Tobacco industry playbook

Gift offered by tobacco industry lobbyists to Dutch politician Kartika Liotard in September 2013

The tobacco industry playbook, tobacco strategy or simply disinformation playbook[1] describes a strategy devised by the tobacco industry in the 1950s to protect revenues in the face of mounting evidence of links between tobacco smoke and serious illnesses, primarily cancer.[2] Much of the playbook is known from industry documents made public by whistleblowers or as a result of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. These documents are now curated by the UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents project and are a primary source for much commentary on both the tobacco playbook and its similarities to the tactics used by other industries, notably the fossil fuel industry. It is possible that the playbook may even have originated with the oil industry.[3][4]

A 1969 R. J. Reynolds internal memorandum noted, "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."[5][6]

In Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented the way that tobacco companies had campaigned over several decades to cast doubt on the scientific evidence of harm caused by their products, and noted the same techniques being used by other industries whose harmful products were targets of regulatory and environmental efforts.[7] This is often linked to climate change denialism promoted by the fossil fuel industry:[8][9] the same tactics were employed by fossil fuel groups such as the American Petroleum Institute to cast doubt on climate science from the 1990s[10] and some of the same PR firms and individuals engaged to claim that tobacco smoking was safe, were later recruited to attack climate science.[11]

  1. ^ "The Disinformation Playbook". Union of Concerned Scientists. Archived from the original on April 21, 2020. Retrieved April 9, 2020.
  2. ^ Rowell, Andrew; Evans-Reeves, Karen. "It was Big Tobacco, not Trump, that wrote the post-truth rule book". The Conversation. Retrieved April 9, 2020.
  3. ^ Hulac, Benjamin (July 20, 2016). "Tobacco and Oil Industries Used Same Researchers to Sway Public". ClimateWire – via Scientific American.
  4. ^ "New Documents Reveal Denial Playbook Originated with Big Oil, Not Big Tobacco" (Press release). Center for International Environmental Law. June 20, 2016. Archived from the original on June 25, 2020. Retrieved April 9, 2020.
  5. ^ Glantz, Stanton A (1996). The Cigarette Papers. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 171. ISBN 978-0-520-92099-6. OCLC 42855812. alt link
  6. ^ "Smoking and Health Proposal". University of California San Francisco. 1969. pp. 4–5.
  7. ^ Oreskes, Naomi. (2010). Merchants of Doubt (1st U.S. ed.). New York: Bloomsbury Press. ISBN 978-1-59691-610-4. OCLC 461631066.
  8. ^ Supran, Geoffrey; Oreskes, Naomi (August 1, 2017). "Assessing ExxonMobil's climate change communications (1977–2014)". Environmental Research Letters. 12 (8): 084019. Bibcode:2017ERL....12h4019S. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f. ISSN 1748-9326.
  9. ^ Nuccitelli, Dana (August 23, 2017). "Harvard scientists took Exxon's challenge; found it using the tobacco playbook". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on September 25, 2020. Retrieved April 9, 2020.
  10. ^ Pooley, Eric (February 14, 2017). "Climate Change Denial Is the Original Fake News". Time Magazine. Retrieved April 9, 2020.
  11. ^ Cite error: The named reference Grauniad-Doubt was invoked but never defined (see the help page).