John Stauber founded the non-profit Center for Media & Democracy and its quarterly newsmagazine PR Watch in 1993 and since has served as the Center's executive director. He is an investigative writer, public speaker and democracy activist whose leadership on controversial public issues began in the 1960s when he was growing up in a Republican family in Marshfield, Wisconsin, the home town of President Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird. In high school Stauber dedicated himself to an autodidactic education and organized to stop the U.S. war in Vietnam and for the first Earth Day.
Since then he has begun or worked with many citizen advocacy and public interest groups at the local, national and international levels.
In collaboration with Sheldon Rampton, he has co-authored five books:
• Toxic Sludge Is Good For You! Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry' (1995)
• Mad Cow U.S.A. (1997)
• Trust Us, We're Experts! How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future (2001)
• Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq (2003)
• Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing Is Turning America Into a One-Party State
