the scale and engineering of deception
September 20, 2004 10:21 pm by kruegerI think the sheer scale of deception involved is hard to grasp here. Also the methods: how was it even possible?
This PR Watch article helps: http://www.prwatch.org/improp/ctr.html.
It’s about the CTR, or Council for Tobacco Research. For over 40 years it pretended to be a responsible tobacco industry effort: funding research on smoking and health. In fact its purpose was PR: “promoting cigarettes and…creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it”.
Over 40 years, over $300 million — and this was just one piece of the tobacco industry’s PR campaign. This is an industry that can well afford to spend that kind of money on just one piece of an overall PR campaign. The total amount comes to much, much, more.
And how was the deception done? Several strategies were used: raising the bar of proof to impossible standards; blaming every other possible cause of cancer; creating the appearance of scientific “controversy” long after any real controversy had ended; nit-picking the science that showed smoking causes disease. PR Watch reveals how CTR engineered deception using these and other strategies. It’s well worth reading.
Now you may say, well I never heard of CTR, so how much could it have affected me? Here’s a simple example of how this was all used:
http://tobaccodocuments.org/pollay_ads/TIIA07.04.html
You might also say, well that was all a long time ago. Here’s more — from 1985:
http://tobaccodocuments.org/pollay_ads/TIIA07.06.html
Of course, this cost even more money — yet this too was just a small part of the PR campaign. This was a huge, massive, campaign. Philip Hilts called it the largest, longest running issue campaign ever run. It started in 1954 and ran almost 50 years. All to “keep doubt alive” on smoking and health. “Scientists disagree”. “It’s complex”. “The link is merely statistical”. “It’s unproven”.
Today the industry uses the same methods, the same engineering of deception — on secondhand smoke: