Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Merchants of Doubt, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science, Trust, and Public Policy
Capitalism and the Environment
Media Bias
Certainty, Doubt, and the Scientific Method
Summary
Analysis
In 1986, the link between smoking and cancer was already common knowledge. But that year, a major Surgeon General’s report concluded that even non-smokers could get cancer from “secondhand” cigarette smoke. The EPA started to limit smoking indoors, so the tobacco industry hired Fred Singer to challenge the evidence and discredit the EPA.
With the acid rain and ozone debates all but settled, Fred Singer moved on to a new policy area, secondhand smoke. It’s clear why the tobacco industry hired him: he was already an established merchant of doubt, with strong connections to people in power and impeccable pro-business connections.
Themes
A Brief History of Secondhand Smoke. Tobacco industry scientists already knew about secondhand smoke’s dangers in the 1970s. In 1980, other researchers found that working in a smoky office could cause cancer, and in 1981, a landmark Japanese study showed that nonsmoking women were more likely to get lung cancer the more their husbands smoked. Tobacco companies challenged the findings by hiring contrarian scientists, buying advertisements, and funding independent studies. But they privately admitted that the Japanese study was right.
The debate about secondhand smoke was all but a repeat of the earlier controversy about cigarettes and cancer. Indeed, early findings on secondhand smoke were totally consistent with what researchers already knew: if smokers’ spouses were experiencing the same negative health effects as smokers themselves, then cigarettes were the obvious culprit. Nonetheless, tobacco companies repeated the same dishonest playbook in the hopes of undermining (or at least slowing down) legislation.
Themes
State governments started banning public smoking, and in 1986, the Surgeon General released his report describing secondhand smoke as a serious danger. Tobacco companies responded with every tactic imaginable: they paid off scientists through secretive law firms, called smoking bans discrimination against smokers, and blamed construction materials for the effects of secondhand smoke. Just one company, Philip Morris, spent $16 million trying “to maintain the controversy.” The industry started calling secondhand smoke “environmental tobacco smoke.” But this backfired: the word “environmental” invited regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency. In 1992, an EPA report concluded that “environmental” smoke caused 3,000 lung cancer deaths and hundreds of thousands of asthma, bronchitis, and pneumonia cases per year.
Tobacco companies had already fooled the public about cigarette smoke once, so governments acted much faster to restrict it the second time around. By this point in the book, readers likely won’t be surprised by the tobacco companies’ response: they invested massively in a deceptive public relations campaign. They hoped to fend off policy change by insisting that scientific results were actually still up for debate, when in reality, they were totally conclusive. As the EPA report shows, they were really fighting for the right to continue killing innocent people for profit.
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The scientific evidence on secondhand smoke was very strong—the best studies showed that smokers’ spouses had much higher risks of lung cancer. Eight studies showed this with 95 percent certainty and nine more with 90 percent certainty. These studies could never be perfect, because scientists can't expose test subjects to toxic materials like secondhand smoke, but the EPA considered the evidence on secondhand smoke as “conclusive.” So, the tobacco industry hired Fred Seitz and Fred Singer to deny it.
Oreskes and Conway point out the very real limits of scientific research—especially when it comes to substances that scientists can’t ethically test through experiments. Of course, regulators have to realistically understand these limits if they are to create effective science-based policies. While it may be reasonable to demand 100% certainty in some experiments—above all in physics—this simply isn’t feasible in most research dealing with health and environmental toxins.
Themes
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Fred Seitz proposed that the tobacco industry reject the EPA’s “balance of the evidence” approach and only consider perfect studies based on “ideal research designs.” But no such studies could ever exist, so the industry rejected Seitz’s proposal. Instead, it adopted Fred Singer’s proposal to call favorable studies “sound science” and unfavorable ones “junk science.” In articles for the industry, Singer claimed that the EPA was ignoring other risk factors for lung cancer (which was false) and “rig[ging] the numbers” by accepting studies with 90 percent certainty. Of course, his true goal was to undermine potential regulations.
