with the president of El Salvador University, where the military had taken over the campus and was disappearing students and burning books. He has written for In These Tines, Village Voice, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, CBS Healthwatch, Stern. He is the author of AIDS INC., The Secret Behind Secret Societies, and Oklahoma Bombing: The Suppressed Truth. His website is www.insolutions.info