Doubt is our product

The campaign

In December 1953 the heads of the major American tobacco companies met at the Plaza Hotel in New York with John Hill of the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. The occasion was a run of studies, in Britain and the United States, linking cigarettes to lung cancer, and a Reader's Digest article, "Cancer by the Carton", that had put the findings in front of the public. Sales had dipped for the first time in memory. Hill's advice was not to deny the science but to call for more of it: to present the industry as a responsible party to an open scientific question.

On 4 January 1954 the companies published "A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers" as a full-page advertisement in more than four hundred newspapers. It accepted public concern, promised cooperation with research, asserted that there was no proof that cigarette smoking was a cause of lung cancer, and announced the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, with an independent scientific advisory board, to fund the search for answers. The committee, later the Council for Tobacco Research, ran for forty-four years, spent hundreds of millions of dollars, and funded a great deal of real science on everything except the question it had been created to answer.

The strategy was stated plainly inside the industry. A 1969 memorandum from the Brown & Williamson company, released in litigation decades later, said: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy." Public statements held to the formula for four decades. In 1994 the chief executives of the seven largest companies told a congressional committee, under oath and in turn, that they did not believe nicotine was addictive.

The apparatus grew with the years. The Tobacco Institute, founded in 1958, handled lobbying and public statements; a network of law firms coordinated research so that unhelpful results could be kept under privilege; sponsored conferences and journals gave the industry's scientists a platform; and the companies' advertising, which by the 1960s was the largest of any consumer category, kept the product's image of health and vigor in front of a public that was being told the question was open.

Who ran it and why

The companies ran it, with Hill & Knowlton and later other firms, and the motive was the obvious one: the product was the most profitable consumer good in the world and the science threatened it. What makes the case instructive is that the people who ran it knew. Internal research at the companies had confirmed the cancer link by the late 1950s and the addictiveness of nicotine by the early 1960s; the documents say so. The public position was not a belief but a strategy, maintained by lawyers who reviewed scientific statements before release and by a research council whose independence was advertised and whose agenda was set.

The strategy's genius was that it asked for nothing unreasonable. "More research is needed" is always true. "The science is not settled" is a scientist's own caution turned into a weapon. The industry did not need the public to believe smoking was safe; it needed the public to believe the question was open, and an open question is no reason to quit.

The techniques, in order of weight

Manufactured Doubt is the case's own technique, and this is where it was perfected. The method is to treat a settled question as an open one by funding, publicizing, and demanding research, so that "controversy" exists in the press whether or not it exists in the science.

Front Groups: the Tobacco Industry Research Committee presented itself as an independent scientific body. Its board included real scientists and its grants went to real institutions; its purpose was set by the industry, and its existence was the industry's main exhibit.

Paid Expert: the industry retained scientists, statisticians, and physicians to testify, to write, and to appear, and the payments were not disclosed. The Council's own grants created a body of researchers with reason to be friendly.

False Balance was the technique the industry needed journalism to perform, and journalism obliged. Reporters trained to present two sides gave the industry's doubt equal space with the medical consensus, for decades.

Cherry Picking and Misleading Statistics supplied the content of the doubt: the smokers who lived to ninety, the studies with small samples, the distinction between association and causation pressed past its limits.

Message Discipline held the line. Every company said the same thing in the same words for forty years, and the 1994 hearing is the record of it.

The artifacts

The campaign is unusual in being documented from the inside. The Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive at the University of California, San Francisco, holds some fourteen million pages released through litigation, and the campaign can be followed through them from the Plaza Hotel meeting to the settlement. Three documents in particular belong beside this study.

The "Frank Statement" of January 1954 is the campaign's founding text, and it repays close reading as a piece of writing. It accepts concern, promises care, and makes one assertion, that there is no proof, in the middle of a paragraph of reassurance. Every sentence is defensible; the whole is a strategy. The 1969 Brown & Williamson memorandum, with its line about doubt, is the strategy stated by its authors. And the transcript of the April 1994 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, at which seven chief executives in turn denied that nicotine was addictive, is the strategy at the end of its life, maintained past the point of credibility by men who had read the documents.

The industry's advertising from the period is the campaign's other face. While the research council spoke of open questions, the advertisements showed athletes, outdoorsmen, and the Marlboro cowboy, and the filter-tip campaigns of the 1950s implied a safety the companies' scientists knew the filters did not provide. The archive reproduces examples with the techniques pinned: the doubt in the statements and the reassurance in the pictures were one campaign.

What happened

The strategy worked for longer than its authors can have expected. The Surgeon General's report of 1964 settled the science publicly; the companies went on disputing it until the 1990s. The documents that ended the campaign came out through litigation and a leak, in the mid-1990s, and showed that the companies had known what they were denying. In 1998 the Master Settlement Agreement between the companies and forty-six states dissolved the Council for Tobacco Research and the Tobacco Institute, restricted marketing, and committed the companies to payments that continue. In 2006 a federal court found, in United States v. Philip Morris, that the companies had engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to deceive the public, and ordered them to publish corrective statements, which began running in 2017.

The playbook outlived the case. Historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway traced the same methods, and in some instances the same people and firms, through the disputes over acid rain, the ozone hole, and climate change. The manufacture of doubt is now the standard response of any industry whose product is found to harm, and its signature, "the science is not settled", can be heard in every such dispute.

The case also changed the law of evidence about propaganda. The 2006 judgment in United States v. Philip Morris runs to more than a thousand pages and is, in effect, a judicial history of the campaign, finding as fact that the companies had known the science, had agreed to deny it, and had funded research and experts to that end. It is the most thorough official account of a manufactured-doubt campaign in existence, and a reader who wants to see the techniques of the Structural family proved to a legal standard will find them there, with the documents cited.

What it teaches

The tobacco campaign is the case for the Structural family because none of its techniques is visible in any single message. Each statement was reasonable; each study was real; each expert was credentialled. The propaganda was the arrangement: who funded what, who reviewed what, and what the body of statements was for. The reader's defense is the same as the historian's: follow the money, read the documents, and treat a demand for more research as a claim with an interest behind it.