Corporations spent $240 million on environmental advocacy advertising in two years

Evidence

Business interests also sought other avenues to influence news media coverage. They established the Media Institute in 1976 for the purpose of monitoring the media’s coverage of business. The Mobil Oil Corporation started buying advertising space on the op-ed page of the New York Times in 1971, a practice it later extended to similar space in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal. Many of these “ads” simply expressed Mobil’s view on current environmental issues. In the mid-1970s, the American Electric Power Company similarly commenced a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign in opposition to the mandatory use of scrubbers for air pollution control and in favor of greater reliance on coal and nuclear power. In 1976, the Advertising Council initiated its own multimillion-dollar effort to inform the public about the importance of the U.S. economy. Corporations spent 100 million and 140 million in advocacy advertising on environmental and energy issues in 1975 and 1976, respectively. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 441

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Bears on the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ piece only tangentially, but more relevantly seeds material for how corporate voice colonized op-ed space.
• XREF: connects to: Corporations deploy distancing strategies to wear down environmental justice campaigns — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 159

Broader Connections

• Corporations deploy distancing strategies to wear down environmental justice campaigns #corroborates (0.80) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 159