46 min
Today’s disinformation economy was built on the lying techniques of Big Tobacco Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)
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- Politics
The term disinformation is most commonly associated with the internet and social media posters spreading conspiracy theories, but when you really think about it, disinformation is actually just lying at an industrial scale.
While various authoritarian governments have used lying and propaganda forever, the history is crystal-clear: In the United States, the modern-day tactics of lying to the masses were invented in the mid-20th century by huge tobacco companies desperate to stave off federal regulation of their disease-causing products.
This is a history worth exploring because all of the disinformation techniques that Big Tobacco used have been subsequently adopted by fossil fuel companies to fight public accountability and then further adopted by Donald Trump into a political marketing program that is essentially a personality cult.
Joining me in this episode to talk about the history of disinformation and the tobacco industry is Matthew Rozsa, he is a climate change journalist at Salon.com who’s written about Big Tobacco and propaganda and how its deceptive techniques were later adopted to oppose climate change mitigation policies.
The video of this discussion is available. The transcript of the audio follows. The conversation took place January 25, 2024.
Related Content
Philosopher Richard Bett on the history of skepticism and why today’s online know-nothings are practicing a zombie Socratic method
Disinformation researcher Renée DiResta on epistemology and internet content moderation
Former libertarian activist Will Wilkinson on the many commonalities of atheist libertarianism and Christian fundamentalism
The American right is at war with modernity itself and the struggle did not begin with Donald Trump
How reactionaries invented canceling people while also pretending to believe in free speech
Audio Chapters
0:00 — Introduction
03:00 — The History of Disinformation in the Tobacco Industry
06:23 — Manufacturing doubt and building anti-epistemology
08:33 — Big Oil and American reactionaries adopted Big Tobacco's disinformation techniques
16:50 — How mainstream journalism's "both sides" paradigm facilitates disinformation
21:43 — False dilemmas can protect false beliefs
24:36 — Both tobacco and oil companies hid their private research on the harms of their products
29:34 — Donald Trump's nonstop cascade of lies is the continuation of this dishonest tradition
32:36 — Disinformation addicts mostly cannot be persuaded, so they must be opposed
Cover image: An advertisement for Camel cigarettes featuring the cartoon character Joe Camel
Audio Transcript
This is a rush transcript that likely contains errors. It is provided for convenience purposes only. Some podcast apps may truncate the text.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thanks for being here today, Matt.
MATTHEW ROZSA: Thank you for having me, Matthew.
SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, the history that we're going to be talking about here today, I think, is a bit unfamiliar to a lot of people because advertising is kind of boring to everybody.
I think, to the extent people know about advertising in the 20th century, they think of Andy Warhol and that's about it. But there's a lot more there, and Mad Men only scratched the surface, I'm afraid. [00:03:00]
ROZSA: I would say if you're talking about Big Tobacco, you have to start in the early 1960s, when president John F. Kennedy was elected on what he described as a New Frontier platform, and he appointed people to positions of power that were idealistic and believed in an activist version of government. One of those people was the Surgeon General Luther Terry, and he became concerned about tobacco products in 1964 and in 1965. Because of his efforts and because of other investigations that validated his concerns, the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 was passed and it mandated that warning labels had to be attached to cigarette boxes.
That should have been the end of it in terms of any pushback to
The term disinformation is most commonly associated with the internet and social media posters spreading conspiracy theories, but when you really think about it, disinformation is actually just lying at an industrial scale.
While various authoritarian governments have used lying and propaganda forever, the history is crystal-clear: In the United States, the modern-day tactics of lying to the masses were invented in the mid-20th century by huge tobacco companies desperate to stave off federal regulation of their disease-causing products.
This is a history worth exploring because all of the disinformation techniques that Big Tobacco used have been subsequently adopted by fossil fuel companies to fight public accountability and then further adopted by Donald Trump into a political marketing program that is essentially a personality cult.
Joining me in this episode to talk about the history of disinformation and the tobacco industry is Matthew Rozsa, he is a climate change journalist at Salon.com who’s written about Big Tobacco and propaganda and how its deceptive techniques were later adopted to oppose climate change mitigation policies.
The video of this discussion is available. The transcript of the audio follows. The conversation took place January 25, 2024.
Related Content
Philosopher Richard Bett on the history of skepticism and why today’s online know-nothings are practicing a zombie Socratic method
Disinformation researcher Renée DiResta on epistemology and internet content moderation
Former libertarian activist Will Wilkinson on the many commonalities of atheist libertarianism and Christian fundamentalism
The American right is at war with modernity itself and the struggle did not begin with Donald Trump
How reactionaries invented canceling people while also pretending to believe in free speech
Audio Chapters
0:00 — Introduction
03:00 — The History of Disinformation in the Tobacco Industry
06:23 — Manufacturing doubt and building anti-epistemology
08:33 — Big Oil and American reactionaries adopted Big Tobacco's disinformation techniques
16:50 — How mainstream journalism's "both sides" paradigm facilitates disinformation
21:43 — False dilemmas can protect false beliefs
24:36 — Both tobacco and oil companies hid their private research on the harms of their products
29:34 — Donald Trump's nonstop cascade of lies is the continuation of this dishonest tradition
32:36 — Disinformation addicts mostly cannot be persuaded, so they must be opposed
Cover image: An advertisement for Camel cigarettes featuring the cartoon character Joe Camel
Audio Transcript
This is a rush transcript that likely contains errors. It is provided for convenience purposes only. Some podcast apps may truncate the text.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thanks for being here today, Matt.
MATTHEW ROZSA: Thank you for having me, Matthew.
SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, the history that we're going to be talking about here today, I think, is a bit unfamiliar to a lot of people because advertising is kind of boring to everybody.
I think, to the extent people know about advertising in the 20th century, they think of Andy Warhol and that's about it. But there's a lot more there, and Mad Men only scratched the surface, I'm afraid. [00:03:00]
ROZSA: I would say if you're talking about Big Tobacco, you have to start in the early 1960s, when president John F. Kennedy was elected on what he described as a New Frontier platform, and he appointed people to positions of power that were idealistic and believed in an activist version of government. One of those people was the Surgeon General Luther Terry, and he became concerned about tobacco products in 1964 and in 1965. Because of his efforts and because of other investigations that validated his concerns, the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 was passed and it mandated that warning labels had to be attached to cigarette boxes.
That should have been the end of it in terms of any pushback to
46 min