The PFAS Distortion Strategy
Part 2 of the Press Payola Series
The mainstream media is being inundated with articles about “forever chemicals” invading our bodies and the environment. It is meant to scare and outrage the public and, like many recent activist campaigns, this current onslaught has a lot of big money financing the media activism.
The term “forever chemicals”, coined only in 2018 by a Harvard professor, refers to a family of substances known as PFAS, which stands for “per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances”. Why has this become such a major issue in less than a decade?
It’s a chemical (and worse, a synthetic one)!
(cue dramatic music)
It’s been around since the 1940s!
(cue reel of Nazi soldiers marching in lockstep)
It is persistent!
This means the chemicals do not break down in the environment. This of course is beneficial for applications where having a substance biodegrade would render the applications useless. Having a persistent chemical that does not break down is the point of using the chemical. The carbon-fluorine bond (from which thousands of chemicals have been developed) have provided enormous benefits to humanity, from flame retardants to insulations to water-resistant or stain-resistant products.
The most common PFAS substances (and most widely studied recently) are PFOA and PFOS, and it is from the attention to their persistence in humans and the environment, that so much attention has been directed toward fearmongering an entire class of fluorine-based applications. Just imagine: thousands of PFAS forever chemicals permanently poisoning humans and the environment. This has the makings of the perfect fear campaign.
As fluorinated chemicals have been around since the 1940s, what has changed to make them the new public enemy over all other chemicals? Why have the public, and reactive policymakers, become so afraid of a class of common, and highly beneficial, substances?
Several things have happened.
NGOs have come into a large increase in funding via foundations and interest groups. In my 30 years following and participating in chemical policy issue management, I have never seen such powerful and influential NGO campaigns (and this has as much to do with the professionalization of the philanthropic organizations as with the weaknesses in industry strategy).
Researchers have received more grants for studies to try to link PFAS chemicals to a wide variety of health risks. When activist scientists get funding to find a correlative link, they design their studies to justify their research objectives (however small) and then find a pay-to-play journal to publish their results.
Analytical technologies have become cheaper and more precise. A decade ago, detecting exposures at the nano-scale were often under discussion because risk managers lacked the technologies to measure them. Today we can detect chemical exposures in the environment at the shadow level. If you are looking for a chemical in the environment or in human urine, and you callibrate your chromotograph or spectrometer correctly, you will find trace levels.
Persistent chemicals like those in the PFAS family will definitely show up in trace amounts in the environment. This does not mean there are any risks to such incredibly low levels of exposure, but the activist argument is that these are synthetic chemicals, in the environment and in humans. As they are not natural, WE AREN’T CERTAIN OF THEIR SAFETY and THEY ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THERE!!!
The Forever Campaign
More testing -> more fear -> more public outrage. Policymakers have been forced to respond, as more testing of low levels of persistent chemicals have created a pressure to act against producers, forcing them to clean up residues in the environment. Precaution is an easy policy response to a complex issue when such beneficial chemicals are needed.
The NGOs of course have piled in producing wickedly frightening terms like “forever chemicals” “the poison of the century”, and the “worst pollution crisis in human history”. None of the exposure levels were seen as alarming risks or widely accepted as hazardous in the scientific community, but that never stopped a good activist campaign before (especially if it is fueled on the hazard-based approach).
The Corporate Europe Observatory report that launched this most recent PFAS campaign had 94 NGOs sign a letter and a petition (signed mostly by the NGOs’ membership). Standard stuff in Brussels that rarely moves the dial. What these anti-chemical, anti-industry campaigners needed was to get the media to make this fear campaign part of our daily news feed.
But something has changed. There has been an enormous influx of funding for NGOs and the media for this “forever chemicals” campaign. More than the NGO fear-mongering, we need to see how the media has been pulled in, spreading fear and misinformation of the potential risks as facts. That is where this Firebreak analysis will direct its attention.
This is Part 2 of the Press Payola series that looks at how special interest groups are funding large-scale media campaigns via foundations, either via non-transparent third parties or by setting up fiscal sponsors to act as clearing houses for the journalist payoffs.
The Relentless Warhorse Still Has Some Kick
The most recent iteration of the “forever chemicals” campaign, known as the “forever lobby” was the brainchild of Stéphane Horel. Horel had spent decades campaigning against industry on her belief that there was a widespread threat from endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs). As this ideology was high on emotional rhetoric but low on scientific facts, the campaign was banalized and the public lost interest in Horel’s fear-mongering, lobbumentaries and campaign literature disguised as journalism.
This activist, posing as a journalist, has had a checkered past with reality. She worked on a report attacking EFSA under a consulting contract with the transparency-focused NGO, Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), but when the report was published, CEO claimed Horel was an independent journalist. But as this die-hard endocrine disruption campaigner has shifted her obsession to PFAS, Horel’s old habits of hiding funding sources for her activism has continued.
She frequently claims in her biography that she is a Le Monde journalist but in 2024 she only published four articles in Le Monde, three in February, and all on her anti-PFAS campaign. The reality is that she is paid as an activist while seeking credibility via a few friends in Le Monde who amplify her campaigns.
