Alan Caruba
Alan Caruba is a public relations advisor, a vitriolic critic of environmentalism and founder of the National Anxiety Center.
His personal website boasts that his clients have included or currently include "chemical and pharmaceutical companies, think tanks, trade associations, service providers, publishers, authors, and others. Since the 1990s, he has been the public relations counselor for the New Jersey Pest Management Association. For ten years, he served as the Director of Communications for the American Policy Center." [1]
A staunch conservative, he has also strongly supported the Bush administration's war with Iraq and advocates similar military action against other countries in the Middle East, including Syria. [2]
Caruba maintains several web sites:
Between 1984 and 2004 Caruba also ran the website, The Boring Institute.com. [3] The institute's domain address was http://www.boringinstitute.com.
Between 1989 and 1997, Caruba edited a media directory, Power Media Selects for Broadcast Interview Source, a Washington D.C. company. [4] Caruba is currently listed as a contact for journalists as a public relations expert on the following websites run by Broadcast Interview Source:
Contents
Need for disclosure
In 1989, identifying himself as a Public Relations Counselor, he wrote that there was nothing wrong with PR professionals producing PR materials, as long as they disclosed that this was what they were doing:
Many NASW [National Association of Science Writers] members, including myself, function both in the field of public relations and independently as authors of factual articles and other literary materials. So long as we properly identify ourselves as regards these separate activities, nothing, I know of can or should forbid us the right to pursue these two activities.[1]
Defending Fumento
In a January 2006 column, Caruba railed against the decision by the Scripps Howard News Service to drop Michael Fumento as a columnist after Businessweek revealed he had been funded by Monsanto for his 1999 book BioEvolution. "Courageous journalists that they are, Scripps dropped Fumento without even contacting him to determine the truth or falsity of the claim of bias leveled against him in a Business Week column," Caruba complained.
Arguing that the book was accurate Caruba described the Businessweek article as "nothing to do with his ethics and everything to do with a leftist attack intended to smear his reputation and hopefully remove a leading critic of environmentalism and other manifestations of dubious science intended to frighten people." [5]
Caruba brands SourceWatch a "front group"
In a comment appended to one of his own articles, Caruba attacked SourceWatch as follows:
- May I suggest that, instead of SourceWatch, a Green front group that exists to demonize anyone who is a critic of the endless scare campaigns of the environmental movement, that you simply visit www.caruba.com where I provide a complete set of "credentials" that includes membership in the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the National Association of Science Writers. Everything I write is, to the best of my ability, carefully documented. Do I think the environmental movement has an agenda and no sense of ethical behavior? Oh, yes! [6]
He did not explain who he believes SourceWatch acts as a front for. The Center for Media and Democracy, which sponsors SourceWatch, publishes an easily-accessed list of its major donors on its website.
Other affiliations
- Columnist, The New Media Journal.us
Contact details
Alan Caruba
The Caruba Organization
28 West Third St. (Apt 1321)
South Orange, NJ 07079
Phone:(973) 763-6392
E-mail: acaruba AT aol.com
Web: http://www.caruba.com
SourceWatch resources
External links
References
- ↑ Alan Caruba, P.R. Counselor (Summer 1989). Letter to NASW(pdf). UCSF Tobacco Documents Archive. Retrieved on 2009-11-22.
Articles by Caruba
- Article index
- Alan Caruba, "Killing millions to 'save' the earth ", Checkbiotech.org, November 21, 2003.
- Alan Caruba, "Demonizing Doe Run", WEBCommentary.com, May 8, 2005.
- Alan Caruba, "Mad Cows Don't Scare Me! ", NewsReleaseWire.com, June 24, 2005.
- ^ Alan Caruba, "It's Getting Colder, Not Warmer", EnergyPulse, November 23, 2005.
- Alan Caruba, "Smearing Conservative Writers", NewsReleaseWire, January 29, 2006.
- Alan Caruba, "The Greenpeace Scam," NewsByUs.com, June 1, 2008.
Articles about Caruba
- "Credentials:Caruba: Public Relations Counselor & Editorial Consultant", The Caruba Organization, accessed May 2005.
- "Alan Caruba Biography", WEBCommentary.com, accessed May 2005.
- Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, "Flack Attack: Industry P.R. Guys Invent a 'Green Genocide Agenda'," The Progressive, October 1999.
- Stephen Goode, "Caruba Proves to be Far from Boring," Insight on the News, March 27, 2003.
Wikipedia also has an article on Alan Caruba. This article may use content from the Wikipedia article under the terms of the GFDL.
