In this episode, David Fenton, founder of the first progressive PR firm in the US, reflects on lessons learned from 50 years of advancing activist causes through effective communications.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
David Fenton came of age as an activist during an era that neither I nor likely most Volts listeners experienced firsthand. He attended the Chicago 7 trial in 1968. He helped organize the famous No Nukes concert in Washington, D.C. in 1979. He worked on Nelson Mandela's campaign for the presidency of South Africa in 1994. The list goes on.
In the middle of all that, in 1982, he founded Fenton Communications, a PR firm devoted entirely to progressive causes. It was the first such PR firm in the nation, though it has inspired many copycats since then. It has grown steadily since the ‘80s and now has offices in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, employing more than 100 people.
Fenton has just released a new book — The Activist's Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator — that is a combination biography, photo journal, and accounting of lessons learned in the PR business. He tells the stories of his numerous campaigns over the years (alongside pages and pages of vivid images) and tries to boil down what works to capture media attention and advance progressive causes, and what doesn't.
Fenton's life story is fascinating in its own right, and he comes bearing trenchant criticisms of the climate movement, so I was eager to talk to him about the action-packed life he has led, what he has learned about working with journalists, and what the climate movement is getting wrong in its approach to communications.
Alright then, with no further ado, David Fenton, welcome to Volts, and thank you for coming.
David Fenton
It's very good to be with you.
David Roberts
Thank you. So I read your book and it was kind of mind-blowing, in one particular way, which, you know, this, I guess, is going to seem obvious to say, but I guess everyone around my age or younger — I'm 50 now — came into politics. I came to sort of political consciousness under Clinton and then in 2000 and Bush won, basically under Bush. And so for my entire life, my entire political life, the Democratic Party has been more or less defensive, timid, sort of technocratic, uninspiring, like the sort of boring teacher at school. And it's just, reading about your experiences coming into the left 20 years earlier than that, amidst the sort of ferment of the 60s and 70s, and it's just wild how different things were.
It's just wild that the left, and you tell all these great stories about this. But the left was, like, felt insurgent. It felt rebellious. It was doing crazy stuff. It was trying crazy stuff, saying crazy stuff, doing all these crazy protests and all these different experiments with different sit ins and just the whole thing felt like the whole world was up in the air and anything could happen and we're the vanguard. And it's just so fundamentally different from how the left feels now. I don't even know what my question is, honestly, but it's crazy to hear what things were like then.
So maybe just tell listeners a little bit about, like, young David Fenton and how you got pulled into sort of left activism and what it was like back then.
David Fenton
Well, it was a lot more fun than it is now, I can tell you that.
David Roberts
Exactly. That's another thing that comes across.
David Fenton
But of course, the left and the Democratic Party has never really been the same thing.
David Roberts
Right.
David Fenton
We've gone through periods of influencing the Democratic Party and then not influencing it. But I was in high school in New York City in the late 1960s, and there was just revolution everywhere, and including in popular culture. You know, the music was exhorting us to rebel, and we did, and it was, you know, we broke with the culture, religions and mores of our parents and previous generations kind of overnight. And that was pretty unprecedented and heady, and it was very utopian. We really thought we were making a better world. The so-called "Age of Aquarius." No, really, we did it every time you turned on the radio, that's what you heard you were doing.
David Roberts
Yeah.
David Fenton
And of course, the heavy experimentation with psychedelic drugs at that point also contributed to often a feeling of possibility and a connection to something larger and to each other. So it was a very different kind of time. Another thing that was different about it, though, is that there were only three television networks, and so the country had a shared experience that it doesn't have anymore, largely with some exceptions, like the Super Bowl. And so if we got attention in a way that got on the news, everybody heard about it.
David Roberts
Right. We're going to talk a lot more about that later. And that's another again thing that's just wild reading about it was possible to gain the country's attention, basically, like full stop. Back then, for good or for ill, you could gain the country's attention. And now today, I don't even know if that's even a thing anymore or even possible anymore for anything or anyone.
David Fenton
It's harder. But the George Floyd murder certainly got the country's attention and created all kinds of activism. But that is increasingly rare. That is true. One of my formative experiences was I was at the Chicago Seven trial every day for three weeks with
David Roberts
We have a lot of young listeners, so let's just give like a two sentence summary of what that is.
David Fenton
Yeah, well, first of all, some of them have seen the Netflix movie "The Trial of the Chicago 7."
David Roberts
I should go watch it.
David Fenton
It's a great film. And so this was Nixon charged eight leading anti-war activists with conspiracy to cross state lines to incite a riot at the Democratic National Convention in 1968. And it became the Chicago Seven instead of the original Eight when the trial began, and Black Panther co-founder and chairman Bobby Seal was removed from the trial after first being bound and gagged by the judge in the courtroom, he's silenced. First I was ever in an American courtroom, I see this Black guy tied to his chair, something stuffed in his mouth, and big, barely federal marshals handcuffing him, and members of the spectator crowd jumping on the federal marshals and having fistfights.
