In 2020, reporters at Drilled had completed an investigative project into the origins of climate science denial and were unsatisfied. This was not a genius strategy, nor had it been particularly well executed, so why did it work so well? Eager to answer that question, they dug into the history of the modern corporate PR industry as a first step toward understanding where science misinformation had come from in general, and why every new iteration of it seemed to find such fertile ground.
Reporters spent several months combing through corporate and personal archives to put together a thoroughly researched series that clearly illustrated the role the PR industry had played in the creation and use of science misinformation as a tactic. The work brought about a new understanding of this problem: Science misinformation was not, as many had assumed, something invented by the tobacco industry and spread to other industries, but rather a technique created by the PR industry and deployed on behalf of multiple industries at once—particularly the tobacco, chemical, and fossil fuel industries—for decades.
That series sparked a congressional hearing in the U.S., inspired a global nonprofit campaign targeting creatives working in the PR industry, and generated more listener and reader emails than Drilled had ever received about any other series it had produced. In the years since, the Drilled newsroom has expanded to include reporters in multiple countries, which has brought about a whole new layer of understanding: When a particular form of science misinformation—like climate denial, for example—stops working in one place, it's often just copied and pasted to another. And while the narratives that shape the public's understanding of the climate crisis shift from country to country, the entities creating those narratives are largely the same.
Over the past two years, Drilled's global reporting team has been cultivating various whistleblower sources at PR and advertising agencies, and tracking the ways that science misinformation spreads. Now the team is ready to put out a sequel to its original series: a deep dive into what the PR industry is doing today to create, amplify, and spread science misinformation across the globe; which industries that work is being done on behalf of; and how to spot it anywhere in the world.
