By David J. Theroux

We should indeed be skeptical of what we see or hear in the media and from alleged public policy "experts." But the question to ask is: "What are the best criteria to use to evaluate competing political claims?" And, should not such skepticism equally apply to information from industry, government, partisan, ideological and other interest groups?

In their book, "Trust Us, We're Experts," Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber fail their own criterion of skepticism of media claims driven by public relations campaigns when they base their analysis of the Independent Institute on an erroneous and long-discredited article in the September 18, 1999, edition of The New York Times. That article was found to be based on disinformation given to the Times by a public relations agency hired by the Oracle Corporation. Furthermore, the Times reported that the Institute received support from Microsoft after this fact had already been published more than three months earlier in the Times, the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. Yet, Rampton and Stauber chose to ignore this and other facts that completely undermine every claim they make against the Independent Institute.

In further applying Rampton and Stauber's own criteria to their work, because their book was exclusively funded from the start by a consortium of left-liberal advocacy foundations, should we not then question the independence of its content? Are those foundations supporting the Center for Media and Democracy not thereby engaging in the tactics Rampton and Stauber complain of: "a modern-day public relations strategy that amounts to Potemkin punditry — the manipulation of public opinion by financing and publicizing views congenial to the public policy goals of their sponsors"?

Rampton and Stauber also accuse the Independent Institute of employing other disreputable tactics they themselves are guilty of using: "Yet suppose we could supply testimonials from people whose names you've heard and respect, or who carry impressive titles and credentials. Better yet, suppose the testimonials came from people with no apparent connection to us. If that were the case, you might be less skeptical."

Indeed, the dust jacket of "Trust Us, We're Experts," features a glowing endorsement from Bill Moyers, who Rampton and Stauber somehow fail to note is the president of the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, one of their Center's largest financial underwriters. In contrast, "Winners, Losers & Microsoft"'s endorsers, at whom Rampton and Stauber's snide implications are presumably aimed, include nationally respected economics professors, a Wall Street Journal columnist and T. J. Rodgers, chair of Cypress Semiconductor — none of whom have any connection to the work by Liebowitz and Margolis. Favorable reviews for "Winners, Losers & Microsoft" also hail from such diverse publications as The Economist and Wired News.

In addition to failing their own tests for credibility, Rampton and Stauber also never examine the competing evidence to determine the truth. As a result, their book is a mix of fact, error, hearsay, conjecture, slur and opinion, posing as a "watchdog" exposé. Lacking not just a minimal scientific standard of analysis but also any adherence to the scientific method, and opting instead for "increased democracy and citizen participation" in the scientific process, the authors deliver just another deeply flawed advocacy piece.

As we now know, the inaccurate, incomplete and misinterpreted documents leaked to The New York Times — which Rampton, Stauber and their own third-party expert, David Callahan, rely upon — have since been shown to have been deliberately placed with the Times by the PR agency hired by Oracle Corporation, one of Microsoft's major rivals.

Hundreds of distinguished economists have been critical of the corporate welfare (protectionist) aspects of the prosecutorial frenzy launched over the past few years by federal and state governments against successful high-tech firms, such as Microsoft, Intel and others, entirely at the behest of their competitors. Oracle, among others, attempted to discredit people critical of these prosecutions by hiring the notoriously antidemocratic Investigative Group International (IGI) and a public relations firm to conduct a clandestine smear campaign through back-alley tactics and disinformation. In our particular case, Oracle tried to distract attention away from the devastating findings in our book, "Winners, Losers & Microsoft" by Stan Liebowitz, a professor of managerial economics at the University of Texas at Dallas, and Stephen Margolis, a professor and head of the economics department at North Carolina State University. In our book, Liebowitz and Margolis show that the Microsoft case has nothing to do with consumer welfare but everything to do with corporate welfare. Unable to refute the results of this work, Ellison and others chose instead to try to smear us.

In running a story it had reason to know was factually incorrect, and in repeating the story even after Oracle has been exposed as the true source of it, The New York Times, and now Rampton, Stauber and the Center for Media and Democracy serve as accomplices, deliberately or not, to the public relations campaign of a major corporation seeking to use state power for its own benefit. I outlined the fallacies of the Times piece to an interviewer from the Center for Media and Democracy many months ago, and all of this information has been publicly available through the Institute's Web site since September 19, 1999. But in Rampton and Stauber's prosecution of a political war representing ideological interests, truth is again the first casualty.