And I'm like, oh, I guess this is what happens in courtrooms. So it became the Chicago 7. And so the reason I brought it up is that the trial was turned by the defendants into theater and agitprop. And every day after the antics in the case, where there was a lot of humor as well as putting the war in Vietnam on trial, we would go back to the defense offices in Chicago. And the main point was to watch the evening news broadcast to see our reviews, to see how we had done, and the coverage shaped how the trial defendants and attorneys conducted the case the next day.
And you can't imagine something like that happening today. And so that trial ended up completely backfiring on Nixon because it deeply entered the culture and became a cause célèbre for basically all the young people of the country.
David Roberts
Another thing, too, is the left used to be kind of funny, which is extremely, extremely not funny now.
David Fenton
That's really true.
David Roberts
Politics is so oppressively not funny now.
David Fenton
Yeah, and it's far more sectarian now, too. But some of that humor came from one of the Chicago 7 defendants who's played in the film by Sacha Baron Cohen, Abbie Hoffman, who was basically a child of Lenny Bruce, the great comedian of the early 60s, following in his footsteps. And Abbie was just funny, as hell and would stage all kinds of stunts that would get all this media attention. Abbie was one of the people who understood what television was going to do to issues in politics early. I'll tell you one quick story. It was illegal to wear an American flag as a piece of clothing and Abbie was continually being arrested laughing, wearing an American flag shirt.
And one day he went on the top talk show in America at the time, the Oprah Winfrey of its time, the Merv Griffin Show. And the executive producer of that show happened to be Roger "Evil" Ailes, the person who founded Fox News later.
David Roberts
No kidding.
David Fenton
And so Roger's response to Abbie defying the law on TV and wearing his American flag shirt was to literally block out the half of the TV screen where Abbie was. So you could only see the interviewer, you couldn't see Abbie.
David Roberts
And reading about Abbie Hoffman, too, is a great sort of illustration of the point. He tried all kinds of things, and some of them blew up in everyone's face. Some of them were clearly, obviously enduringly anti-productive, but some of them also were great and got attention and I just think about it now, like Abbie Hoffman trying to run his ideas past a group of Democratic consultants. It would just be like, no, don't do any of that. He wouldn't do the counterproductive stuff, but he also wouldn't have done all the brilliant stuff that lives on in history books now and caused people to come together around stuff, like just none of it would happen.
David Fenton
You're just bringing back memories. Abbie went to the New York Stock Exchange once and threw wads of dollar bills down on the trading floor. And just as he expected, all trading stopped while the traders scrambled for the frigging dollar bills. And this, of course, was covered and with great agitprop symbolism. And today, if you go to the Stock Exchange visitor gallery, there's a glass wall so that no one can do that. And in the 80s I urged activists who were protesting money in politics to do this from the House of Representative visitors gallery. I figured with inflation, they'd have to throw five dollar bills, but I was sure that members of Congress would stop everything and pick up the bills, but no one had the courage to do it.
David Roberts
So looking back in history, you kind of got into all this as a photographer. You went and were photographing protests and news stuff, and then you kind of got pulled into the activism yourself and then kind of got pulled into the side of activism that was about trying to manage attention, basically trying to manage attention and press. So tell us, like, what were your sort of first experiences or campaigns where you had the sort of concrete thought like, oh, like, managing attention and managing the press is an art that I could get good at and do sort of like it's not just part of a campaign, but this is a vocation.
David Fenton
Well, I never thought about it as a vocation. I was an activist, and I was looking for ways to make activism more effective and get power. So the first thing when I transitioned from being a radical photojournalist for Liberation news service that served all the hippie, underground anti-war newspapers of the time is in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when they lowered the voting age to 18 and the supreme court said students could vote where they went to school. There we were in this town of 100,000 people, half of whom were students, and we thought, well, let's take over the city government.
So I was living in this hippie commune, and we decided to start a third political party called the Human Rights Party. And we started organizing, and I had never done this before, but I started organizing the press conferences and making the radio commercials and rehearsing the candidates. And we were frankly surprised when we won control of the city council. So that was my first PR effort. And a little bit before that, I had also helped out on a campaign to get someone out of prison a guy in Michigan named John Sinclair who had been sentenced to ten years for two joints.
And Abbie Hoffman brought John Lennon and Yoko Ono and Stevie Wonder to play a big benefit concert for this guy. And the Michigan Supreme Court reversed its previous ruling, like, the next day after this concert and let the guy out of prison and overturn the state's marijuana laws as unconstitutional. So I started seeing that organizing media attention with the right kind of messaging and delivery vehicles could have a big impact.
