The Rights Of Corporate Speech

Kerr analyzes how in the 1970s Mobil Oil made the The New York Times op-ed page the focus of its advocacy strategy to promote interests far beyond its immediate business objectives. Although other corporations produced advocacy messages, none spoke so regularly on so many issues of public policy as Mobil. Kerr shows how Mobil framed the corporate role in democratic processes as identical to that of the individual citizen. This was a radical assertion at the beginning of the seventies, but by the end of the decade Mobil's efforts were the ideological vanguard of an historic expansion of the right and practice of corporate speech.