In December 1953 the presidents of the major American tobacco companies met at the Plaza Hotel in New York with John Hill of the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. Ernst Wynder and Evarts Graham had published epidemiological work linking smoking to lung cancer, and Wynder's mouse-painting study — applying cigarette tar to the shaved skin of mice and producing tumors — had just been reported widely.
The industry's instinct was to attack the science. Hill's advice was the opposite.
On 4 January 1954, a full-page advertisement headed A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers appeared in 448 newspapers in 258 cities, reaching an estimated forty-three million people.
Its text does not deny anything. It acknowledges that medical research has produced experiments with mice which have given wide publicity to a theory. It states that the industry accepts an interest in people's health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business. And it announces the establishment of a Tobacco Industry Research Committee, with an independent scientific director and an advisory board of distinguished scientists, to conduct research into all phases of tobacco use and health.
It is the founding document of the modern manufactured-doubt playbook, and it works through a technique with a name in the persuasion literature.
Stealing thunder: disclosing damaging information about yourself before someone else does. Experimental work by Williams, Bourgeois and Croyle found that a party who reveals negative information first is rated more credible than one whose information is revealed by an opponent, and the effect is substantial.
The second element is the promise of research, and it is the load-bearing one. Announcing that an authoritative inquiry is underway licenses the audience to suspend judgment — and suspension of judgment is the entire commercial objective, because a smoker who is waiting for the science to be settled is a smoker who continues buying cigarettes.
The Tobacco Industry Research Committee, later the Council for Tobacco Research, funded a great deal of genuine science over the following decades, mostly on subjects other than whether cigarettes cause cancer. Judge Kessler's 2006 findings characterize it as a public relations instrument rather than a scientific one.
The internal documents establishing what the companies knew, and when, were released through litigation and are now held in the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive. They show that the industry's own scientists had reached the relevant conclusions well before the public did.
Cross-ref: Attack — Confess the Small Sin