David Roberts
Your book contains some really wild stories of very successful campaigns, and it goes from No Nukes to Castro and then, like, Mandela shows up. Is it Zelig? Ze-lig or Zee-lig? I don't know that I've ever said that out loud before, but like, you're, you sort of pop up at every kind of pivotal leftist campaign. So tell me just for instance, about the No Nukes thing. Like, that was the first time that music, a concert came into it, right?
David Fenton
Well, I had done this concert to get this guy John Sinclair out of prison in 1971 with John and Yoko. But this was a bigger thing the No Nukes concerts for which Stuart Brand has never forgiven me, if you know what I mean, for the audience. That's because he's a big proponent of nuclear power and I am not, although I recognize why so many climate people are thinking that that might be necessary.
David Roberts
But the focus of the No Nukes concert was nuclear weapons, wasn't it?
David Fenton
No, it was nuclear power.
David Roberts
Oh, really?
David Fenton
Yes. And here's what happened. So I was working at Rolling Stone magazine and became the director of Public Relations there in 1977 when Rolling Stone was a really interesting and important magazine and had lots of investigative reporting in it and was center stage in the media and popular culture. And it was a great job for me because I got to meet everybody at the New York Times and the Washington Post and all the networks. It was very visible. So I also got to know Bonnie Raitt and Carly Simon and James Taylor and this great musician from the band Orleans, John Hall, and Jackson Browne.
And we all decided — because, remember, at that time, they were planning to build hundreds of these old generation nuclear power plants. We decided that we would do a series of big time concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York and make a record and a motion picture to try to educate people about the significant problems with that technology and its perennial poisons that it makes. So we did that, and it got a lot of attention. And the Three Mile Island accident happened right in the middle of it. So that was ...
David Roberts
I guess you would want to call them good timing, but ...
Not good, but it certainly impacted the result. I mean, ultimately those plans were derailed. And in the culture, this slogan we had back then of No Nukes was very widely adopted and I don't know if you want to talk now about the issue but we can certainly do that later if you like or if you don't like.
I can't think of anything more boring than having another debate over nuclear power. Everyone knows how they feel about it.
David Fenton
Yeah, that's fine. So after that, those concerts I thought that there should be a public relations firm for progressives. There was no such thing. The PR firms were paid to lie all the time for the tobacco industry and dictators and polluters and big companies.
David Roberts
And it's sort of like it was between I think like the 50s and the 70s when those PR firms got really, really good at lying. Like the PR industry had kind of grown up and become very sophisticated by that point.
David Fenton
True. And the media had become more dominant so they were playing a very negative role. And I could see even with my fair minded journalist friends they couldn't help but be influenced to some degree by an organized flow of information going to them from one side. And so I thought this is not good and we need to reach these reporters with truthful material. And everybody thought I was crazy and of course I was. And we started in 1982 in New York. We opened a Washington office six months later. And now for 40 years Fenton has done nothing but progressive work.
David Roberts
And you mentioned that you have inspired copycats. Would you say that the progressive PR industry is robust at this point? It has enough, has as many people as it needs. Where do things stand now?
David Fenton
Well, it's much, much bigger. Of course. When I started I was the only one pretty much and I was just at a conference of an organization called the Communications Network in Seattle and there were 1,000 people there that do communications for nonprofits and foundations which would have been unimaginable back then. And a number of firms have been spawned some by people who used to work for me and are doing very good stuff. I think the problem is at a different level which we can talk about which is still in the psyche and worldview of progressives and scientists and others.
Communications is a low priority and the related problem is that resources for it are scarce there's more than they were. But because the media environment is so different now as we were talking about if you don't pay for attention it's very hard to get enough of it. And so this is what I hope is the next evolution.
David Roberts
Right. Well, looking back at history again, it seems like the left back around Abbie Hoffman and the hippies and all that, it seems like the left used to have a pretty good appreciation of the fact that if you're trying to sort of change the world, revolutionize everything, a big part of that is communicating to people, telling people about it, and persuading people. You can point to a lot of what I think were probably pretty counterproductive attempts at communications, but at least they seemed to get it. So when did everything become so kind of professionalized and scientized and policy-focused?
How did that happen?
David Fenton
It came with the evolution of the NGOs, which started out like, take the environmental groups. I was present at the creation in the early 70s, the first Earth Day, when the big environmental NGOs emerged, and they were scrappy, and they were in your face, and they were taking on polluters big time, and they were focused on popular mobilization, not solely policy and law and science. And so they grew a lot, and things change, and institutions go through life cycles. And while there are many, many fine people in these organizations, their focus has shifted as they've gotten much larger and have much bigger budgets and much more complicated boards of directors, I would say, and funding sources.
