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Alan Caruba

Alan Caruba (b. Oct. 9, 1937) is a public relations counselor and freelance writer who is a frequent critic of environmentalism, Islam and global warming.

Career

In the late 1970s Caruba founded the PR firm The Caruba Organization, and in 1990, the National Anxiety Center, which identifies itself as "a clearinghouse for information about 'scare campaigns' designed to influence public policy and opinion" on such subjects as global warming, ozone depletion and DDT. From 1984 until 2004, he ran The Boring Institute, a "spoof" satirizing the media by releasing annual lists of the year's "boring" celebrities. From 1994 until 2004, he was director of communications for the American Policy Center. He is an adjunct scholar at the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, a wise use think tank in Bellevue, Washington.

Caruba's clients have included corporations, publishers, think tanks, trade associations, chemical and pharmaceutical companies and other organizations. In the 1970s he "helped introduce" the insecticide Ficam. Since the late 1980s, he has been the PR counselor for the New Jersey Pest Management Association. Former clients include Hyatt Hotels and chemical companies Van Waters & Rogers and BFC Chemicals.

He identifies himself as a "founding member" and " charter member" of the National Book Critics Circle, that is, a member since its founding in 1974. Caruba is also a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, American Society of Journalists and Authors and the National Association of Science Writers.

Views

Caruba writes on a variety of topics including energy issues, education, the United Nations, and popular culture. He has claimed that global warming is a "hoax" and criticized many other claims made by environmentalists. Caruba initially supported the Bush administration's war with Iraq, but has since written to express a note of caution regarding the hoped-for outcome.

He has written that he believes that:

The whole of America, Europe and other nations that are the engines of the global economy, has been under attack by the environmentalists because an evil, corrupt United Nations wants to be an unelected global government and we stand in their way. This is why the worldwide environmental movement is directed from the United Nations. Behind the United Nations are those who subscribe still to the failed economic theories of Marxism and who hate the success of the United States and others who have embraced capitalism…They are the ones seeking to destroy the sovereignty of the United States by stealth, creating a North American Union to merge our nation with Canada and Mexico, sinking the individual protections afforded by our Constitution into a morass of regulations over which there will be no vote by Americans. Global warming is the mask, the charade, the Big Lie by which the destruction of the United States of America is being advanced.

Publications

In the 1970s Caruba published a book of poetry (Pocket Books) and a novel (Dell Publishing), along with two book collections of his commentaries -- Warning Signs (2003) and Right Answers (2006), both published by Morrill Press. He also maintains Bookviews.com, a website devoted to new fiction and non-fiction.

Under the auspices of the National Anxiety Center, Caruba writes a weekly column called "Warning Signs", which his company says is widely excerpted on such conservative news and opinion websites as CNSNews.com, the Free Market News Network, and Axcess News. Caruba also contributes opinion pieces to consumer and trade magazines and newspapers such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Providence Journal, and The Washington Times.

Criticism

Caruba's views on environmental issues are generally contrary to the mainstream scientific consensus, and critics have called him an "industry shill" and a "flack." Some have accused him of blurring the ethical line between his writings as an "independent" journalist and commentator and his own public relations business activities and self-interest. His website for his PR business, The Caruba Organization, features a link to his weekly online column "Warning Signs", published on his website for the National Anxiety Center, which "operates under the aegis of the Caruba Organization." In an interview published in PR News, when asked "But aren't you using the press to generate publicity for yourself?", Caruba responded:

To some extent, yes, but mostly The Boring Institute and other creations such as the National Anxiety Center are, for me, a PR exercise. They satirize the media in general and the process by which news is determined. Frankly, many in today’s print and broadcast media are utterly, totally dependent on PR people. They could not function without us. Too much of what passes for news today lacks depth, insight or value.

Caruba has published a series of pro-pesticide columns, while failing to disclose his relationship with the pesticide control industry.

SourceWatch criticized Caruba for defending columnist Michael Fumento when he was dropped by Scripps Howard News Service after Business Week revealed Fumento had not properly disclosed his ties to biotech giant Monsanto. Scripps featured several pro-biotech and pro-Monsanto columns by Fumento before his conflict of interest was uncovered, but after its disclosure, Caruba still justified Fumento's actions: "Suffice it to say that even writers need to eat and pay the rent," going on to characterize SourceWatch as "a left-wing organization that devotes a lot of time to attacking the public relations profession in general and conservative writers in particular.

Although SourceWatch editor Bob Burton has called into question the factual accuracy of some of Caruba's articles, Caruba has not withdrawn or altered any of his weekly commentaries. According to Burton, in 2006, while Caruba was engaged in protracted disagreements with SourceWatch and its parent company Center for Media and Democracy, he "impl[ied] that the book Mad Cow USA, co-authored by CMD's John Stauber and Sheldon Ramption, is irrational and extremist since, according to Caruba, 'there has never been a case of this disease in the U.S.A.'"

Burton also cites Caruba's view that "Members of the public who support organizations like CMD ... have been so 'intensely propagandized' that they 'believe that global warming [aka "climate change"] is something other than a normal climate cycle.'"