So, to correct the record once more, please note the following:

1.  Although The New York Times story originally credited "a Microsoft adversary associated with the computer industry who refused to be identified" as the source of the leaked documents, readers of most newspapers — including The New York Times itself — now know that the Times' source of disinformation was a public relations firm hired by Oracle, one of Microsoft's major rivals. Oracle's Larry Ellison has loudly taken credit for the smear campaign.

If the Center for Media and Democracy is still searching for a "Potemkin village," perhaps it should consider the case of Upstream Technologies (not to be confused with the communications technology company by the same name based in Monsey, New York). In late June of 2000, reporters from The Wall Street Journal broke the story of the phantom firm, which had rented office space in Washington, D.C., neighboring a "pro-Microsoft trade group, the Association for Competitive Technology" (ACT). Detectives posing as employees of the counterfeit Upstream Technologies attempted, unsuccessfully, to bribe janitors into turning over ACT's trash. Oracle's Ellison, a multibillionaire, later confessed to hiring Investigative Group International (IGI), whose investigators were the ones posing as tech-firm workers occupying the offices next door to ACT. Instructively enough, Oracle had grown out of a contract Ellison had had with the CIA and is proudly named after that CIA project. The story garnered front-page treatment in newspapers across the country but doesn't warrant a single mention in Rampton and Stauber's book.

2.  The total funding we received from Microsoft was approximately seven to eight percent of our total revenues — far less than the 20 percent figure the Times erroneously claimed in its article and that Rampton/Stauber repeated. The Institute's full disclosure of this funding was made during the press conference held in Washington, D.C., for our Open Letter on Antitrust Protectionism — again, more than three months prior to The New York Times article in September, 1999, that claimed that the relationship between Microsoft and the Institute was a "secret," and at least a year before Rampton and Stauber's book was published. The fact and timing of the Institute's disclosure was reported in subsequent stories in The Wall Street Journal as well as The New York Times, and has been available on our Web site for more than 16 months. And contrary to the Times' assertion, parroted by Rampton and Stauber, Microsoft is not now and never has been "the largest single outside donor" to the Institute — a fact again provided to (and ignored by) both the Times and the Center for Media and Democracy.

The research and publication of our book, "Winners, Losers & Microsoft," and our Open Letter on Antitrust Protectionism, were organized entirely by the Independent Institute, as our other books and Open Letters have been. The letter was written by a number of distinguished economists. The 240 economists who became signatories were in no way approached by Microsoft and received no compensation from anyone for their involvement.

We pursued the publication of the Open Letter as ads in various newspapers and budgeted to pay for this work through internal funding. Microsoft, naturally pleased that such a project was being done, indicated that it was interested in increasing its support, particularly for our efforts to discuss publicly the issues we were raising in the Open Letter. To apply for this additional support, I sent a letter — not a "bill" — to Microsoft outlining the Institute's costs for this publicity. Rather than underwriting these specific costs, Microsoft simply provided, as in the past, general operating support.

Thus, there was no new and accurate information produced by IGI for Oracle's smear campaign that we had not disclosed months earlier at our press conference. Liebowitz and Margolis remain unrefuted, and Oracle and others have quite frankly been stymied by the impact of a letter signed by a group of economists and a single scholarly book, "Winners, Losers & Microsoft," by two widely respected academics.

3.  If an organization is attracted to our work and wishes to contribute toward the costs of disseminating the information based upon it, we welcome such support. Our restriction on all funding is that it is noncontractual, meaning that the funding sources have no say in our research. The Institute's supporters cannot withdraw their funding should they not approve of the results. In addition, all of the Institute's results are derived from research that adheres to the standards of excellence found through scholarly peer review. We challenge Rampton and Stauber to show otherwise.

4.  Contrary to Rampton and Stauber's claims, the Independent Institute is not a "conservative" organization, nor is it a "liberal," "moderate" or in fact any kind of political organization at all. Unlike such advocacy groups as the Center for Media and Democracy, all of our work is based, again, as Rampton and Stauber seem to admit, on peer-reviewed science. As a result, some of these results may appear to some people as "conservative," some results may appear "liberal," but by and large they will not fit the usual stereotypes because this is the nature of scientific research.