So that now very little of the billions of dollars that are taken in by the environmental groups are spent on actually educating and reaching and mobilizing the public. So it's become more of a professional operation, but much more focused on what I call the supply of policy meetings, reports, conferences, studies ...
David Roberts
No shortage of that,
David Fenton
And some great lawsuits that are essential, of course, and less on what we really lack, which is demand for those policies. We don't really have a shortage of supply. We know pretty much what needs to be done on the climate issue, or a lot of it, but the public isn't clamoring for it.
Climate is a low saliency, basically low-priority issue for most of the public. And we're not addressing that as a priority, in my opinion.
David Roberts
Well, over your career, starting back with those activist campaigns in the then in the 80s, you made a profession of it and were hired by all sorts of left campaigns. I mentioned Mandela before, and just like every big progressive movement, somehow you popped up in. So what have you learned about how to catch the media's attention? And has that changed? And if so, how has it changed? What gets attention? If you could summarize.
David Fenton
I'd want to start, if I could, with what reaches the public. And the top lesson of my book and what I'm trying to impart to progressives and people in the climate community, is that we know from cognitive science and linguistics and marketing science that people learn from simple messages and from the repetition of simple messages.
David Roberts
Yes.
David Fenton
And our community likes complexity and is rewarded for complexity. And we hate repeating ourselves.
David Roberts
Well, we're all humanities grads, right? We're all the most ... right where you're judged on being the cleverest in the room. And the last thing you want to do in like a grad seminar in philosophy is repeat what someone else said over and over again.
David Fenton
That's right. And of course, in the sciences, you're rewarded for specialization and publishing novel papers not simplifying and repeating. And there's a kind of disdain, it's a subconscious disdain among people who study the humanities, the law and the sciences. There's exceptions. But overall there's a disdain for selling ideas. There's what the linguist George Lakoff calls the enlightenment fallacy that great ideas, great policies magically sell themselves because they're so brilliant, they're reasonable. So meanwhile, the people that go to business school and work for these polluting diabolical industries and the Republican Party, with few exceptions, now these business school types, they have a different attitude and orientation and paradigm of change, which is they've had to master cognitive and marketing science and sell products and services to advance their careers.
So they actually know how to do this and they really focus on it and they spend a lot of money on it. And they have built significant institutions whose primary purpose is, as Jane Mayer said in her seminal book "Dark Money" to change how Americans think. And so too much, there's a kind of unilateral disarmament being practiced by our side. As Dr. Anthony Leirsowitz, who runs the Great Yale Project on Climate Change Communications says, "We are in a propaganda war, but our side is barely on the field."
David Roberts
Can I share here a very brief anecdote of my own? I just was on Twitter a few days ago talking about we need basically a marketing campaign to create negative associations in homeowners minds about gas, right? We need to just make gas feel bad. It doesn't even matter if the homeowner knows why gas feels bad, right? Just as long as gas is vaguely associated with negative stuff. And you would not believe the number of responses I got from people on the left, on the Democratic side saying basically you're talking about manipulating people. You're talking about you're trying to group think people into thinking how you think.
It's just the whole idea of consciously shaping people's perceptions in and of itself seems to be disdained by still by enormous numbers of people on the left.
David Fenton
That is exactly the problem. You would put it very succinctly. And what I try to explain to these people is what we actually need to do is unmanipulate people. They've been manipulated. So our responsibility is to get them the truth. And there's no ethical problem in simplifying the truth. That's the way people learn the truth. You have to be ethical about it and factual, but you need to simplify it. And back to your earlier question about getting media attention because the brain only absorbs material and learns and public opinion and the brain only changes from repetition.
The job of getting media attention is to get it repetitively and to not think that because you've had an op-ed one time that you've changed the world. You haven't.
David Roberts
Frank Luntz has a famous quote about this, doesn't he? Basically the gist of it is about the time you are screamingly sick of saying it and feel like you're going to go insane if you say it one more time. That's about the time that most consumers heard it the first time.
David Fenton
That's right. It's only when you're sick to death of it that anybody's heard it. And this is why I'm preaching the need to buy visibility, repetitive visibility, especially on social media, which we can do now in incredibly scientific and targeted and proven ways, because if we don't, we're just not going to have sufficient visibility. I mean, people are on their phones and if we're not, guess what? We're invisible. I want to give you an example of this. So I'm a progressive, I'm a leftist, of course, but I am very convinced that we can and must get some Republicans on our side on climate.
I think it's really important always to split the enemy, right? It's just basic. So if you look at this right now, when conservatives go online, pretty much all they see about climate change is it's a hoax. That's their input. That's the flow of material and content to them. So how can you expect them to think anything else? So as I say to people in these organizations, it's not just the Russians that can buy ads on Facebook to change public opinion. We can do it too. And it doesn't even really cost that much, and you never have to scale it till you have proof of what's working.