Horel perhaps realized that her decades-long endocrine campaigns, activism and films failed because the media was not coordinated. Learning from how the media had signed on to promote the climate change agenda, Horel approached her anti-PFAS campaign by creating the Forever Lobbying Campaign with enough foundation funding to keep a large number of mainstream media journalists in line, well financed and eager to publish.
The Forever Fear Campaign
Horel started the Forever Lobbying campaign in 2024 out of the Forever Pollution Project that wound down the year before. It claims:
The Forever Lobbying Project is a cross-border interdisciplinary investigation involving 46 journalists and 29 media partners in 16 countries, with an expert group of 18 international academics and lawyers.
This is impressive and shows how activists have learnt that running a campaign based on fear and outrage is not enough. The media needs to be integrated and controlled to amplify the message. The solution is to start a large project from the outset with a wide network of journalists, making success far more efficient than having only a campaign alone.
A small group at the core of Horel’s anti-PFAS campaign was doing the research but a large organization was set up to support the journalists in amplifying the findings in the various media sources. My fingers got sore scrolling down the list of Forever Lobbying team members, all of the coordinators, expert groups, web developers and three people responsible for “scrollytelling”. There are more than 100 people involved in this project before a report had even come out and the journalists got to work.
Since Stéphane Horel is famous for her low-budget productions, the question needs to be asked: Who is paying for all of these people?
Forever Funding
The Forever Lobbying campaign claims the following funding (without getting into the details).
The project received financial support from the Pulitzer Center, the Broad Reach Foundation, Journalismfund Europe, and IJ4EU.
Many of these foundations or funds take and redistribute or regrant funding from elsewhere so the source of the campaign and media funding is not at all transparent.
In Part 2 of the Press Payola series, the Firebreak noted that the Pulitzer Center seemed willing to take money from anybody to pay forward to an investigation project.
The Broad Reach Foundation is a virtual organization that is 100% donor advised, which means an interest group can donate to Broad Reach and they will turn around and regrant it to the earmarked campaign (minus the fees). This is pure funding obfuscation (and Horel knows it).
The Journalismfund Europe describes itself as an intermediary organization, meaning they match funders with recipients. Once again, the activists did not say who the funders were.
Curiously, the anti-PFAS media campaign also acknowledges support from what is widely known as a fiscal sponsor.
“Arena for Journalism in Europe is financed via its own income and a diverse group of funders and provided in-kind support (team, website, etc.).”
Arena acknowledges they take earmarked funding from foundations to regrant to campaigns like Forever Lobbying. They provided a link to 23 foundations, any one of which could have donated to the PFAS activists, but Horel chose not to be transparent. In any case, many of these foundations utilize donor-advised funds, so not only is this campaign unclear on which foundations are supporting Arena as the anti-PFAS campaign fiscal sponsor, they are also hiding the special interest money coming into the foundations via dark pathways.
Neither Arena nor the anti-PFAS media campaign defined what “in-kind support” for team members means. The Firebreak saw how the foundation-funded fiscal sponsor, Covering Climate Now, considered in-kind support as direct cash payments for journalists to report on climate stories.
This is not a free press. True to the Press Payola thesis, the anti-PFAS campaign stories are bought and paid for by special interest groups hiding in the shadows behind foundations.
The Forever Non-Transparent Interest Groups
The key ambition of the anti-PFAS lobby is to harm the chemical industry with a ban on all fluorine-based chemicals, impose unrealistic clean-up costs, hold industry liable for the damages to humans and the environment and to promote alternatives to PFAS applications. In all cases, there is a large ecosystem of opportunistic interest groups, from tort lawyers to environmental services companies to non-PFAS-based producers, who would benefit enormously should this activist campaign succeed in phasing out the thousands of fluorine-based chemical applications.
There is big money involved here which could justify funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into foundations and fiscal sponsors to pay off the journalists participating in this Forever Lobbying campaign. Like the fiscal sponsors set up to pay journalists to keep climate change in the news, this PFAS media campaign, paying the rent for “46 journalists from 29 media partners in 16 countries” (not to mention the 18 lawyers and academics or the hundreds or editors, coordinators and “scrollytellers”) qualifies as another Press Payola situation. As a reminder, the Press Payola series looks at how foundations redistributing funds from interest groups via third party fiscal sponsors to pay journalists to run stories on their investigation .
How much is the Forever Lobbying campaign paying their journalists to report on the research the activists have prepared for them? Even though the pro-transparency NGO, Corporate Europe Observatory, is at the heart of this campaign, there is no transparency on how much the activists have received from the foundations and their fiscal sponsors. For that matter, there is no information on which groups are funding sponsors like the Pulitzer Center or the sources of the dark donor-advised funds channeled through foundations supporting the Forever Lobbying fiscal sponsor, Arena.
Even Corporate Europe Observatory failed to list the costs of producing their PFAS report that launched the campaign in January 2025. I suppose for these NGO activists, transparency is only for industry, fools and the idiots we don’t like.
The next time you read some story on PFAS, you need to ask three questions:
Is the risk significant or just part of another chemical fear campaign?
Was the journalist paid by some non-transparent foundation or fiscal sponsor to amplify the report?
Which interest groups would likely benefit from the solutions the campaign and “news story” is peddling?
I wish the news editors would ask those questions, but they are likely also on the take.