Because other Institute studies — including those found in our journal, The Independent Review — have defended a woman's reproductive rights, sought an end to the War on Drugs, called for American politicians to be held accountable for war crimes, supported open immigration into the U.S., opposed the death penalty, called for a radical reduction in the American military complex, attacked the racism and sexism fomented by numerous institutions, called for abolition of the national security state and opposed censorship of any form, it is clearly ridiculous to describe us as "conservative."

Indeed, our attack on corporate statism through antitrust protectionism could hardly be considered "conservative," despite the blind reverence many "liberals" still mistakenly hold for antitrust. As observed by renowned New Left historian Gabriel Kolko, "only if we mechanistically assume that government intervention in the economy and a departure from ordinary laissez faire automatically benefits [sic] the general welfare can we say that government economic regulation, by its very nature, is progressive in the common meaning of that term." Kolko then showed that during the so-called Progressive Era (1900-16), dominant business interests championed antitrust laws to provide protection against their rivals. This co-option of the "progressive" agenda by "political capitalists" is why Kolko titled his infamous book on this period of American economic history, "The Triumph of Conservatism" (which, in other words, means the triumph of special business interests). In short, collectivism in theory produced corporatism in practice, a process utterly pervasive today in America.

Moreover, as Rampton and Stauber do partly note, almost all of the major advocates of the antitrust case against Microsoft are conservative and Republican, including Robert Bork; Orrin Hatch; Robert Dole; Newt Gingrich; Daniel Oliver; James C. Miller III; Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson; the CEOs of Netscape, Oracle, Sun and Intuit; the Progress and Freedom Foundation; and most recently, Ken Starr. So, how does Rampton and Stauber's PR theory square with the fact that here we have multibillionaire industry leaders clearly propagandizing conservative Republican policies that are anti-market and pro-government in order to expand their profits, while simultaneously being supported in the process by Ralph Nader and The Nation? In short, by failing to separate out those who, like ourselves, are properly and honestly attacking corporate welfare in the United States, Rampton and Stauber have, wittingly or not, ended up being the defenders of such policies.

As "Trust Us, We're Experts" correctly states, the Institute's work on antitrust and the issue of "path dependence" that underscores most of these antitrust cases began in 1988, therefore predating any of these cases, the "browser wars" and the Internet industry itself. Because the support we received from Microsoft occurred well after our research was completed, we do not see how Rampton and Stauber can still allege a causal link compromising our independence. Are we to similarly suspect that the contents, credibility or independence of their own books and newsletters are tainted by any new funding Rampton, Stauber or their Center receive after their publication?

For many "liberals" and "conservatives," perhaps it just seems too incredible to believe that antitrust, for over 100 years one of the most sacred pillars of popular political culture and folklore in America, could actually be antisocial, the enemy of consumers and the disadvantaged and a tool of corporate statists. For this reason, too many journalists have been far too sloppy, shallow and ignorant in their analysis of the Microsoft case. Yet the record is clear for those who will look. We are proud of the fact that it has been the Independent Institute that has uniquely led the way in doing so. We believe that the issues pertaining to the disputes in the Microsoft case are fundamentally important. Central to this matter is the issue of what is correct and what is fallacious in the disputes over competition, monopoly, antitrust, entrepreneurship, innovation and social welfare. Accordingly, we welcome any careful analysis of the examinations, methodology and findings of "Winners, Losers & Microsoft," and our earlier book, "Antitrust and Monopoly".

In sum, Rampton and Stauber's thesis is yet another example of an ad hominem attack in which no serious examination is made of the substance of the issues in dispute (e.g., is the Microsoft antitrust case pro- or anti-consumer?). And in failing their own test for credibility, Rampton and Stauber only discredit themselves while behaving like apologists for corporate welfare and junk science.

I believe that Rampton and Stauber should immediately retract the errors pertaining to the Independent Institute in both their book and at future media appearances, for the sake of their own integrity. Otherwise, one can only conclude that the title of their book is quite illuminating, not about whom or what they are evaluating, but of the shoddy quality and untrustworthiness of their own highly questionable, and indeed unfounded, "expertise."

Incidentally, the Independent Institute is a Macintosh office.

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

The Media Channel is a not-for-profit project of OneWorld Online and The Global Center, and is produced by Globalvision New Media.