Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy

"Well, thank heaven for this book. In meticulous fashion Westervelt makes clear not only what's gone wrong but how we might start to fix it." —BILL McKIBBEN

Whether it’s the tobacco industry lying about the health dangers of cigarettes, Big Pharma burying studies that make its products less marketable, or Big Oil misleading the public on the dangers of the climate crisis, we all know how corporations use doubt and science denial to avoid responsibility. So why do we continue to let them get away with it?

In Brought to You By, Amy Westervelt exposes the wider plot hidden within the familiar story of science denial. Over the last century, Big Industry has built a vast apparatus of think tanks, lobbyists, sponsored university labs, and obliging news networks to con the public and fool decision-makers, poisoning the informational ecosystem and warping the nature of truth itself along the way.

With her signature wit and fiery anger, Westervelt shows how the masterminds of corporate misinformation—people like Herb Schmertz, the public relations pioneer who made Mobil “the thinking man’s oil company,” Richard Edelman, the PR guy who helped the dairy industry vilify oat milk, and David Petraeus, the disgraced former spy chief introducing counterinsurgency tactics to the fight against climate science—have ushered in an era of unprecedented corporate control. According to Westervelt, exposing their methods is the first step toward robbing them of their power.