Previous
Chapter 4
Themes
and Colors
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.
Active
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.
Active
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.
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.
Active
Themes
Get the entire Merchants of Doubt LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
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.
Active
Themes
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.
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.
Active
Themes
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.
Active
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.
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.
Active
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.
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.