So I've been doing little experiments and making short climate videos where conservatives speak to conservatives about how climate change threatens conservative values and then measuring the responses and lo and behold, it works. You change the perceptual input, you start to change the belief systems if you have people from their own tribe, of course, speaking to their values. And I'm kind of astonished that we don't do more of this.
David Roberts
Well, this gets to, I think, one of the central things that I wanted to ask you about and talk about, which is your whole model, how you ran campaigns through the decades, was about how to get to the press and thereby get to the people who read the press. And so if you want the press to repeat your message right, if you want to get that crucial element of repetition, you have to come at the press with new twists, over and over and over again. Because they're not just going to fall in line like soldiers and repeat what you want to say over and over again. You have to sort of in some way trick them into writing about the same thing over and over again.
In the sort of pre-2000, maybe world. I feel like it was easier because, as you say, there were a limited number of outlets, a limited number of reporters that you could conceivably know and have relationships with. But since then, the media has splintered. But more to the point, and this is my key point, is it seems like what the right wing did is say screw trying to persuade the press to carry our messages. We're just going to build our own press. So you have a commercial on Fox saying one thing and maybe if you test someone immediately after seeing that message they feel mildly positive about it.
But then they go back to Fox and it's basically a 24 hours commercial for the opposition. That small positive feeling gets washed away like so my question is just basically the, the right built a big machine to replace having to persuade the press to do things right. They just built the machine to get all their messages directly to all their voters and the left just didn't do that. Kept chasing after the press, kept trying to persuade the press to carry its message. And now you have the right with a big machine that can carry any message at once to all its voters immediately and repeatedly.
And then you have the left sort of chasing after a fractured, dispersed, less powerful press that seems even more hostile to paying any attention to it. So it just seems like a huge structural imbalance and I would love to hear you sort of address that.
David Fenton
Yeah well you're absolutely right. You know the other thing the right did is they started beating up on the media very conscious. That's right. And you know, this all started when Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post in the early 70s. And he purposely bought the New York Post because he knew the media was in New York and that he could start changing the overton window of what the press viewed as legitimate and who they viewed as legitimate. And it was a very conscious and extremely money losing enterprise. The Post has never made a dime.
So I write in my book about how when Fox News started, the great journalist Bill Moyers, who was a longtime commentator and PBS empreserio and who had actually started as Linda Johnson's press secretary during the Great Society. Bill went to the progressive billionaires and said look, we have to start our own television network because what Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch are going to do is try to brainwash a bunch of the country and if we leave them to do it with no counter force they're going to succeed. And unfortunately ...
Sure enough.
And unfortunately, I think largely because these progressive billionaires none of them had any media or entertainment or content background. They just didn't see the importance of this and so it never happened.
David Roberts
Honestly, the most fateful mistake the left made in the last 60 years?
David Fenton
I would say well, that's one, you know, I would say also, you know, we used to have these rules for at least broadcast television, the Fairness and Equal Time doctrines. And Ronald Reagan repealed those rules, and the Democrats should have insisted on putting them back in and applying them to cable, because then you couldn't have Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. And that's why Reagan repealed those rules. I talk about this in my book, and I'm also kind of amazed that with the Democratic majority, we haven't done some very basic things. Like, for example, the problem with most social media is not that people's crazy individual posts, you know, let people post mostly what they want, except for, you know, hate speech.
The problem is the algorithmic boost of the false salacious, reptilian negative, horrible material to millions and millions of people intentionally to keep eyeballs on the platforms. And the law makes the tech companies have zero liability for what they choose to boost to millions of people. No other industry has this, and that law should be changed so that individual posts, as the law is now the platforms don't have liability, but if they choose on YouTube to serve you up a bunch of climate denial, you should be able to sue them.
David Roberts
Well, I have mixed feelings about how that would play out, but it would be nice if the left had well, every time I relate the argument about how the left should or should have build its own sort of media machine, two things come up, and let's take them one at a time. The first is but Air America. What do you have to say about but Air America? And just again, for listeners who are not ancient like us, Air America was an attempt to start a progressive radio station back in the 20 ... I forget exactly what years ... I want to say the mid-2000s.
David Fenton
It was a long time ago.
David Roberts
It was a long time ago. And long story short, it didn't take off and it died.
David Fenton
Well, just because something's tried once and failed doesn't mean that it's a bad idea. It's all in the execution. People say to me, when I urge the funding of large climate advertising public education campaigns, I get. Well, Al Gore tried that in 2007, right? And I'm like, okay, well, that was 15 years ago, and maybe we know how to do it better now.
David Roberts
He did dump a lot of money into that ad campaign, and he really did nothing.
