Coke Adds Lies: Media Sources Paid to Downplay Soda’s Dangers

Coca-Cola’s use of healthcare professionals to market its products used to be more overt.

Last year, journalists unmasked a scheme that should look familiar to anyone following health and environmental news (FAIR Blog, 10/28/15): corporations paying front groups and scientists to spin the media and public in order to protect their products.

In this latest example, Coca-Cola—facing slipping sales and increasing pressure to regulate products that are fueling the nation’s obesity epidemic—launched a new front group led by prominent professors. As Anahad O’Connor reported in the New York Times (8/9/15):

Coca-Cola, the world’s largest producer of sugary beverages, is backing a new “science-based” solution to the obesity crisis: To maintain a healthy weight, get more exercise and worry less about cutting calories.

The beverage giant has teamed up with influential scientists who are advancing this message in medical journals, at conferences and through social media. To help the scientists get the word out, Coke has provided financial and logistical support to a new nonprofit organization called the Global Energy Balance Network, which promotes the argument that weight-conscious Americans are overly fixated on how much they eat and drink while not paying enough attention to exercise.

This despite evidence that exercise, while beneficial for other reasons, by itself has minimal impact on weight (Obesity, 9/6/12).

In the case of the Global Energy Balance Network, Coke funded the group to the tune of $1.5 million and claimed minimal involvement. However, as Candice Choi reported for the Associated Press (11/24/15), internal emails show that Coke executives were actually heavily involved: “They helped pick the group’s leaders, edited its mission statement and suggested articles and videos for its website.” The Times pointed out that “the network’s website, gebn.org, is registered to Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, and the company is also listed as the site’s administrator.”

Coke-funded academic James O. Hill wants people to see Coke as “a company that brings important and fun things to them.”

The investigation revealed that Coke was also providing millions of dollars in funding to the two professors who led the now-collapsed front group: the president James O. Hill and vice president Steven N. Blair.

Hill is a professor of pediatrics and medicine at the University of Colorado and director of its Center for Human Nutrition. According to emails uncovered by AP, Hill wrote privately to a Coca-Cola executive:

I want to help your company avoid the image of being a problem in people’s’ lives and back to being a company that brings important and fun things to them.

Coca-Cola’s vision for Global Energy Balance Network, AP reported, was for the group to “quickly establish itself as the place the media goes to for comment on any obesity issue.”

The front group was well-positioned to achieve that vision, since professors Hill and Blair were already well-established as experts on obesity.

An analysis of media coverage by Gary Ruskin, my co-director at US Right to Know, found 30 news articles quoting Hill or Blair, written after they received funding from Coca-Cola, in which journalists failed to disclose this funding.

The articles appeared in influential outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, USA Today, Boston Globe, Atlantic Monthly, US News, Newsweek and NPR. Hill typically comments about the importance of physical activity (rather than diet) as the key to weight loss, with no mention of funding from Coca-Cola. Interviewed by the LA Times (5/9/14) about the documentary Fed Up, he offers the viewpoint that “the food industry and scientists need to join forces to find solutions.”

The Coke story is just the latest “Rent-a- Scientist” example of corporations quietly paying professors who appear in the media as independent experts, pushing points of view that happen to benefit the corporations from which they take money.

Earlier this month, a Greenpeace sting operation caught Princeton professor William Happer and Penn State professor emeritus Frank Clemente agreeing to take corporate cash (and conceal the payments) to write papers extolling the benefits of coal and carbon emissions.

That scandal followed the revelation that Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims global warming can be explained by variations in the Sun’s energy, described his work as “deliverables” for corporate funders, as the New York Times (2/21/15) reported.

In September, emails obtained by US Right to Know linked Monsanto money to two professors who frequently appear in the media as independent experts on GMOs (New York Times, 9/5/15).

A media analysis on that issue found 28 media stories quoting or written by University of Florida professor Kevin Folta or University of Illinois professor emeritus Bruce Chassy after they received Monsanto funding that did not disclose that funding.

All these cases highlight that reporters need to do a better job researching their sources, and disclosing the financial ties between corporations and academics. As Ruskin wrote (USRTK.org, 12/14/15): “Readers need to know who pays sources to evaluate the legitimacy and biases of these sources.”

Stacy Malkan is co-director of US Right to Know, a nonprofit consumer group. She is also the author of Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry