Who is Andy Rowell and why is he economical with the truth?
Sunday, March 30, 2014 at 12:08 Andy Rowell describes himself on Twitter as a "freelance writer/ investigative journalist specialising in environmental, health and lobbying issues".
He's co-author of A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism And Broken Politics In Britain.
Rowell and his co-author Tamasin Cave are directors of Spinwatch which "investigates the way that the public relations (PR) industry and corporate and government propaganda distort public debate and undermine democracy".
The advisory board of Spinwatch includes some interesting names – Caroline Lucas, Britain's first Green MP and former leader of the Green party; Guardian columnist George Monbiot; and John Pilger, contributor to the Guardian, Mirror, New Statesman and Independent.
He's also a "part-time research fellow at Bath University", home of the Tobacco Control Research Group, so it won't surprise you to learn that Rowell has written an article for the Independent on Sunday today in which he "reveals the tactics of an industry desperate to head off new rules on packaging".
Recycling information that has already been published elsewhere, Rowell writes:
Leaked documents from PMI show the extent of the sophisticated lobbying and media campaign undertaken by the industry to “ensure” that the Government does not introduce plain packaging.
“Tobacco industry whistle-blowers have revealed the underhand use of third parties, front groups and lobbyists to try to prevent new regulations for tobacco,” argued Deborah Arnott from the anti-smoking group Action on Smoking and Health (Ash).
Messengers identified by PMI, writes Rowell, include:
... the influential campaign group the TaxPayers’ Alliance and the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the latter having received tens of thousands of pounds of tobacco money. The BBC, in particular, has been heavily criticised for airing the IEA’s views without disclosing its links to tobacco.
Forest gets a mention too:
Forest, predominately funded by the tobacco industry, launched a campaign called Hands Off Our Packs and hired a marketing firm to employ several hundred canvassers in dozens of locations to garner signatures to be submitted to the consultation. Their canvassing tactics have been called into question, including where signatures were forged or canvassers misrepresented how plain packaging works. Forest has condemned these incidents, saying they were “isolated”.
Bias comes in many forms and bias by omission is one of them.
For example, Rowell fails to mention a far more serious case of vote rigging – by tobacco control campaigners – which Angela Harbutt and I wrote about here and here.
He also omits to mention that the BBC's chief critic when it comes to the IEA's tobacco funding is George Monbiot, a member of the Spinwatch Advisory Board.
Another small but significant omission is the fact that the Indy describes Rowell as a "part-time research fellow at Bath University" but fails to explain exactly what he does.
In fact, he's a senior research fellow with the University's Tobacco Control Research Group, a job he shares with Dr Eveline Lubbers.
According to her profile:
Together they developed TobaccoTactics.org as a cutting-edge model of monitoring the tobacco industry, launched in June 2012.
Rowell can call himself a "freelance writer/investigative journalist" but anyone involved in an exercise like that is also a propagandist for the tobacco control industry. (See my review of Tobacco Tactics, published in October 2012.)
Then again, his obsession with the tobacco industry goes back a long way, so at least he's consistent. Here are two examples:
Tobacco explained: The truth about the tobacco industry in its own words, Clive Bates and Andy Rowell (1998)
No smoke without fire (2000): Tobacco smuggling has reached epidemic levels. But tobacco companies themselves are fuelling the trade. Andy Rowell and Rich Cookson report.
Anyway, if you want to read Rowell's article in today's Indy, go to Plain packaging: Big Tobacco prepares for ‘bare-knuckle fight’ over ban.
Reader Comments (5)
So that's where Pilger's been festering!
I always remember John Pilger popping up on telly almost every other week when aunty beeb wanted someone to reliably criticize the United States and her allies - which usually meant us. Pilger was always a darling left-wing polemicist called upon to relentlessly castigate the US and the UK when involved in various skirmishes throughout the globe…and of course big nasty business. Big business was always in line to take a delicious beating from Pilger.
I don’t think this man ever had a nice word to say about anyone or anything slightly left of centre. I was glad when the day came and he appeared less and less on television pumping out his sanctimonious garbage which was music to the biased ear’oles of the sensitive and oh so delicate poppies of the left.
Here’s just a sample of his even handedness.
2010. He defends WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange. (A man worth defending, hasn’t done anything wrong)
2004. The inhabitants of the Chagos Islands who were brutally expelled by British Governments in the late 1960s and early 1970s to make way for an American military base.
2003. War on Terror: Here he criticizes the US and the UK.
2001. The New Rulers Of The World: An analysis of a new global economy run by government backed multinational companies who are further widening the gulf between the rich and the poor. Nice one John – good standard fare from you.
1970. ‘The incredible account of the break-up of the US military in Vietnam. I bet he slavered (drooled for younger people) over that one.
He seems to have lived his life in a constant state of moral outrage against the West.
Of course he's never felt any moral outrage about his well funded lifestyle by the West allowing him to hop around the World.
Anyway he'll certainly welcome the opportunity to disparage Tobacco Companies as much as possible.
Must be nice to get paid for writing offensive crap about people you don't like on the web. And these days they can probably put it into the REF.
It is unreasonable for people who rely on anti-tobacco activism for their very livelihoods to belittle the contribution of others based on the argument that any contribution from the "evil" tobacco industry implies vested commercial interest. The IEA for example claims to receive less than 2% of its funding from tobacco companies whereas opponents from the public health industry are funded entirely by tobacco control and stand to lose that funding entirely unless they can maintain their campaigning. Who is the most partisan and the most financially compromised, Chris Snowdon or Anna Gilmore?
I am tired of the juvenile argument that tobacco industry is bad so all associated in any way are bad, anything anti-tobacco does is acceptable because tobacco is bad and anyone who opposes anti-tobacco must be associated with tobacco industry so is bad.
The intellectually challenged in politics and the media have been buying that nonsense for decades and it is time that it stopped.
"Who is Andy Rowell and why is he economical with the truth?"
Simon, I remember the name Andy Rowell as being at the centre of a huge row in 2010.
According to Christopher Booker -
"The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger "up to 40 per cent" of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears.
This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain's two most committed environmentalist newspapers.
Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7113582/Amazongate-new-evidence-of-the-IPCCs-failures.html
George Monbiot
"There is no doubt that the IPCC made a mistake. Sourcing its information on the Amazon to a report by the green group WWF rather than the abundant peer-reviewed literature on the subject, was a bizarre and silly thing to do"
http://www.monbiot.com/2010/07/06/a-bookful-of-bookerisms/
But a scientist made a complaint and the Times retracted the article
Nature News Blog
UK paper apologises for ‘bogus’ climate change claim
21 Jun 2010
"A British climate scientist has succeeded in forcing an apology from the Sunday Times after it published an article alleging claims that global warming would damage the Amazon were “bogus”."
"Lewis became embroiled with the Sunday Times as a number of papers published articles attacking perceived mistakes in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s influential reports. Although some of these mistakes have turned out to be real, Lewis says that the article he complained about “was baseless”.
The Sunday Times article ‘UN Climate Panel Shamed by Bogus Rainforest Claim’, which is no longer on the paper’s website but is widely available on the internet, said that the IPCC claim that 40% of the Amazon could be wiped out by global warming was “based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise”.
In a detailed letter to the UK’s Press Complaints Commission, Lewis says that the IPCC report “contained an incorrect reference relating to a sentence about the potential impacts of climate change on the Amazon rainforest, and not an error of science”.
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2010/06/uk_paper_apologises_for_bogus.html
From the original Times article
"The latest controversy originates in a report called A Global Review of Forest Fires, which WWF published in 2000. It was commissioned from Andrew Rowell, a freelance journalist and green campaigner who has worked for Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and anti-smoking organisations.
The second author was Peter Moore, a campaigner and policy analyst with WWF.
In their report they suggested that “up to 40% of Brazilian rainforest was extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall” but made clear that this was because drier forests were more likely to catch fire. The IPCC report picked up this reference but expanded it to cover the whole Amazon."
Yes, citizens of the West must never ever criticize it--just keep their mouths shut and get in line.