Everyone has a story I can learn from to be fearless like her, to have the confidence to achieve my dreams.
To know this ad that you're hearing. It starts out with a little girl dressed in an Amelia Earhart outfit. Then it pans to a montage of women playing golf professionals. Clearly, nearly one hundred thousand girls are participating in lpga Usta Girls Golf. It's about so much more than golf. It sure is golf Lady, because this ad was paid for by Chevron, who sponsored the program. And it's not just
Chevron either. Take a listen to this recent Conico Phillips ad, which sounds like it's actually advertising an education nonprofit.
Who's gonna hold you back.
I always wanted to be a teacher. It was just something that came natural to me.
If I knew I wanted to be a teacher when I was a middle schooler, and now I'm a teacher here at my old middle school.
Ads like these and the activities behind them, from sponsoring sports events and teams to funding education initiatives or supporting women in stem have become so common that you might be wondering why I'd bother calling attention to them at all. But it's important to talk about why companies, and especially oil companies, spend so much money on stuff that is entirely unrelated to their core business and why you almost never see an ad that's about what they actually do.
It's not so much about being a good corporate citizen as it is about seeming like a citizen period, someone with ideas and policy positions, morals, ethics, a philosophy, a reputation, and most of importantly, a personality that's mostly due to a guy. Longtime listeners of this podcast might recognize one of my long running obsessions.
Herb Schmirtz.
Here's what ol Herb had to say about the idea of companies doing philanthropy for philanthropy's sake.
It shows a sophistication and awareness on the part of corporations that they can tie their business interests to other interests in the cultural and educational and philanthropic area and yet be able to show to whomever's interested, whether it be shareholders or whatever, that there is a bottom line payout for the giver.
Herbschmirtz was a fascinating dude. He worked in military intelligence and as a labor lawyer, sorting out disputes, mostly on behalf of the government. In the nineteen sixties, he actually helped to end a major life Shorman strike. Here's LBJ and his labor secretary talking about it and.
Wants order longshowman. That's the serious one, and I should I should sit down and bring you or give you a complete memorandum on that that one is not in good shape. The dock when is just not in good shape? What can we do beforeward through it? And it's very likely to bring it out. I had them in this last week. And the trouble is that the that the company, the employers want to settle it in Congress and the union want to sell it in the White House. About what it comes down to.
Schmertz also helped run JFK's presidential campaign. Eventually he ran Bobby Kennedy's campaign too and Ted's. In between running campaigns for the Kennedys, Herb Schmertz had another job, VP of Public Affairs for Mobile Oil. Mobile initially hired Schmertz as a labor lawyer, but when he returned to work after taking a leave of absence to work on Bobby Kennedy's campaign, the company thought, hmmm, maybe someone so tight with the Democrats would be more helpful in their public affairs office.
Schmertz thought the rough and tumbled tactics he'd learned of running campaigns in DC could be helpful to Mobil too, and so he got a promotion. It helped that the company's CEO at the time, a guy named Rolly Warner, had a lot in common with Schmertz. They were both Ivy League educated but good at talking to normal people, and they both thought it was important for Mobil to
stand up for itself more often. In the early nineteen seventies, with an oil crisis brewing and Americans pissed off about waiting in line for hours to get gas, the two hatched a plan to take charge of Mobile's public image.
You have to find unconveyed no ways to communicate to the public. It's not a question of convincing the press of anything. It's a question of convincing the public. And to do the job properly, you have to really go around the press, or beyond the press, or against the press to get a story out so that the public focus is on it, not the press. If you're just going to limit yourself to getting the press to focus on You're not doing the entire job.
At the time, issue advertising, this thing of an oil company doing an ad about diversity or environmental initiatives, it was relatively new. Schmertz eventually called it affinity of purpose marketing, not great branding, but he explained why in a speech.
The term affinity of purpose marketing is a term that I developed because the American Express has caused related marketing. But it basically says the same thing.
Affinity of purpose marketing cause related marketing. Today this is basically just marketing, But back then it was pretty revolutionary, especially in the oil industry. Schmertz thought the company needed to focus on ideas and issues rather than just selling gas at stations, and to do that it needed more than just the ideas themselves. Mobile needed a personality. Here he is a leader in life, describing that personality, well, it was multifaceted.