David Fenton
It's true. And I write about it in my book. There's a whole chapter about this that I think is very respectful of Al, who I work closely with, but also laments a few things that we could have done and we didn't. So, yeah, look, it's this simple. Visibility is power. So if you're not ensuring that you're visible in effective ways and you're not reaching audiences repetitively with effective content, you're not powerful, you don't exist. I'll give you an example of this. So if you go to Washington DC. And you turn on television news, on cable or broadcast or any place, you're barraged by fossil fuel advertising.
Fossil fuels are the greatest thing ever. They're making us independent and free and jobs and prosperity and beautiful. People are telling you this and pretty much that's all you ever see.
David Roberts
Or if you subscribe to newsletters from Axios or any Washington Post, any of the big ones, for us it's like genuinely like 90% profile fuel advertising. It's wild.
David Fenton
Yeah, because they understand our enemies in those industries that that's effective. They're shaping the perceptual environment of the media and policymakers and we're not. So meanwhile, I ask people when I give presentations and I say, you never see that if you use these fossil fuels forever, you know the National Mall is going to be underwater and you're going to have to abandon the Norfolk naval base and price of food is going to skyrocket. And you know, you think you have an immigration problem now, you ain't seen nothing yet. And those messages you'll never see if you're turn on TV and you work in the White House or the Congress or the think tanks or you're a media booker for CNN, invisible unless you.
David Roberts
Go to their websites and click on reports or research and then you get the big white paper. right? That's where you find it out.
David Fenton
That's right. So I asked people, how much do you think it costs to buy a 32nd television ad on CNN or Fox News in Washington DC? And most people say $100,000 or $50,000. And the answer is $2,000 to $3,000 in most cases. And people are shocked by it.
David Roberts
That is wild.
David Fenton
That's right. So then I get to say, well, I guess the reason our community doesn't neutralize the pernicious propaganda of the fossil fuel industry in the most important city in the world for this is not that we can't afford it, it's because we don't think this way and our enemies do.
David Roberts
I was going to talk about this later, but we might have to talk about it now. It's not like the green NGO world is scraping for dollars. There are billions of dollars. I mean, it's wild, the budgets of these groups. There's hundreds of millions of dollars sloshing around in the green NGO space. And I frequently have occasion to wonder, where is it all going? How are they spending that much money without making a dent on public dialogue? I know I can find like if I'm into white papers, I can find a near endless supply. But what are they doing with all that money?
David Fenton
Well, they do really important lawsuits. The legal work is really important and some of the policy work, of course, is useful, but it's out of balance. And there are many wonderful people in these groups. They're my friends, they were my clients for years. But their paradigm of what to do as revenue increases is only to hire more people to do more legal and policy and science work. And I was talking to the head of a major environmental NGO just recently and I said, as you get more revenue, hiring people isn't the only thing you can do with the money.
You could also buy visibility to change narratives and to get rid of myths about renewable energy and all sorts of stuff. But this is not the mindset of this community.
David Roberts
We're straying all over the place now. But you keep bringing up things that I wanted to ask about. There's this sort of attitude, I feel like, that took over in the professional green space, I'd say, in like the 80s, 90s, 2000s where the idea was, climate is not a partisan issue, it affects everyone. And we come together around bipartisan solutions. And so the sort of presumption has always been insofar as you're going to do a big communications campaign or you're going to do any sort of big campaign, you don't want to piss off the right. You don't want to sort of poke eyes.
You don't want to go too far and casting them as villains or you don't want to heighten the contrasts too much, which, of course, is a compunction that they don't have at all. So that has had the effect of making communications out of these groups just so milquetoast and kind of like, blah. I feel like that's changing. I feel like there are young people in these groups who get it now, but for a long time they just had one hand tied behind their back. Because the sort of truth of the matter is the right is the villain here.
The right is who is allied with the fossil fuel companies and who is opposed to regulation and as opposed to taxes and spending and et cetera, et cetera. I mean, that was clear a long time ago. But this pretense of like, we're polite and bipartisan and can't irritate anyone or piss anyone off really stuck around for decades.
David Fenton
It's true. And there was a related thing that I always found very frustrating, which is we don't really want to talk about the negative impacts of global warming. Let's just talk about clean energy.
David Roberts
It makes people sad, right? It makes people sad when you do that.
David Fenton
And I try to explain in my book, anytime you hear black and white thinking, it's almost always wrong. It's not a choice between telling people what the bad effects are going to be or showing people that we can have a better future. The art of this is to synthesize those messages in the right balance so that you're inspiring people that we can have a better, cleaner, cheaper world while also telling them it's kind of urgent.
