Oil Slick, Part 1: Mobil's PR Mastermind and the Rise of the Corporate Persona
Drilled
Pushkin Industries
4.6 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 February 2020
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mobil Oil's Herb Schmertz humanized the oil company, creating the "corporate persona," fighting for First Amendment rights to extend to corporations, and laying the groundwork for decades of aggressive media manipulation.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you're going to do the job properly, you have to find unconventional ways to communicate to the public. |
| 0:05.1 | It's not a question of convincing the press of anything. It's a question of convincing the public. |
| 0:10.2 | Keeping with our mad men theme this season, Ivy Lee was the father of public relations, the |
| 0:16.3 | Berk Cooper, if you will, and Daniel Edelman was the Roger Sterling. He took Lee's foundation and |
| 0:21.9 | spun it into a whole Siop's operation, using a combination of human psychology and a bit of the |
| 0:27.8 | old razzle-dezzle to schmooze legislators, trick the media, and keep Big Tobacco and oil clients happy. |
| 0:34.4 | Herb Schmerz, that guy you heard up top, was the Don Draper. Slick and handsome, always with an |
| 0:40.0 | expensive suit, he was the smartest guy in the room and mostly thought that both journalists and other |
| 0:45.2 | PR guys were idiots. Schmerz is the guy who really turned media into another propaganda tool for the |
| 0:51.6 | fossil fuel industry. He ran PR for mobile oil from 1969 to 1988 and became a master of media |
| 0:59.2 | manipulation. Schmerz didn't just focus on placing particular stories. He said about fundamentally |
| 1:05.5 | changing the relationship between corporations and the media. To Schmerz, the press was more of an |
| 1:11.1 | obstacle between him and the public, or mobile and policy makers. And to do the job properly, |
| 1:16.4 | you have to really go around the press or beyond the press or against the press to get a story |
| 1:22.8 | out so that the public focuses on it, not the press. If you're just going to limit yourself to |
| 1:27.4 | getting the press to focus on it, you're not doing the entire job. All of our madmen seemed to |
| 1:31.7 | forever be just one step ahead of the press and their ability to establish oil as such an |
| 1:37.0 | essential part of American life that you couldn't really question it. To the point where for a |
| 1:41.6 | long time journalists didn't even question it is a big part of how it became so easy later to |
| 1:46.9 | spread climate denial and delay climate action. I'm Amy Westreveld and this is drilled, season 3, |
| 1:54.1 | the madmen of climate denial. Oil industry PR began in part as a response to journalists. |
| 2:07.2 | Remember Ida Tarbell from our first couple episodes? Well, she wasn't the only muck raker |
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