It was a personality where we believed very strongly about the importance of public policiation. Secondly, we believed fervently that as a sort of a custodian of a large corporation and as custodians of vast resources and employment and everything else. That we were not doing our job if we did not participate in the marketplace of ideas. Third part of our personality was we believed in that a democracy is
composed of a group of free institutions. We believed in free market, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, academic freedom, freedom to organize and participate in union activities.
Government intrusion into the marketplace of ideas would limit our freedom of speech and distort the selection of our leaders.
Wow, if Mobil was a person, they'd be kind of a Dick Ben Shapiro as a company. Anyway. You'll note too that a lot of these so called personality traits are more like policy positions. But over time, Schmertz started to do various things to build out a sense of who Mobile was, and he very intentionally did things that no other oil exec had really thought about doing. At one point he described his approach to this as being
like a political campaign for a company. He sponsored a bunch of art exhibitions, for example, and started a literary prize, the Pegasus Prize, in nineteen seventy seven, to honor works from country whose literature is rarely translated into English. For Mobile. It also helped to strengthen the company's relationships with various Middle Eastern countries where it was hoping to drill for oil.
Schmertz also hired writers to write weekly opinion pieces that he edited and paid to run them in The New York Times, and of course, he sponsored Masterpiece theater.
The Bust of Base Theatre is brought to you by Mobile, proviting the fuel but helps public television.
Run Hirschmertz wrote a whole book about his tactics. It's called Goodbye to the Low Profile. In Spanish, it went by the much better title Elsilenzio noesentable. Silence isn't Profitable. In it, Schmertz implores his fellow PR guys to stop being nice to the press, to stop being quiet about it when they think that the press is being unfair to them, and to start shouting their ideas from every
corner of the public square that they can access. Schmertz gives a fascinating window into his whole process in this book. At one point he talks about commissioning a survey to gauge the public's opinion of Mobile before and after the launch of his big issue advertising push, and he remembers fondly how the survey taker said to him, Mobile must be the thinking man's oil company. Did the survey taker
actually say that, We'll never know. The point is that was Herb's goal, classing up Mobile and making it the literary gentleman of oil companies. But while there is a lot of evidence to suggest that Herb really liked to hobknob with the creative elite, that wasn't the goal. It was just a fun side benefit. The point was humanizing Mobile,
making him seem smart and trustworthy. Oh yeah, Mobil is definitely a hymn I bother making an oil company seem like a smart, trustworthy dude, so that when he came at you with ideas.
Like, hey, why don't we be more off for drooling.
You might be more likely to think it's not a terrible idea.
According to the US Geological Survey, there may be sixty billion barrels of oil or more beneath our continental shelves. Some people say we should be drilling for that oil and gas. Others say we shouldn't because of the possible environmental risks. We'd like to know what you think, write Mobile, Pole Room six four nine one fifty East forty second Street, New York, one one seven. We'd like to hear from all of you.
So, Okay, this is interesting history, right, but why are we talking about it today? Well, at a certain point, Schmertz and Warner ran into an obstacle. They wanted to take the advertorial program that they've been running with The New York Times and do it on TV.
Two.
Schmertz commissioned a few videos, and they went to the big three TV broadcasters, ABC, CBS, and NBC. Remember this was before cable was widespread and long before streaming. The three big broadcasters were a major source of information and entertainment for the American public.
Two of the.
Three, ABC and CBS turned the ad buy down flat. They said it would violate their ethics clauses and that it might run a foul of the fairness doctrine, which required broadcasters to present both sides of controversial issues. They told Schmertz that when it came to covering important political issues, they left that to their journalists. Running these new fangled ads of mobiles felt like broadcasting propaganda and they weren't
into it. Let's all pause for a moment and appreciate in America in which met corporations had a shred of dignity for Mobile, though this was an all hands on deck moment. If the TV guys said this was propaganda. What if the New York Times started to feel weird about running it every single week. What if PBS decided its partnership with Mobile was no longer kosher. What if all that work on developing a personality, getting their ideas into the public square was just a waste of time.