David Roberts
I know. And of course, if you scare people and then ask them, do you like this feeling of being terrified? Of course they're going to say no. Of course you're going to get a negative result in your test group if you terrify people, because people don't like to be terrified. But nonetheless, terror has motivated people to do all kinds of things.
David Fenton
But there are some things that are very basic that we haven't done where you don't have to terrify anybody. Here's to me, the most prominent example of this. According to the Yelp Project on Climate Change Communications, only 20% of Americans know that there's scientific consensus among climate scientists that we are heating the Earth. Most Americans still believe that there's enormous scientific disagreement about this. And when you inform when the people at Yale go into their testing labs and inform almost any constituency, including the right, that in fact, all the climate scientists agree, we're the ones doing this now, support for action goes way up.
So I've been urging for a long time, and I'd like to urge again right now, we need to do a campaign to reach the public with this very simple, very effective message. All the climate scientists agree it's us, but we do like, we will change the whole dynamic.
David Roberts
But remember, there was that study a while back that sort of found that 97% of climate scientists agree with this, which is I always found amusing. Like, oh, now we have a study saying the obvious, but this was the center of a lot of climate communications for a long time. Like, I've heard that message a million times and not only have I heard the message, but we had this elaborate years long process of literally pulling scientists all over the globe together into a structured organization so that we can literally find the scientific consensus. It's just been said and communicated and proven a gazillion times, and it just doesn't sink into the public. So I guess ...
Because they don't hear it, it's not reaching them. You see, this is the fundamental distinction between what we know in our community and what we ensure through scientific means of using mass communication science that the people find out about it. I'm from New York. Forgive me, I can be too sarcastic sometimes, but I call it the telepathic theory of communications. We know something, the IPCC has talked about it, and magically everybody finds out about it. Now let's look at the origin of why only 20% of Americans know their scientific consensus. The origin is that was the propaganda strategy of the fossil fuel industry to spread doubt about that.
David Fenton
Scientists don't all agree and they took that from tobacco. Doctors don't all agree smoking causes cancer. That is their product. Naomi Oreskes in her brilliant book and film documented this. So that's call it half or 60% of the reason that the public is confused. But we also bear responsibility for this because we have never mounted a math campaign at the scale needed. And we certainly could afford to, to inform people of the truth in guaranteed and effective ways. And by the way, this is why I remain an optimist about this, because I believe that if we ever did do mass education campaigns effectively, that the public would rally and they wouldn't just say, okay, kill me, kill my family.
That's not what they're going to say.
David Roberts
The other situation that seems like the left sort of helped or encouraged through these years is this notion that I think still captures a lot of people in DC and in like media and political and financial elites, that Fox was necessary as a counterbalance to CNN, right? That we have a liberal media, it's CNN and MSNBC and all this. And Fox is just the other side of that. And so we have this two sided media now. And of course you and I know that if there was such a thing as a left media, it would not look anything like what MSNBC looked like.
The idea that liberals are running the show over there or that they're the same kind of creature, right. Mirror images of one another is just you wouldn't believe. And I think like normies too, I don't know, people object when I use the term normies. Let's say non-political, obsessive, just normal people when I talk to them. That is kind of the folk wisdom that's out there is. Like CNN's liberal, Fox's conservative, they both have their medias. So it seems to me that that impression, that idea is itself a huge impediment to building and investing in true communications infrastructure that could get messages to people.
David Fenton
Yeah, and that's a right wing myth that they spent decades perpetuating, that the corporate media is somehow the left. And that's just ridiculous.
David Roberts
I mean, it seems ridiculous on its face to me, but it genuinely is. Like people I respect and people I know still believe it. But anyway, so given the current media landscape in all its utter dysfunction, you got sort of like an MSM that is declining. People's trust in it is declining all the time. It's in a financial and economic utter mess. And then you have this what looks like growing burgeoning right wing media that's gone way beyond Fox. Now you have multiple cable channels, who knows how many radio shows, facebook pages.
David Fenton
And all this internet dominant.
David Roberts
Tiktoks, Fox, YouTube. They dominate the YouTube algorithm. I mean, the thing about the algorithm is it doesn't have to be biased itself. If it's going to select for fear, right, and outrage and terror, then right wing messages are going to do better.
David Fenton
Well, that's true, except we don't pressure the tech and media institutions. We don't do that. The right does that. And if you're attacked from one side only, which side are you going to pay attention to? It's called working the refs. And we don't do it. We're so nice.
David Roberts
They bullied institution after institution after institution with that same play. They run the same play every time. They ran it on the media and then they ran it on social media. And like Facebook, they just fell for it almost immediately.
David Fenton
Because they think mass communications is important and they pay attention to it. So will we please start paying attention to it? And by the way, I have a simple suggestion that would help a lot that's really easy and doesn't cost a dime.
