Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry

I wanted to read this book as soon as I discovered that it was a part of our study. It related specifically to my specialization, public relations, so I was interested in learning more about the field. I anticipated that there would be a lot of criticism of the public relations industry involved because of the negative title, however, I would have appreciated there being more said about the positive efforts of public relations professionals. I think that too often public relations practitioners are made out to be manipulative in the eyes of the public, and this book supported that belief.
Although the book was negative for the most part, I did enjoy learning about the different past PR scenarios. The section on the environment stunned me the most. Being somewhat of an environmentalist myself, I have difficulty believing that major companies, such as McDonalds are able to get away with what they do. What I find more surprising is that I had not heard of this issue before. Perhaps the McDonalds environmental campaign is too out-dated for me to recall, but it seems like it should have been a big deal at the time. This reminded me very much of the launch of the recent McDonalds campaign to get healthy. The happy meal bags pictured all of the ways to eat healthy, one of them being eating healthy. There was a picture of vegetables and fruits. I found it very ironic that something like this would be promoted on a McDonalds product and wonder if at all this campaign was successful.
Another one of the sections that I found especially interesting was regarding smoking and the development of ad campaigns for smoking. The deception involved related to cigarettes and how they were advertised was incredible. Advertising has always been something that I have wanted to learn more about and this book is great for understanding advertising strategies; however, it seems as though many of the strategies outlined in this book discuss how to manipulate or lure consumers into buying your product. I think that there has been other successful ad campaigns for products that do not have to involve this sort of thing. Of course there always needs to be a way to lure customers in, but I do not think that lying is the way of doing so.
This book has an obvious bias and the authors are not trying to hide it by any means. It is important to understand how public relations has worked in the past and this book is helpful for the public to understand how they are potentially being manipulated by media as well. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone with remote interest in advertising, media or the public relations industry. This was my favourite required reading of the term.