In the end, they couldn't have it, and so they developed a strategy that would protect their new human version of Mobile. And that is a problem we are still very much dealing with today. That's the story we're going to get into in this drilled mini series. Welcome to Yeah, Why Not herb? A three part mini series on the oil guy who popularized corporate personhood and how it's become one of the biggest problems facing climate action today. Part one, The Panic After this quick break.
Mister Olsen, are you taking the position that there is no difference in the First Amendment rights of an individual? The corporation, after all, is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights, So is there any distinction that Congress could draw between corporations and natural human beings full purposes of campaign finance.
What the Court has said in the First Amendment context New York Times versus Sullivan, Gross Chain versus Associated Press, and over and over again a corporations are persons entitled to protection under the First Amendment.
That's the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg talking to Ted Olsen, former Solicitor General of the United States, a founding member of the Federalist Society and a partner in the corporate law firm Gibson Dunn, which represents Chevron along with several other companies in the fossil fuel business. To the extent that Americans think about the idea of corporate free speech at all, it tends to hinge on this one Supreme Court case from twenty ten, Citizens United versus the Federal
Election Committee. It was a weird case. Basically, a tea party Republican group called Citizens United made a movie about Hillary Clinton, and they thought it was a documentary, but it was very obviously not. It was a bit of campaign marketing. It was called Hillary the Movie.
She is steeped in controversy, steeped in sleeves. That's why they don't want us to look at our record.
Obviously, this was not a movie that was going to get a theatrical release, but Citizens United had arranged to release it as a video on demand offering on a few cable channels right before the Democratic primaries in January two thousand and eight, but it was classified as electioneering communication, which had been made illegal by the Federal Election Commission.
The producers fed a lawsuit in the U. S. District Court for DC, trying to get a ruling that would allow them to show the film and various promotional ads for it. The District court judges ruled that there was quote no reasonable interpretation of the movie other than as an appeal to vote against Senator Clinton, so it clearly qualified as electioneering communication. The producers appealed to the Supreme Court,
which took the case up. For some reason, it was a weird decision to begin with for them to even hear this case, because by the time they could hear it, the election would have been passed and the whole argument would be a mood point. When it ruled in twenty ten, the Supreme Court upheld the District court on the fact
that the film was in fact electioneering communication. But it applied what's called the strict scrutiny test to the First Amendment and concluded that because the money for this film wasn't being paid directly to a candidate for a campaign,
it wasn't illegal under the FEC's laws. Just to make it clear, the Justices emphasize in their ruling that corporations and labor unions can spend as much as they want to convince people to vote for or against a candidate, and they don't have to disclose who's paying for what or to what end.
It basically says that from now on, corporations can spend directly.
From their treasuries.
And that opens up this, I mean incalculable pool of money.
This is Robert her a professor at the Journalism School at the University of Oklahoma. I went looking for Professor Kerr because he wrote two very detailed academic books about what he calls the corporate free speech movement, and one of them focuses entirely on mobile Oil's role in it, which we're going to get to in a minute. But first, more on the impact of Citizens United.
All the business corporations in the world can now spend freely from their stockholders' money. Really, Over the years, because I wrote so much about it, people often ask me to participate in different kinds of discussions, and a lot of people first will say, well, I think corporations should have a right to speak, and that's a broadly held view.
Corporations should have a right to speak. And then when I'll say, okay, but do you think they should have a right If you've invested in a corporation, should they have a right to spend your investment for political purposes? And they almost always say no. Almost everybody, whether they call themselves liberal or conservative, they almost always agree, well, no, I invested that because I wanted to make a profit.
I don't want the.
Corporation deciding which political side, because when people think about it, they realize, you know, wherever their personal political views lie, if a corporation can spend the stockholders' money, they might spend it for someone you support, but they could very well spend it for someone you don't.
What a lot of people don't know is that there was a key case that came a few decades before Citizens United that was really the first domino to fall on corporate free speech.
There was a pretty big effort to get a Supreme Court ruling that basically supported corporate speech and the right of corporations to do advertising of their not just product aising, but of their you know, positions.
That's Brown University environmental sociologist doctor Robert Brule. The ruling he's referring to was a case called First National Bank of Boston versus Ballatti. It was brought by a bank that wanted to be able to advertise in favor of a ballot referendum that it had also backed financially. It violated a state law in Massachusetts that prohibited corporations from this sort of political funding, but the bank decided to challenge that law in a case that went all the
way to the Supreme Court and won. It was the first time the Court had stepped in to define corporate First Amendment rights.
I don't think people really appreciate how big of a deal that was in shifting the rules of speech in the public space that now suddenly corporations could use their budget, which are enormously larger than individuals, to advocate their position in the public space. And as a sociologist, I would say that what this did was it allowed for a systematic distortion of the public space. Is that it gives corporations basically a loudspeaker to amplify their voice above everybody else's.
And in a media environment where there's many, many competing voices, the ability to get your message out repeatedly, over and over and over again an opposition to other voices is enormously influential in getting your viewpoint to be part of the public discussion and eventually become part of the taken for granted worldview.
And here's where we bring it back to Mobile Oil and our old pal Herb Schmirtz.
And Mobile was one of the leading corporations to fight for that legal right.
That's why Robert Kerr wound up writing a whole book about Mobile's role in shaping free speech, a book he actually interviewed Herbsmirtz for.
He was very pleasant, you know, a little bit argumentative, but not much. He said that looking back, he thought the Mobile op eds demonstrated that corporations can participate in the dialogue and that Mobile had achieved leadership.
And that's basically true.
They did nobody, no one else utilized The New York Times op ed page the way Mobile did.
I don't think he meant it this way, but wooh, sick burn on the New York Times embarrassing. Anyway, Mobile didn't just shape public discourse by using the media as a tool. It also got involved in shaping the legal structures that would allow them to have more influence, to be the loudest voice in the room.
He got into Bolotti some I don't think in his mind, at least many years later, he wasn't looking back like, yeah, we won that and that change history. He was on the side that won and it did change history. And of course that's the thing I can talk about endlessly. But he said the reason they got into it at first was that they saw the energy crisis of the nineteen seventies coming, and it was a big deal anyone who was alive then as I was, I mean, it
dominated not just media discussions but popular discussions. And you know, man on the street, everybody was for years and years was talking about the price of gasoline going up, the long lines at the gas stations, and you know, sometimes the gas stations closed because they had no gasoline. And he said that Mobile felt that media in general were getting it wrong and that they had to come in and correct things.
That's why mobile got into what they called issue advertising or affinity of purpose marketing. But they started to look for ways the law could protect that type of marketing because of one big threat to it in the early nineteen seventies. Here's Schmertz talking about that threat in a promotional video he made for the National Association of Manufacturers to circulate to executives at other big corporations.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, while the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. That was the first Amendment.
And you may not be aware of it, but there are two constraints imposed by television networks that we contend are not consistent with these First Amendments, right, And I'd like to discuss these constraints with you.
Yep, it was the TV thing I mentioned before. In the early nineteen seventies, high on the success of his Weekly New York Times advertorials, Schmertz tried to take a video version to the three big networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC. AC and CBS turned it down flat. NBC accepted a couple of the ads, but asked for major edits. It was a huge threat to this plan that he and Mobile CEO Rolly Warner had cooked up to try to mitigate the impact of the energy crisis on Mobile's reputation
and profits. But Schmertz sold it as a huge threat to all businesses and to the American way of life.
The first constraint, what you may not be aware of, is that the television networks take the position that controversial issues of public importance should only be presented in formats determined by broad cash journalists. They contend that the public's interest will best be served by this limitation. The second constraint involves the ability to purchase time to present what
we contend is issue or opinion advertising. The networks take the position that they will not sell commercial time to advertisers to present what they define as controversial issues of public importance. Now, some of the things that they have considered controversial are offshore drilling, oil company profits. The energy crisis itself has been considered a controversial relationship by one
state station. Now When you put these two constraints together, the result is that the American people are not getting adequate information to make up their minds on a very crucial issue, namely, the energy crisis and the development of adequate energy for the United States.
Schmertz and Warner immediately started talking to business groups like the National Association Manufacturer Is, the Chamber of Commerce, and various economics clubs about this looming threat against American business and with it, democracy itself. They wrote op eds, They went on the radio. They highlighted the problem in their
weekly New York Times spot. They argue that TV was doing a superficial job at best of covering the energy crisis, and that by rejecting mobiles ads, they were robbing the American public of crucial information.