David Roberts
We're wrapping up here so ... I want to hear a quote like, what should the left messengers or aspiring messagers do, given the mess of the current media landscape?
David Fenton
Well, the most important thing to do is to create a unified echo chamber that the right has and we don't. We have the Tower of Babel. They pick messages of the day. They all fall in line behind it. They repeat the same thing over and over and over again because they know that's how the brain works. And if, for example, we could just get all the scientists and NGOs and politicians that are with us on climate to use the same language, the same imagery, and it's proven language and imagery at this point, it would make an enormous difference.
And what we should say and we need to recognize the public doesn't know what net zero means. It doesn't know what an emissions is. It certainly barely knows what carbon is. It does know what pollution is. People think in mental frames. They're actual circuits in your brain that have been shaped by decades of exposure to language. So you want to use terms that activate strong existing mental neural circuitry. When you say pollution, everybody knows what you mean and nobody likes it. So the best testing message on our issue is that we have put a blanket of pollution around the Earth that is trapping heat that used to go back out to space and that's making the storms and the drought stronger and melting the ice and flooding our cities.
And the good news is we know what to do. We need to phase out the pollution, and the temperatures will get better, and everybody gets that instantly. And if we would talk that way, we'd make a lot of progress.
David Roberts
This is something that I always return to whenever I talk about messaging. Like the choice of words and messages is important, but to me, it's only half the story or not even half the story. The other half is that infrastructure, those institutions, the mechanisms to even if we all even if everybody on the green climate side coordinated around those, how do we get that to the public's ears? We just are so attenuated now the left's connection to the listening public is so attenuated now. How do we strengthen that with communications infrastructure? Like, what would you invest in to build a better machine for getting those messages to the people we want to get them to?
David Fenton
Well, I talk about it in my book, and we're wrapping up now. But I would say that we know how using targeted social media to reach target audiences with sufficient repetition on proven messages and we have the proof that even with the right wing machine, it changes awareness and it's effective and it works. We know how to do it, and we don't have the resources for it. Jeff Bezos put up $10 billion for the Earth Fund, and it would take a small fraction of that to change the political dynamic. Remember ...
David Roberts
Just one of those billions.
David Fenton
... political will basically comes from public knowledge and mobilization. It comes from public demand. So we need to shift our investment to that and use messages that are not wonky and not scientific and that are simple but truthful. And I'm sure if we did that we would make a lot of progress both on the solution side because it would stimulate the markets and on this essential issue of getting people to understand where we're in a crisis and we know what to do about it.
David Roberts
Well, also, and this is the really last question, the issue that I started with, which is that the left used to feel insurgent and revolutionary and new and sort of like if you were young and wanted to reject the squares and your parents, you went to the left and fought for justice and peace, inequality and racial reparations and all this stuff. Now. And now it just feels like if you're young and you hate the squares and you want to reject your parents, you get sucked into this creepy alt-right stuff because somehow the Democrats have become your lecturing parents. So I just wonder if you have any I just wonder if you have any thoughts on like how to recapture a little bit of that feeling that you had when you were 20 and out and felt like the whole world was at your feet and anything could change.
Like this is a broad cultural zeitgeist kind of thing. Obviously it's not anything you could sort of just pull a lever and do but do you have any thoughts on how to recapture some of that spirit?
David Fenton
Yeah, move to Oregon where psychedelic therapy is going to be legally starting in January.
David Roberts
Psychedelics? That's your answer?
David Fenton
I'm kidding.
David Roberts
I'm weirdly positive about that answer.
David Fenton
Well optimism, that sense of utopianism was influenced by those experiences of that generation. There's no question about it. There is a very interesting new media operation. Have you come across the Cool Down?
David Roberts
No, I don't think so.
David Fenton
I would check it out. The Cool Down was started by the people that did the Bleacher report. And it's a climate science and solutions play on Instagram and TikTok and soon other platforms. And it's very cool. And lots of young content creators are involved in it. And it's a lot of fun, and it's very hip. And I think it is in the contemporary style that so much of the movement's communication lacks, as you say. And there are other people planning some things of this kind. I think I am seeing some shifts in the philanthropic community to support more contemporary persuasion and communications.
So I'm hopeful this is going to get better and it better be because if we don't alert and mobilize the public we're not going to be able to defeat the fossil fuel industry.
Or preserve democracy or good on the list.
But if we don't save the climate, as you know, we won't get to solve any of those other problems. So they're certainly related. But this is the big one.
David Roberts
All right. Well, thank you so much, David, for coming on. I really enjoyed the book. It's a wild trip down memory lane. History that wasn't really that long ago, but seems like from a different world. And I appreciate all your efforts over there.
David Fenton
And you can see it, right? Because you saw it's full of visuals and graphics and photographs. It's a very visual book, and I hope people like it.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.
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