Creating the Corporate Citizen: Mobil Oil's Editorial-Advocacy Campaign in The New York Times to Advance the Right and Practice of Corporate Political Speech, 1970–80

Abstract

Over the course of the 1970s, Mobil Oil made The New York Times oped page the focus of a groundbreaking advocacy strategy to promote interests that went far beyond its immediate business objectives. This study considers that influential campaign in terms of its significance for intellectual history, particularly Mobil's efforts to reframe understanding of the marketplace of ideas in First Amendment theory and practice. Although other corporations produced advocacy messages in the seventies, none spoke so regularly on so many issues of public policy as Mobil did during that period This research documents the way rhetoric was employed in Mobil's Times editorial-advocacy campaign to frame the corporate role in democratic processes as identical to that of the individual citizen.