And the result is that you get really superficial coverage, a visually attractive story, not one that really relates to what caused the shortage, what caused the crisis, and where do we.
Go from here?
Now, that would be all right if we were allowed to run the commercials that we think the people are entitled to receive and the information that we would like to impart to the American people, And indeed if others were allowed to present their views, so that the American people received a very wide spectrum of views and could get all the information and then make up their mind
on these important natures. But we're not allowed to do that, as I said, Television networks say that they will not accept commercials that.
Deal with controversial issues.
So that means, as I said, that the issues that we want to present only can be presented in formats determined by broadcast journalists. We can't say it the way we'd like to say it. And you, the American people, really are not getting an adequate opportunity to get satisfactory information.
We still hear arguments like this today. So let me just emphasize here that the First Amendment protects speech, it does not guarantee reach. Nowhere in the Constitution is every American promised a primetime TV slot. Here's an example of one of the ads that Mobile wanted to run.
Well, I thought I'd never see this. This country is big and huge and it can do just about it anything, and let something like this happen. It's unbelievable.
I find it very disillusioning to find that government seems to be as naive as all of us.
I don't know.
It could be the oil company not being prepared for all the gas that we.
Need, the people themselves, everybody.
It's just we went crazy. Last twenty years has been nuts, you know, with cars, and I don't know what we could do about.
It about the shortage.
I think people are trying to use less gas themselves.
I feel we can be very much self sufficient if we just tap our own resources. I don't feel that our own resources have been tapped enough.
Well.
Like I said, it was beautiful before, this is ridiculous.
A standing line to get gas.
We agree, and we're looking for oil everywhere we can, as fast as we can.
This commercial was made during the period of long gas lines, and this version was rejected by all three networks because they contended a dealt with a controversial issue.
Keep in mind, this was a pre bloody At the time. The networks relied in part on the fairness doctrine to justify rejecting ads from mobile It didn't necessarily prohibit the networks from taking these kinds of commercials, but it did give them cover to reject things they just thought were not appropriate.
Now we've been running ads on the opposite the editorial page of The New York Times for about three and a half years. These, in effect, have been paid editorials where we have had an opportunity to present our views, views different, indeed frequently from the editorial policy of the New York Times. That hasn't caused the Times any problem. They've been delighted to receive these ads, and indeed they've been delighted to increase the spectrum of views.
The networks, on.
The other hand, have gone just the opposite direction. They have said that they will not develop a structure to accommodate a wide spectrum of views and have relied on the fairness doctrine and have said only broadcast journalists will present views.
That difference, of course, was mostly to do with the fairness doctrine which applied to broadcast networks like ABC, NBC and CBS, but not two newspapers like The New York Times, which schmertz knew, of course, but acknowledging that fact would not have served his argument that the TV networks were being uniquely unfair to mobile.
I asked him did he sell Mobile on this, and he insisted no, it was the other way around. That management came to him Raley Warner, who was the CEO back then, had a pretty good interview with him. A lot of things he said were consistent with what Schmert said, and he did say that, yes, I was angry about the way the media were getting everything wrong and I.
Wanted us to be a bigger voice.
What it did, Warner confirm what Schmert said about Ballotti.
You know that he sort of.
Put that on Schmertz's radar.
Yes, I think they saw it as just sort of a organic piece of what they were doing with trying to speak out more in general, because they really got active about seventy two with their op eds, and then Bellotti probably came on the radar when it was first kicking around the Lower Court, so they would have picked up on it even though it didn't involve the petroleum industry in any way. They just saw it as chance of expand First Amendment rights for corporations.
And they didn't stop there next time. How Mobile turned the tide on corporate personhood, why Exon kept that work going once the two merged, and how it all played out in Nike's sweatshops in the nineties. Drilled is an original Critical Frequency production. This season is produced and sound designed by Mark Saltz Austwick. Our sound engineer is Peter Duff. Additional reporting by Julia Manipela, fact checking by Woodan Yan. Our first Amendment attorney is James Wheaton. Marketing is handled
by Maggie Taylor. Our artwork is by Matt Fleming. The show is written and reported by me Amy Westervelt. Primary documents and additional information related to this series are available on our website at drilled dot Media. You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter there.
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