Corporate Propagandist Richard Berman Secretly Taped Bragging About How He Smears Progressives

By Steven Rosenfeld

October 31, 2014 | One of corporate America’s most notorious political hitmen, Richard Berman, whose ugly campaigns rely on smears and fake front groups that hide sponsors’ identities, has been secretly tape-recorded bragging about his dirty tactics.

“Think of this as an endless war,” told a group of oil and gas industry executives at a June meeting of the Western Energy Alliance in Colorado Springs, as he sought to raise $3 million for a campaign called “Big Green Radicals” aimed at environmentalists and fracking opponents. “You can either win ugly or lose pretty.”

Berman’s remarks were secretly recorded by an attendee who gave them to the Center for Media and Democracy [3]. His speech was filled with the inflammatory rhetoric and bruising tactics he has used for decades in corporate propaganda campaigns to smear, discredit and destroy public-interest causes and groups. As a lengthy profile in AlterNet detailed [4], Berman—labeled Dr. Evil by CBS’s "60 Minutes"—is known for pioneering a toxic mix of front groups, distortion-filled attacks, ridicule and bullying to stoke prejudice and hatred as a means of turning public attention and regulators away from clients’ business practices.