Seitz’s “ideal research designs” idea was impractical, but at least it had a plausible scientific principle behind it. This principle was the same one that doubt-mongers had already been citing for decades: science isn’t valid unless it’s absolutely certain. In contrast, Fred Singer’s distinction between “sound science” and “junk science” was pure rhetoric, with no coherent principle behind it at all. Whereas Seitz’s strategy would have forced the tobacco industry to reject virtually all science, Singer’s benefited it by allowing it to label studies it funded or favored as “sound.”
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Next, tobacco companies published a communications handbook, Bad Science, based on Fred Singer’s work. It was full of unproven statistics, quotable lines, and articles from industry consultants. But it also included many articles about real scientific misconduct, ranging from researchers inventing data to, ironically enough, corporate money distorting research. This was all designed to give readers “a means to challenge science on any topic.” Of course, the handbook focused on the EPA. It declared that the EPA report on secondhand smoke was “widely criticized within the scientific community”—even though the only scientists criticizing it were the ones paid off by the tobacco industry. Bad Science’s goal wasn’t really to correct bad science: it was to protect secondhand smoke by attacking science altogether.
Bad Science offers the clearest available evidence about how the merchants of doubt approached their work. The handbook all but explicitly advised that corporations should undermine science that harms them by lying about it. Of course, it was primarily a guide for speaking to and writing in the media—and specifically for tricking the public into taking corporate lies seriously, while questioning legitimate science. This again highlights the fact that the merchants of doubt could not have possibly succeeded without a corporate media environment that favored them. Above all, Bad Science took advantage of the public’s inability to identify truly “bad science.”
Themes
Blaming the Messenger: The Industry Attack on the EPA. Oreskes and Conway explain how the Philip Morris tobacco company began secretly funding the George C. Marshall Institute in exchange for press coverage defending secondhand smoke. Through the lobbyist Steven Milloy, Philip Morris founded a group called The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), which embarked on a national media tour and began recruiting “third party allies”—favorable scientists and journalists.
Oreskes and Conway frequently point out that companies like Philip Morris hide their public relations funding by routing it through law firms, lobbyists like Milloy, and legitimate-seeming institutes like TASSC. Of course, these companies’ goal is to make positive media coverage sound independent and objective, when they’ve really been paying for it.
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Next, the industry hired the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, a pro-business think tank, to produce a report defending secondhand smoke. Its authors, Fred Singer and the conservative lawyer Kent Jeffreys, accused the EPA of trying to ban smoking entirely (which wasn’t true). They argued that secondhand smoke is probably harmless in small doses, and that the EPA was doing bad science by assuming otherwise.
Like all other press coverage by the merchants of doubt, Singer and Jeffreys’ report was effective because it was plausible—it sounded like it could be true, even though it simply wasn’t. If the EPA truly were trying to ban all smoking and secondhand smoke truly were harmless in small doses, then conservatives’ indignation would be justified. The problem wasn’t Singer and Jeffreys’ reasoning—it was that their reasoning wasn’t based in any underlying truth.
Themes
The true test of good and bad science is peer review. A board of nine qualified doctors and research scientists peer reviewed the EPA study, and they did recommend significant changes: they thought that the EPA was understating the risks of secondhand smoke, especially on children. Since scientists already knew that cigarette smoking severely harms people’s health, peer reviewers concluded that studies at the 90 percent confidence level were sufficient to link secondhand smoke to cancer. And two dozen of these studies consistently found the same risks, bringing the overall confidence level for the report’s conclusions to above 999 in 1,000. Finally, the peer reviewers had no reason to consider the threshold effect idea—that secondhand smoke is harmless below a certain level—because there was no evidence for it, and it is simply not true of most toxic substances.
