(Pt. #1) Killing the Truth with Disinformation
If You Can't Hide or Destroy the Truth, Surround it with Bullshit.
This is the first of a series of three installments about Killing the Truth with Disinformation.
Link to Pt. 2 of Killing the Truth with Disinformation
It’s no mistake that we’re in a culture of fake news, disinformation and misinformation. It’s a culmination of seventy years of strategic denialism beginning in the early 1950s by the tobacco industry, and has become a blueprint for not only science denialism — but reality denialism.
Lee McIntyre, author of On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy, says, “The truth isn’t dying - it’s being killed.”
And adds, “Those in the media, government, education, and the rest of us have got to stop thinking of our current epistemic crisis as if it were some sort of accident or natural disaster.
It is instead a coordinated campaign being run by nameable individuals and organizations whose goal is to spread disinformation out to the masses - in order to foment doubt, division, and distrust — and create an army of deniers.”
I was surprised to learn that it was 70 years ago this year when the tobacco companies began their strategic Fight the Science campaigns, a strategy to counter anti-tobacco science and publicity.
During the early 1950s, concerns about health risks, such as the risk of lung cancer related to smoking were beginning to emerge. More specifically, a research study linking lung cancer and smoking was about to be released to the public. So, in a panic, tobacco industry leaders set up a series of meetings in 1953 with the PR firm, Hill & Knowlton, headed up by John W. Hill, at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.
Their advice? Fight the science! That’s right. Fight facts!
And it worked. It prolonged the science - and bought the tobacco industry decades of additional profits. Billions and billions, I’m sure.
Hill’s advice was to form an industry research committee of their own, which they did, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC). On January 4, 1954, they took out full-page ads in 448 newspapers in 258 cities with their announcement called, A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers.
The strategy was to hire their own scientist to create an alternative narrative and push journalists, newspapers, magazines and publishers to tell “both sides” of the cigarette controversy — promoting that it’s a scientific debate where nothing has been proven yet.
Their goal, as McIntyre writes, “was to get the public to question the truth about something that scientists didn’t really question in the first place.”
They didn’t have to prove anything. Just create doubt. Any level of doubt.
They were able to continue making huge profits, knowing their product was addictive and worse, deadly.
Their strategic science denialism is now commonplace in our society. Look at the GMOs, the pesticide industry, the fossil fuel industry, the food industry, the sugar industry, and most recently, the social media industry. Anytime there is research, even rock-solid research, on areas that affect a company or industry negatively, they respond with a fight-the-science strategy.
Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway call them, Merchants of Doubt, in their book titled the same. They contend that this strategy created a blueprint that was later used by others to deny the truth about acid rain, the ozone hole, and— most notoriously— global warming.
As Lee McIntyre writes:
“Scholars and journalists have shown that fossil fuel companies followed the tobacco strategy to the letter and created their own decades-long campaign of obfuscation and delay— including sponsorship of “contrarian” scientific work and donations to members of Congress.
It later came out, through a series of their own leaked memos, that the fossil fuel companies had known the truth about global warming as far back as 1977.”
They were very successful in their campaign, because even today, millions of people think Global Warming is a scam of some sort.
Truth killers taking front stage.
I believe 2016 was a huge turning point that catapulted fake news, disinformation and misinformation.
We all remember President Obama’s record-breaking attendance for his inauguration, right?
Well, in 2017 during President Trump’s Inauguration, the crowd was not nearly as big, as documented by video. Live video, mind you. And personal witnesses who were in attendance.
Evidently, Trump didn’t like that. Remember when Sean Spicer, then Press Secretary to Donald Trump, called a press conference a day or two after the inauguration?
On a CNBC report, “Spicer fumed in his announcement and claimed, ‘This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.’”
He went on to say “Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall.”
In other words, don’t believe what you see, believe what I say.
I even remember Trump blurting that phrase out at one time during his presidency.
The Truth Killers have a new objective: Kill reality.
The Washington Post reported that by the end of Trump’s presidency, he had lied over 30,000 times over his four years in office. WOW!
The 2021 article went on to report, “What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths (lies) kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth.”
So, the fact that journalists and newsrooms all over the world are fact-checking him didn’t faze him in the least. In fact, the frequency of lies increased.
My theory on this is Trump has Fox News and other fake news outlets which their loyal audience watch faithfully — and only watch that outlet, or read those sites. So, it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. He knows his loyalists will only hear his words, and not those of real media outlets.
Let’s pause here for a minute.
Looking back, a brilliant, yet corrupted and downright immoral strategy of Fight the Science was created that was so successful it became a blueprint for science denialism everywhere — and now — Reality Denialism.
Think about this from your own experience. Did you ever have any doubts about global warming, or that glyphosate (the key ingredient in pesticides) was harmful to humans, or any number of science studies that have been debatable over the past forty years? Think about it.
I know I did. I had moments of doubting the science of global warming and the ozone layer. I can’t believe that I had doubts about it, but I have. Remember - they only have to create doubt. When they back that with millions of dollars of advertisements, their own research studies or news reports showing science denialism, it tends to stick.
Enough for now.
Next issue…
I’m going to go into the five common tactics used by science and reality deniers,
the three things necessary for strategic denialism - how and why it works,
and why so many people believe the lies, and even swear by them,
and how to counter denialism.
But first, Think on this:
I’ll leave you with this quote from Lee McIntyre’s book, On Disinformation. “What began with a few tobacco executives at the Plaza Hotel culminated seventy years later on the steps of the US Capitol.”
Thank you for joining the conversation.
Uea. It's amazing. For myself, I've been able to notice the power of simply, doubt