Trust Us, We're Experts

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Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future is a book written by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. A publisher's blurb calls it:

a chilling exposé on the manufacturing of "independent experts." Public relations firms and corporations have seized upon a slick new way of getting you to buy what they have to sell: Let you hear it from a neutral "third party," like a professor or a pediatrician or a soccer mom or a watchdog group. The problem is, these third parties are usually anything but neutral. They have been handpicked, cultivated, and meticulously packaged to make you believe what they have to say--preferably in an "objective" format like a news show or a letter to the editor. And in some cases, they have been paid handsomely for their "opinions".

[edit] Critical response

An April 2001 Village Voice review of the book accuses them of "paranoid fatalism" concerning the facts researched but also says the book is "exhaustively detailed", "calmly convincing", and "light on rhetoric". [1]