Why We've Slept Through Climate Change For 30 Years

How a PR Firm Helped Establish America's Cigarette Century
By Allan M. Brandt, AlterNet. Posted April 16, 2007.

How the tobacco industry-hired Hill & Knowlton to develop many of the propaganda techniques against science used today to attack climate change and evolution.

Excerpted from The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America by Allan M. Brandt, (Basic Books, 2007).


[The advertising executives hired to promoted cigarettes] concluded ... that seizing control of the science of tobacco and health would be as important as seizing control of the media. It would be crucial to identify scientists who expressed skepticism about the link between cigarettes and cancer, those critical of statistical methods, and especially those who had offered alternative hypotheses for the cause of cancer. Hill set his staff to identifying the most vocal and visible skeptics.

These people would be central to the development of an industry scientific program in step with its larger public relations goals.

[big snip]

They apparently made no independent attempt to assess the state of medical knowledge; nor did they seek informed evaluations from independent scientists. Their role was limited to serving the public relations goal of their client.

[big snip]

Ultimately, he concluded, the best public relations approach was for the industry to become a major sponsor of medical research. This tactic offered several crucial advantages. The call for new research implied that existing studies were inadequate or flawed. It made clear there was "more to know,"and it made the industry seem a committed participant in the scientific enterprise rather than a detractor. The industry had, as noted, supported some individual research in recent years, but Hill's proposal offered the potential of a research program that would both be controlled by the industry yet promoted as independent.

[snip]

Hill and his clients had no interest in answering a scientific question; their goal was to maintain vigorous control over the research program to utilize "science" in the service of public relations.

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