The Western Fuels Association put ICE on ice after one of its strategy documents was leaked to the newspapers, sparking a raft of embarrassing stories in the Energy Daily, the National Journal, the Arizona Republic, and the New York Times. But a pattern was beginning to take hold. Corporations and industry associations were using their considerable financial resources to influence the public conversation. They were using advertising slogans and messages that they had tested for effectiveness but not for accuracy. They were hiring scientists who were prepared to say in public things that they could not get printed in the peer-reviewed scientific press. And they were taking advantage of mainstream journalists’ willingness—even eagerness—to feature contrarian and controversial science stories, regardless of whether the controversy was actually occurring in reputable scientific publications.
The next example of a transparent effort to manipulate public opinion on a range of issues, including climate change, started out as a project of the tobacco giant Philip Morris. Big Tobacco had been playing this game since the days of Bernays, at first trying to surround cigarettes with a patina of glamor and then wrapping the death sticks in a cocoon of doubt. It began with the founding of the Tobacco Institute in the 1950s and specifically with the creation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, later the Council for Tobacco Research. The Tobacco Institute and the Council for Tobacco Research were both tireless in funding and promoting any research that would cast doubt on the health effects of smoking. There is a great scene in the 2005 movie Thank You for Smoking in which the main character, Nick Naylor (played by Aaron Eckhart), talks admiringly about a cigarette industry scientist who had done research on tobacco for thirty years without finding a link to cancer. About which Naylor says, sardonically, “The man’s a genius.”
From the emergence of the tobacco lobby in the 1950s until the tobacco companies started losing huge health-related lawsuits in the 1990s, the tobacco industry’s message was admirable for its consistency: the link to cancer (and, later, the cancer link to secondhand smoke) was not “proven.” Tobacco defenders said the alleged link was based on epidemiological studies that established a correlation but couldn’t prove cause and effect beyond a reasonable doubt. They also made arguments that seemed calculated to distract people from the actual issue. They said that lots of things caused cancer, so it was unreasonable to try to pin all lung cancer deaths on tobacco or to pick on cigarettes and not deal with all the other causes at the same time. And they criticized as zealots anyone who tried to educate or legislate against tobacco use, saying that the health advocates, government bureaucrats, or responsible politicians were creating a nanny state that would interfere with people’s rights.
This was a highly effective mixed-message strategy. The smoky executives knew they were never going to win the health argument, so they muddied the scientific waters and tried to reposition the debate to be about free choice. According to a document obtained by the organization TobaccoFreedom .org,2 the executives even co-opted the American Civil Liberties Union, providing big donations to the ACLU in return for its support in recasting smoking as a matter of freedom and individual choice.
Still, by the late 1980s the public had grown tired of tobacco industry “geniuses” telling them smoking was harmless, and skeptical of tobacco company employees or institute “experts” fighting against increasingly popular smoking restrictions. So Philip Morris opened up two new fronts. First, working with the public relations giant Burson-Marsteller, Philip Morris financed the creation of the National Smokers Alliance, a purported grassroots association that mustered smokers together to fight for their “rights.”
From a tactical standpoint this was a brilliant strategy. True grassroots organizations are one of the great expressions of democracy. In them, theoretically at least, you have a group of independent citizens bound together in common interest rising up and demanding to be heard. Reporters have grown appropriately cynical of corporate manipulation, and they are generally suspicious of established interest groups, from environmentalists to consumer advocates, who have made what appears to be common cause with government regulators. They find it refreshing to see an apparently spontaneous outpouring of support or opposition on any public issue.
The political theorist Jeffrey Berry documented this in his 2000 book, The New Liberalism: The Rising Power of Citizen Groups. Berry showed that in the realms of politics and media, grassroots organizations were outperforming industry-sponsored interest groups by a wide margin. For example, Berry found that a small number of citizens’ groups making representations in Congress were overrepresented in media citations by a factor of 10 to 1 when compared to their industry counterparts.
The National Smokers Alliance, however, was not a spontaneous outpouring of public support. It was an Astroturf group, a fake grassroots organization animated by a clever public relations campaign and a huge budget. As John Stauber wrote in a 1994 edition of the online journal PR Watch:
Burson-Marsteller’s state-of-the-art campaign utilizes full-page newspaper ads, direct telemarketing, paid canvassers, free 800 numbers, newsletters and letters to send to federal agencies. B-M is targeting the fifty million Americans who smoke. Its goal is to rile-up and mobilize a committed cadre of hundreds of thousands, better yet millions, to be foot soldiers in a grassroots army directed by Philip Morris’s political operatives at Burson-Marsteller.3
Such are the profits available to the tobacco industry that around the same time, Philip Morris had also engaged the public relations giant APCO Worldwide to craft a parallel attack on the scientific validity of links between cancer and secondhand smoke. In 1993 APCO proposed the foundation of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC). The original documentation of this proposal is available on the Internet at TobaccoDocuments.org, a Web site established after the tobacco industry lost a series of 1990s lawsuits over the falsification of evidence and the attempt to cover up the health effects of smoking.
The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition’s stated objectives were these:
• Establish TASSC as a credible source for reporters when questioning the validity of scientific studies.
• Encourage the public to question—from the grassroots up—the validity of scientific studies.
• Mobilize support for TASSC through alliances with other organizations and third-party allies.
• Develop materials, including new article reprints, that can be “merchandized” to TASSC audiences.
• Increase membership in and funding of TASSC.
• Publicize and refine TASSC messages on an ongoing basis.4
The eagerness to increase TASSC’s membership and funding is important in the climate change conversation because, well, guess who APCO contacted when it came time to increase membership in its new Astroturf group? Realizing how obvious it would look if Philip Morris was TASSC’s only financial supporter, APCO sent out recruitment letters to twenty thousand businesses inviting them to join the fight for “sound science.” Below is a list of the kinds of companies that APCO considered appropriate partners for such a venture. The list comes from another memo, written in 1994 when APCO was planning to expand TASSC operations into Europe.5 One of the first goals, the memo said, was to try to “link the tobacco industry