When Media Swooned In the Arms of Tobacco
Cigarette peddlers lethally succeed in convincing people to suck smoke into their lungs non-stop, decade after decade. There's mountains of evidence for this, millions of publicly available documents on the subject, court proceedings, leaked internal industry documents, as well as movies, articles and books. One in five deaths in the US is smoking related, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) -- preventable deaths, tragically wasteful. Most of us, in and out of public health arenas understand the deceptive business strategies that the cigarette industry uses to reap profits from its killer product. Tobacco is the standard by which deception around other science issues is measured. Despite the evidence the tobacco is the culprit of a major health problem, however, we're forever embattled trying to dissuade people from smoking.
Tobacco industry history informs current discussion on other health concerns such as global warming, diabetes, asbestos and cell phones. Like tobacco, all seem to have a single corporate culprit. Comparisons between the issues are frequent, sometimes pertinent, but too often facile. In order to successfully continue profiting from cigarettes, many parties collaborate, including stockholders, legislators, presidents, and the media. Tobacco captured the media for decades, from movies that romanticized smoking to prolific cigarette advertising, to dubious reporting on the safety hazards that insured the sale and marketing of cigarettes.
One of many interesting stories in the history of tobacco is how the industry influenced investigative news reports back in the 1990's when reporters started uncovering the "dirty secrets" of the cigarette business. Investigative reports from major TV stations were squelched when reporters revealed the tobacco companies' knowledge about the health dangers of smoking. Tobacco companies took advantage of the networks' business aspirations and fears about getting sued, while certain media companies, motivated by profit, complied by shutting down controversial investigative reporting. Together, the tobacco industry and the media industry stifled public knowledge about the risks of smoking.
The 1990's was only last decade...but people tend to forget. Pieces of this story can be found on internet, for instance here and here and here. In his recent book The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (2007).1, Allan Brandt chronicles the story of how two major television stations capitulated to the tobacco industry.
Tobacco Wars
In 1994 ABC News show Day One, aired a report called "Smoke Screen". The trailer for the segment told how companies "spiked" cigarettes with extra doses of tobacco. The show detailed how tobacco companies added reconstituted tobacco plant stems and leaves along with extracted nicotine to its cigarettes. This doctoring effectively controlled the dose of nicotine in cigarettes, and incidentally maintained the level of nicotine in "low-tar" cigarettes, assuring addiction. Jack E. Henningfield, an expert on addiction from the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the NIH, called cigarettes the "crack cocaine form of nicotine delivery". This wasn't stunning news. The Surgeon General had declared nicotine additive in 1988.
However Phillip Morris promptly sued ABC for libel and $10 billion dollars in compensatory and punitive damages. Phillip Morris was particularly defensive about ABC's assertion that cigarettes were "spiked". The company insisted that nicotine was not a drug. Even though the company's own scientists had said their "product" gave people "a pleasing sensory experience with mild pharmacology".
Many experts thought the network would win the case. ABC's report hadn't specifically implicated any company, and Phillip Morris's libel claim was not obvious, since the company would need to prove both intent and malice. ABC defended Day One in court for months, spending millions in legal fees.
Meanwhile, Lowell Bergman of CBS's 60 Minutes was putting together another story, this one featuring Jeffrey Wigand, a biochemist from Brown & Williamson. Wigand was one of many company whistleblowers who had begun to speak out about the tobacco industry, working with the FDA on their investigation of the industry.
When Mike Wallace interviewed Wigand for CBS, the CEO's of seven major cigarette companies had just testified before Congressman Henry Waxman's (D-CA) Subcommittee on Health and the Environment. Each had said in almost identical statements that "nicotine is not addictive". But Wigand had headed up various research projects at Brown & Williamson and lobbied within B&W for safe cigarettes. He told Wallace that the CEO Thomas Sandefur had lied to Waxman's committee. B&W management knew that cigarettes were addictive, Wigand said, and used every opportunity to leverage research data that proved the addictiveness to sell their product. He also described how scientists added ammonia to the cigarettes to assure that the lungs absorbed the nicotine more easily, and how carcinogenic additives like coumarin (one of 700 cigarette additives at the time) were added to cigarettes despite known toxicity.
The Weak-Kneed Fourth Estate
Right before CBS aired its show, ABC shocked its employers, its lawyers, and onlookers by settling its lawsuit with Phillip Morris. The surprise settlement was motivated by ABC's pending business deal with Walt Disney Company. Disney wanted the liability of the lawsuit off the table. Phillip Morris had also threatened to pull advertising worth $100 million dollars a year.
Many in and outside the media agreed that the Phillip Morris lawsuit was about intimidation and that it effectively dampened investigative journalism. As part of the settlement, ABC apologized to R.J. Reynolds and Phillip Morris and paid 15 million dollars in legal fees. Phillip Morris took out full page ads in national publications to advertise the network's apology. Shortly after ABC's settlement with Phillip Morris, CBS canceled the 60 Minutes show featuring the interview with Wigand. CBS revealed that they were in the midst of finalizing a $5.4 billion dollar merger with Westinghouse Electric Corporation.
Business interests had once again prevailed. Coincidentally or not, Laurence Tisch, the CEO of CBS, was the father of Andrew Tisch, CEO of Lorillard, who testified at the Waxman hearings. In the industry's well established pattern of denying science and math when it was inconvenient, Tisch told the subcommittee that he did not believe that cigarettes caused death, because death rates were generated by computers and are only statistical".
The CEO's sworn denials of their knowledge of tobacco's dangers were wearing thin and did not endear them to legislators. When James Johnston, CEO of R.J. Reynolds, compared cigarettes to ordinary sweets like Twinkies, Waxman tersely pointed out the stark difference between the two, "death". Waxman was not swayed then and of course today cigarette company denials elicit aghast indignation across the world, especially in the US and EU. We're wise to deceptive marketing, legislative finagling, and payments to scientists in mid-life/career crises made pliable about science with money. Cigarette companies lie, obviously.
But this is not obvious to people who aren't educated about tobacco's addictive and dangerous nature, or to those who smoke to possess prosperity, joie de vie and independence, the illusions that cigarette marketing sells -- or to those who are simply addicted, illusions or not. Many people have quit smoking and many people never start, but many more people continue to inhale and die. True, this is a devastating public health problem, but its also an undying, successful business strategy.
Tobacco Industry Solutions for Today's Business Executives: A Case Study
Tobacco's marketing strategies are highly successful, as Harvard Business Review highlighted in their February 2008 issue. Michael Sheehan wrote in "Understanding Opposition", about a few handy business techniques: "[s]omewhere between co-option and tug-of-war lies what I call a deflection strategy."
The tobacco industry used "deflection strategy", Sheehan wrote, to deal with pressures to reduce second hand smoke in the 1980's. The industry reframed the issue as a "sick-building" problem, caused by energy efficient buildings. Cigarette companies blaming the buildings for trapping indoor pollutants from things like office machines and carpets. Instead of banning smoking, Sheehan says the tobacco industry reframed or "deflected" the issue: "The solution was to engineer efficient ways of bringing more fresh air into facilities", he wrote, and although the "strategy wasn't ultimately successful", it successfully "stymied [smoking] bans for several years."
It's all about business, and all is fair. "Understanding Opposition" was on page 24 of HBS. Three pages before this article, on page 21, was an article on ethics, titled "How Honest People Cheat", a report on "honest" people's propensities towards dishonesty. It was nice to have close at hand, because it explained some of the rational of both the cigarette companies who deceived, and their would be emulators.
"It's clear that we have an incredible ability to rationalize our dishonesty and that justifying it becomes substantially easier when cheating is one step removed from cash. Nonmonetary exchanges allow people greater psychological latitude to cheat -- leading to crimes that go well beyond pilfered pens to backdated stock options, falsified financial reports, and crony deals."
The Harvard Business Review editors ironically and neatly compartmentalize tobacco industry's "deflection" on page 24, from "cheating", on page 21. Your average businessman should now be able to successfully walk this line. It's fine to "stymie a ban on smoking"; but one should never, ever, "backdate stock options".
Worldwide Opportunities
The tobacco story spans a hundred years and is a complex mix of sociology, science, business and politics. While the number of smokers in the United States began to decrease in the 60's, there are still large numbers of addicts especially among poorer populations and those in inner cities who are especially susceptible to tobacco's marketing. The companies long ago saw the writing on the wall in the US with the rash of lawsuits and public health activism and adapted to the business challenge by expanding their global strategy.
Companies today market aggressively in foreign countries, skillfully navigating each country's laws, and seducing young smokers using the same tools they perfected during the 20th century in the US. Advertisements spin notions of individuality, prosperity, freedom and cool factor. The messages appeal to the poorest populations who are naive to the addiction and health consequences. Tobacco thrives through wily marketing, a favorable trade atmosphere and the dueling motives of public health and profit. At every stage, cigarette makers seem to master all the tricks. Yesterday, the organization Corporate Accountability accused Phillip Morris, British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco of colluding with smugglers to gain entry into markets.
According to The World Lung Foundation, a contractor for the World Health Organization, in 2000 there were approximately 2 millions cigarette deaths in developing countries and 2 million in developed countries from cigarettes. By 2030 they project there will be 3 million deaths in developed countries and 7 million deaths in developing countries, totaling 10 million deaths worldwide from cigarettes.
In moment of enthusiasm once in 1996, former Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) said to a reporter, "I was with some Vietnamese recently, and some of them were smoking two cigarettes at the same time. That's the kind of customers we need!" Then perhaps realizing how that sounded, he added: "Well, not exactly". A Vietnamese official queried by the same reporter said, "We'll smoke for 10 more years, until we are a more developed country." Then, perhaps not realizing the power of addiction he added, "Then we'll quit, just like you." (NYT April 12, 1996) More realistically, one doctor commented a decade ago about China's growing tobacco addiction: "If the Chinese smoke like Americans, then they will die like Americans"
For all the hand-wringing about tobacco's health effects, it remains highly profitable, capable of keeping potential naysayers at bay. China illustrates this dichotomy. The state owned tobacco industry in China contributes $30 billion to government coffers a year in tax revenue which is estimated to be 7% of government revenue (a decrease from a few years ago when it was 12-14%). 350 million people smoke in China, and 1 million people a year die. The country racks up $5 billion in medical costs per year. But government officials have balked at tobacco control, noting that it would "destabilize" the country. A recent WHO study found that "governments around the world collect 500 times more money in tobacco taxes each year than they spend on anti-tobacco efforts."
It's easy to find a primary culprit to blame problems on. But while society struggles with smoking at the same time it allows complex business, government, civilian, and not-for profit arrangements to pervade the media that informs us, the rule-making governments, and society itself. These arrangements thrive, albeit cancerously, because they are entwined in and reinforced by the very public health problems.
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1 This post is not a review of the book, which is excellent, captivating, and highly recommended. Brandt's analysis and perspectives on the tobacco industry are thorough and insightful. The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (2007)
Acronym Required previously wrote about tobacco industry funding of science research in "My Lab Thanks You For Smoking", and UC Senate Smokes RE-89. Lowell Bergman was one of the producers of last years four part PBS Frontline series called "News War" that we wrote about here. We've also written several posts about corporate advertising and the global warming debate.
