John Oliver, host of HBO's "Last Week Tonight", needs to do something splashy soon if he is going to enter the late night big leagues. He's five years into this latest phase of his career, incredulous angry comedy commentator, and 18 months away from negotiating a new contract, so it is a bad time for him to run out of gas.
But if he is not running on fumes he is stretching the bounds of credibility more and more in 2018. His only really popular segment during the run of his show has been "Stupid Watergate", but he has gone back to that well too many times, and his writing team are looking for another home run. However, surrounding a famous non-profit like the American Council on Science and Health with lunatics in an attempt to undermine confidence in them is not a recipe for success. Unless his audience buys a lot of gingko biloba or other magic potions instead of medicine. But he went conspiracy theorist on Sunday night, claiming the ACSH is secretly an "astroturf" organization, which is usually associated with a pop-up organization around some social cause, and they have instead existed for almost 40 years and write science articles for lots of mainstream media outlets.
How can any group be astroturf for 39 years? And for who? Everyone, according to Oliver. Big Chemical, Big Soda, Big Oil, Big Tobacco, if you can name it his montage suggests they are all in control of the group. Who ever thought so many different industries would play so nicely together for decades to covertly control the thoughts of Americans and not a single scientist who's ever worked there would resent being told what to do and spilll the beans? Area 51 and the Moon Landing Hoax believers would say that's probably not plausible. And that they do it for so cheap.
Follow the money, unless there is no money, in which case follow my political conspiracy
They should be fat with cash due to all that industry involvement he claims they have but when you look at the form 990, they lose money and have just $1 million in revenue. Their donations are 96% from the public and foundations with 4% coming from Other, which probably means corporations or industry reps. That's 40 grand. Let's pretend that Exxon is an outsized one of the four percent. If so, they are a $300 billion empire only giving $10K to the group that is supposedly hypnotizing 330 million Americans and preventing them from seeing the flaming tap water due to fracking that Oliver believes is happening? It's pure nonsense.
If only a pro-science version of John Oliver existed to make fun of it. Unfortunately science doesn't sell the way political outrage does. And it's political activists sending this all over social media, hoping to undermine science.
You can't be both wildly successful astroturfing corporate shills and a small science non-profit that is in a competitive environment soliciting foundations and wealthy donors with little luck. They are diametrically opposed. Nor does their content show any evidence of what he says. Where are the articles defending oil companies, tobacco companies, soda companies, and encouraging chemical baths for everyone? We couldn't find them, at least in the few dozen articles on their main page. Their books are talking about the health risks of smoking and poor dietary choices, yet he says they work for Big Tobacco and Big Soda. They have analyses of the chemicals being considered for bans by EPA under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) amendment, even though they work for Big Chemical? A writer actually came up with this conspiracy premise and no one in the room asked any of these questions that everyone in science media immediately thought to ask?
If science education non-profits are really in control of consumer opinion, why does Johnson & Johnson keep losing lawsuits over baby powder? And how did Monsanto just lose $290 million despite there being no biological way their product could cause a groundskeeper's lymphoma?
If $1 million per year spent on science and health education is being a corporate shill, it is a stupid approach when environmentalists spend 6 times that every single day. Yet these are scientists and doctors, they are not stupid. And he says corporations are smart and deceptive, yet they are losing billions in lawsuits. If they were funding astroturf scientists, they would be spending hundreds of millions. Instead, Oliver thinks $19 trillion per year in corporate revenue is spending $1 million to sway the public. That's why it feels like his claim is just made up. Which means it may instead be an instance where someone there has a specific agenda.
They're in New York, presumably, and given the political skew of media environmental groups do a lot better there than science, so it may be that a friend of someone there asked for a favor or just suggested it and the writer or producer pitched it and it sold to Oliver. It's speculation for now, they have refused to respond to our emails asking for their source. Their only evidence, according to an article on Science 2.0 seems to be a blog post provided to them by an Organic Consumers Association trade group called U.S. Right To Know. And that organization's methods and allies are suspect, as we have noted before. They are helping Russia Today scare people about conventional food, as are lots of media outlets on Oliver's political side, a study showed. They are helping trial lawyers looking for media exposure to generate lawsuit interest, and they are hiring discredited journalists to promote negative public relations pieces about scientists. The reactions on Twitter supporting this segment are all those bloggers who have been paid linking to each other about it. None of them are scientists. None of them even have a Bachelor's degree in science. One is an "editor" at a journal but isn't allowed to touch any science content, according to a highly-ranked source there (with a science degree.)
If we wonder why the public doesn't trust vaccines, or any medicine, or food, or chemicals, or energy, or climate science, or anything, one symptom is the need by a crowded talk show field with hosts desperate to "go viral" exploiting that their political allies opposed to science are so ready to believe it is "news." They are creating a postmodern world, where science is just another worldview. We are suffering expertise fatigue. Nothing is empirical in Oliver's Opposite World. And when there is no foundation for reality, we're on our way to being a third world country.