Deadly Spin (27 page)

Alarmed by the shift, the tobacco industry realized it was vulnerable. Because it had no similar national grassroots networks to oppose these local efforts, it started retailer programs like We Card to defeat them.

Youth programs served the industry on several levels. They gave it cover against the charge that it targeted kids, and they generated goodwill among legislators. But these retailer programs also served another function: They gave the industry an opening to have company representatives conduct personal visits with retailers all over the country. Under the guise of instructing retailers to check for IDs as part of a youth-access program, industry representatives also asked retailers to monitor political activity in their towns—and paid them to report back to the Tobacco Institute, the industry’s former trade and lobbying group, at the first appearance of any problems (like citizens pushing for a smoking ban), so the institute could mobilize.

An institute document made public years later stated, “For monitoring purposes, we fund our allies in the convenience store groups to regularly report on ordinance introductions and assist in campaigns to stop unreasonable measures … Promotion of The Institute’s ‘It’s the Law’ program and other industry programs play a helpful role.” It added that “the bottom line is that if we do not know a local battle is taking place in a timely manner, there is no way in which we can employ our resources to challenge unfair outcomes.”
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Retailers as well as restaurant and bar owners across the country started phoning the Tobacco Institute to let it know about “trouble” in their area, and the industry responded by flying representatives to those towns to generate and coordinate strident opposition—or at least the appearance of strident opposition—to the antismoking efforts.

No corner of the country, no jerkwater town, was too small for the industry’s attempts at intervention. It knew that once people experienced smoke-free places, the trend would spread. So it sent people, often smokers’-rights-group organizers, to the smallest, most remote little towns to squelch these activities as soon as they got started.

In addition to using youth programs to help fight smoking bans, the industry used them to help fight cigarette taxes and marketing restrictions. The programs also generated goodwill with the governments of some foreign countries and even allowed PM to partner with foreign health ministries. In 2001, the company announced that it was “actively involved in more than 130 [youth-smoking prevention] programs in more than 70 countries.” The idea was to make people around the world think that tobacco companies were straightening themselves out before lawmakers could do it for them.

SOCIAL ENGINEERING

It is widely known that the tobacco industry hired scientists to spin its messages about the health effects of tobacco and secondhand smoke, but beyond manipulating hard science by commissioning the creation of positive scientific studies and infusing them into the press and other media, the industry also recruited a wide range of “soft scientists”—sociologists, philosophers, political scientists, psychologists, and economists—to influence public opinion through cultural routes.

For example, the industry recruited economists who produced “studies” based on nonscientific, anecdotal evidence that “showed” that smoking bans hurt business. The industry disseminated these studies through credible third parties and used them to scare restaurant, bar, and hotel owners into helping fight smoking bans, by generating fear over the bans’ financial consequences.

It worked for decades. Whenever the public pushed for a law restricting smoking in restaurants, restaurant owners would claim they were afraid of losing business and point to “reports” secretly generated by the tobacco industry that predicted economic doom if smoking bans were passed.

The industry also paid professional philosophers to come up with new arguments in favor of tobacco that did not touch on the subject of health. On February 1, 2002, the U.K.
Guardian
exposed prominent British philosophy professor Roger Scruton, who the newspaper said was secretly taking payments from Japan Tobacco to write pro-smoking articles and place them in a slew of prestigious newspapers and international magazines.
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Scruton wrote articles deriding public health advocacy and warning about the forthcoming “nanny state”—a phrase politicians still use regularly.

Scruton helped the tobacco industry spread skepticism about government-led public safety efforts. In a 1998 article titled “A Snort of Derision at Society,” Scruton claimed that seat belt laws caused people to drive faster, thus nullifying any apparent boost in safety that the law created.
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In another article, he extolled “the benefits of risk taking” and argued that smoking was healthy for its stress-relieving benefits.

Big insurance is grateful to big tobacco not only for its groundbreaking work in stealth PR but also because the tobacco industry consistently ranks lower—although just slightly—than the health insurance industry in terms of public trust and esteem. And when the public doesn’t think your company or industry can be trusted to tell the truth or do the right thing, you have to recruit third parties and create front groups to do the communicating for you. PM turned some of the first shovels of dirt in these deceptive techniques to manipulate opinion.

To get around its lack of credibility and to hide its hand in influencing public beliefs, PM created additional front groups. The company hired PR firms to create artificial third-party organizations and assign each one a cause, like counteracting government health warnings about its industry’s products. This allowed the company to create entirely separate, far more credible mouthpieces to advance its political ends.

In 1993, at PM’s instigation, multinational tobacco companies created a European social engineering front group called Associates for Research into the Science of Enjoyment (ARISE). PM was ARISE’s primary funder, but the group got additional financing from RJR, Rothmans, and British American Tobacco in the United Kingdom—as well as from the companies’ respective food and drink subsidiaries, like Kraft, Miller Beer, and Nestlé. The tobacco companies created ARISE to counteract a U.S. surgeon general’s report that compared nicotine addiction to heroin and cocaine addiction.

This likening of nicotine to heroin and cocaine sent up red flags throughout the global tobacco industry. The answer—without letting the public know that the industry was behind it—was ARISE, whose job was essentially to undermine government efforts to warn people about the highly addictive characteristic of nicotine. Of course, as with other front groups, the management of ARISE was farmed out to a PR firm, Fishburn Hedges, in the United Kingdom.
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ARISE’s “expert” members were portrayed—through press releases, articles, interviews, and media tours—as impartial academic and scientific authorities who felt compelled to address the “science of pleasure.” They held conferences, published books, toured continents, generated media events and newspaper and magazine articles, created video news releases and press releases, and wrote letters to the editor, all while keeping secret the fact that the group’s activities were backed by the tobacco industry.

PROMOTING THE IDEA OF
“
JUNK SCIENCE
”

After the Environmental Protection Agency declared secondhand smoke a Class A human carcinogen in 1993, PM once again desperately needed a powerful “group” to rise up, this time to help discredit the EPA’s findings. So it created The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC).

PM looked around for help funding such a group, and the chemical, paper, metal, petroleum, and other environmentally dubious industries were thrilled to help a group of “committed experts” who would say publicly that scientific warnings against
their
activities were a bunch of baloney, too. So, with other willing industries waiting with wallets open, PM created TASSC—working, as with all its other groups, through a PR firm later favored by the health insurance industry, APCO Worldwide. After a feasibility study conducted with PM’s law firm, Covington and Burling, APCO began the campaign.

APCO did an admirable job of recruiting members for TASSC. The “supporters list” included everything from down-home-sounding businesses like the Family Loompya Seafood Market and Pinckneyville Lighting to sawmills and mining and chemical companies (including W. R. Grace, Amoco, and Dow Chemical). TASSC was assigned three basic talking points: (1) Science should never be corrupted to achieve political ends; (2) economic growth cannot afford to be held hostage to paternalistic overregulation; and (3) improving indoor air quality is a laudable goal that will never be accomplished as long as tobacco smoke is the sole focus of regulators.
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TASSC worked to hang the label of “junk science” on warnings that secondhand smoke caused health problems for nonsmokers. Eventually, the group hung the same junk-science label on environmentalists, and it went on to advance industry-friendly positions on a wide range of topics, including global warming, phthalates, and pesticides. Diversifying this way helped PM continue obtaining other industries’ help with funding the group, and with further disguising the group’s tobacco origins.
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THE PLAYBOOK FUNDAMENTALS

The tobacco industry’s PR strategies have been so broad based, well funded, and stunningly successful that other industries—not just health insurers—are adopting them rapid-fire. The tobacco industry has, in effect, injected its negative, manipulating DNA into corporate culture worldwide, to the detriment of people everywhere.

To emulate that industry’s success, here are actions that you, as an embattled CEO (or your trade association), must take:

• Hire a big and well-connected PR firm, preferably one that has established a reputation not so much for public “relations” as for public “deception.” The firm should pay little or no attention to the Public Relations Society of America’s Code of Ethics, which, among other things, insists that PR practitioners disclose who they are working for and refrain from engaging in deceit. Fortunately, many of the biggest firms pay little heed to such ethical guidelines. They are more than happy to take your money to:

• Set up and operate a coalition or front group, which, if at all possible, should have words like “American” or “freedom” or “choice” in its name. You can launder your money through your PR firm so that no one has to know you have any association with the front group. The PR firm will also:

• Recruit third parties to list as members of your front group. Depending on the scope of your problems and the issues you are battling, the members can range from mom-and-pop bodega owners and motel operators to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business, both of which, by the way, have long track records of lending their names to stealth campaigns. Your PR firm will also maximize the effectiveness of your third parties by helping them:

• Write letters to the editor and op-eds and place them in local and national publications. In fact, the PR firm will do all the writing and placing. The third parties won’t have to do a thing except lend their names. The letters and op-eds will convey all the key messages that you yourself would convey but cannot because doing so would be perceived, correctly, as self-serving. To be sure those letters and op-eds get published in the right places, your PR firm must:

• Cultivate close relationships with editors and publishers. Chances are, your firm will have PR pros on staff who once worked at the publications and other news outlets important to you and your industry. Because of their relationships with key reporters, those PR people will also be able to:

• Influence the tone and content of articles that those reporters write about your company and your industry. This is especially important if you are in the midst of a well-publicized crisis. To bolster your point of view and give reporters an all-important angle, your PR firm might need to:

• Conduct a bogus survey or slice and dice data with the intent of misleading, or “lying with statistics.” And your firm’s PR pros will also know how to:

• Feed talking points to TV pundits and frequent contributors to op-ed pages. They will know how to get talk show hosts with big audiences like Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly or Glenn Beck to say things on the air to support your point of view and discredit your opponents. Lastly, using varying tactics that will depend on the nature of your problem, your PR firm will:

• Develop and carry out a duplicitous communications campaign. Whenever you need to comment publicly, your firm will help you make sure that what you say is perceived to be positive, that you are seen as being responsible and cooperative, and that the public and lawmakers feel that they can count on you to do the right thing and be honest and straightforward. This is the charm offensive I’ve talked about. To distract from the fact that your product is widely considered to be a problem, your PR firm will develop a creative campaign to position your company or industry as part of the solution. It will also broaden the issue to take attention off your maligned product, and it will stress how many people your company employs and how much it contributes to the local or national economy. Behind the scenes, your firm will be using the front groups and their devious tactics to do the necessary dirty work for you.

These are the fundamental tools of the spin business. There are many others, of course, but these are tried-and-true and have worked for big corporations and their trade groups for decades. Following are some “ripped from the headlines” examples of how they are being deployed today by three big industries.

BIG OIL

When an offshore drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010, killing eleven people and creating a massive oil spill, BP launched a multipronged PR strategy as soon as it had begun efforts to try to cap the gusher, which threatened miles of U.S. coastline.