Peer review is the end-all-be-all of legitimate research because it’s how the scientific community distinguishes between work that does and doesn’t meet its professional standards. Since the scientific community is the best judge of whether a given piece of research is legitimate, Oreskes and Conway suggest that policymakers, the media, and the public should decide which science to believe in primarily by placing their trust in the peer review process. In the case of secondhand smoke, peer reviewers rejected both of Fred Singer’s objections as unfounded. For instance, many studies came out at a lower confidence interval than scientists usually demand, but these studies simply didn’t need a higher confidence interval because of their sheer quantity and consistency—coupled with the robust existing research about tobacco’s direct harms to smokers.
Themes
The EPA built a website to respond to the tobacco industry’s attacks and explain its findings about secondhand smoke, including why it accepted 90 percent confidence levels and rejected the threshold effect theory. But the website received far less attention than the tobacco companies’ marketing campaign. This campaign was based on recycled ideas. In particular, the threshold theory became popular after researchers learned that Japanese atomic bomb survivors experienced few health effects if they received low levels of radiation. This makes sense: humans have constantly encountered low levels of radiation every day for thousands of years. But the same isn’t true of toxins like industrial pesticides and cigarette smoke. Still, industry advocates tried to defend both using the threshold theory.
The EPA’s website shows that scientists do take defending their work and responding to corporate lies very seriously. However, since the EPA’s public relations budget is much lower than the tobacco industry’s, it struggled to combat disinformation at the necessary scale. Ultimately, Oreskes and Conway suggest that the underlying problem is that the U.S. media tends to spread the best-funded ideas, regardless of their truth or falsity. The threshold effect idea was attractive to the tobacco industry: it had been proven true in another context, which made it seem scientifically legitimate. What the industry conveniently failed to mention is that, when it comes to cigarettes, the threshold effect hypothesis is simply false.
Themes
Fred Singer and Fred Seitz worked for the tobacco industry as part of a broader campaign for “free market fundamentalism” and against government regulation. Using Tobacco to Defend Free Enterprise. Oreskes and Conway explain how the British tobacco industry fought antismoking regulation by creating an advocacy group called FOREST (Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco). In a 1994 report introduced by a prominent anti-regulation economist, FOREST argued that antismoking advocates were suppressing true science in order to justify taking away smokers’ freedom.
Oreskes and Conway use the term “free market fundamentalism” to refer to Singer, Seitz, and their allies’ strong conviction that society cannot protect democracy and personal freedom unless it also protects corporations’ absolute freedom to do whatever they wish, without regulation. FOREST shows that this worldview was not a uniquely American phenomenon. FOREST manipulates the concept of freedom to protect corporations by framing the debate around smokers’ freedom to smoke, rather than nonsmokers’ health and safety.
Themes
In the U.S., Russell Seitz—who worked for a pro-free market foundation’s institute at Harvard—made a similar argument. He even proposed that the government should fund research “to remove the smoke from cigarettes,” in order to make smoking safer without violating smokers’ freedoms. Of course, all societies recognize that citizens’ freedom to kill each other must be restricted. Still, Seitz and FOREST turned the debate over smoking restrictions into a proxy for the fight between capitalism and socialism. After all, at the end of its report, FOREST argued that many other scientific issues—from global warming to concern over “allegedly disappearing species”—were all inventions designed to limit capitalism.
Russell Seitz’s arguments, like FOREST’s, show how the merchants of doubt fought regulation by strategically making policy debates about freedom instead of the common good. But Oreskes and Conway point out that it never makes sense to talk about freedom in the abstract. Instead, freedom always really means the freedom to do specific things in specific contexts, and some people’s freedoms inevitably affect others. The absurd idea of “remov[ing] smoke from cigarettes” demonstrates how untenable this argument is: while claiming to be protecting freedom in general, it really elevates smokers’ freedom above nonsmokers’ freedom. And its fundamental motivation isn’t smokers’ freedom at all, but rather corporations’ freedom to harm people for profit.
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