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A stunning investigation of the history of organized misinformation in politics.
In today’s post-truth political landscape, there is a carefully concealed but ever-growing industry of organized misinformation that exists to create and disseminate lies in the service of political agendas. Ari Rabin-Havt and Media Matters for America present a revelatory history of this industry—which they've dubbed Lies, Incorporated—and show how it has crippled legislative progress on issues including tobacco regulation, public health care, climate change, gun control, immigration, abortion, and same-sex marriage. Eye-opening and indispensable, Lies, Incorporated takes an unflinching look at the powerful network of politicians and special interest groups that have launched coordinated assaults on the truth to shape American politics.
- Sales Rank: #79350 in Books
- Brand: Bookazine Bertrams Stock
- Published on: 2016-04-19
- Released on: 2016-04-19
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .70" w x 5.20" l, .61 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
Features
Review
“Ari Rabin-Havt tells the truth, and that's something rare in Washington, D.C.” —Sen. Harry Reid, U.S. Senate Democratic Leader
“After 30 years in politics, I thought I was beyond the ability to be shocked—until I read Lies, Incorporated. An important book for everyone who is angry—and an essential one for anyone who isn’t angry yet.” —Paul Begala, Democratic Strategist
“This book is a must-read if you want to understand the intentional manipulation of truth that is blocking progressive change.” —Thom Hartmann, Host of The Thom Hartmann Program
“A provocative, powerful expose, shining a bright, penetrating light on the role deliberate lies play in Washington policy-making.” —Nancy Altman, co-author of Social Security Works!
“Required reading for anyone who wants to understand how our policy-making process has been hijacked by special interests.” —Rep. Keith Ellison, Co-Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus
“A damning jeremiad on how modern public policy can be exploited by corporate chicanery.” —Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
ARI RABIN-HAVT is host of The Agenda, a national radio show airing Monday through Friday on SiriusXM. His writing has been featured in USA Today, The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Observer, Salon, and The American Prospect, and he has appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, Al Jazeera, and HuffPost Live.
Along with David Brock, he coauthored The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine and The Benghazi Hoax. He previously served as executive vice president of Media Matters for America and as an adviser to Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and former vice president Al Gore.
MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA is a Web-based, not-for-profit, progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
The Birth of Lies, Incorporated: Tobacco
Lies, Incorporated, was born during a meeting of the titans of the tobacco industry at the Plaza Hotel in New York City on December 15, 1953. In attendance were the presidents of American Tobacco, Benson & Hedges, Philip Morris, and U.S. Tobacco—the four largest tobacco companies at the time—as well as the CEOs of R.J. Reynolds and Brown & Williamson.
Previously, the group had gathered only for social occasions, at charity events and various industry award ceremonies. This meeting had a far more serious agenda. Earlier that month, Dr. Ernst Wynder of the Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research published the findings of a study linking cigarette tar to cancer in mice. The research attracted intense media attention and put a spotlight on the health risks associated with tobacco. Widely read publications including Life magazine, The New York Times, and the Reader’s Digest (in a piece titled “Cancer by the Carton”) had already published major articles on the dangers of smoking. The looming crisis had to be dealt with, and the leading tobacco barons joined forces to fight back.
At the Plaza Hotel meeting, the heads of the tobacco companies met with John Hill, founder of the legendary public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. The company had built its reputation working for chemical companies, big oil, and other heavy industries. Profit was not Hill’s only motivation. He was a committed conservative, opposed to the idea of government regulations, even of carcinogens such as tobacco.
As far back as 1912, Dr. Isaac Adler suggested a link between tobacco and lung cancer in the “world’s first monograph on lung cancer,” while indicating more research was needed, as his conclusions were “not yet ready for final judgment.” In 1939, Franz Hermann Müller of Cologne Hospital published a study in which he demonstrated “that people with lung cancer were far more likely than non-cancer controls to have smoked.” This was confirmed in another, “more ambitious” study by “Eberhard Schairer and Eric Schöniger at the University of Jena” in 1943. These results became more conclusive as additional scholarly research was published through the 1950s and ’60s.
By the time Wynder’s study was published, the medical field—and the tobacco industry—had access to research concluding that the use of tobacco products posed a significant health risk. Hill believed the way to fight back was for the tobacco companies to join together, sponsor additional studies, and issue new “pro-cigarette” messaging using the word “research” to highlight the scientific nature of their counterarguments. The tobacco companies were not equipped internally to take on this role. For years they had worked to steal one another’s clients. Now they would need to defend the industry as a whole.
Following the meeting, Hill & Knowlton drafted a white paper that laid out a plan for the industry. “The grave nature of a number of recently highly publicized research reports on the effects of cigarette smoking . . . [has] confronted the industry with a serious problem of public relations,” wrote the firm. “The situation is one of extreme delicacy. There is much at stake and the industry group, in moving into the field of public relations, needs to exercise great care not to add fuel to the flames.”
Using the resources of the companies represented at the meeting, Hill & Knowlton recommended establishing the austere-sounding Tobacco Industry Research Committee. “The underlying purpose of any activity at this stage should be reassurance of the public through wider communication of facts to the public,” wrote Hill & Knowlton in the white paper. “It is important that the public recognize the existence of weighty scientific views which hold there is no proof that cigarette smoking is a cause of lung cancer.”
This purported research committee, whose public role was providing independent data on the risks of smoking, was in fact a front for Hill & Knowlton. The tobacco companies supplied an initial budget of $1.2 million and its offices were located one floor below Hill & Knowlton’s in the Empire State Building.
The group announced its existence with “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers.” Run as a paid advertisement on January 4, 1954, in more than four hundred newspapers around the country, the statement claimed:
1. That medical research of recent years indicates many possible causes of lung cancer.
2. That there is no agreement among the authorities regarding what the cause is.
3. That there is no proof that cigarette smoking is one of the causes.
4. That statistics purporting to link cigarette smoking with the disease could apply with equal force to any one of many other aspects of modern life. Indeed the validity of the statistics themselves is questioned by numerous scientists.
The ad went on to describe the activities of the group:
1. We are pledging aid and assistance to the research effort into all phases of tobacco use and health. This joint financial aid will of course be in addition to what is already being contributed by individual companies.
2. For this purpose we are establishing a joint industry group consisting initially of the undersigned. This group will be known as TOBACCO INDUSTRY RESEARCH COMMITTEE.
3. In charge of the research activities of the Committee will be a scientist of unimpeachable integrity and national repute. In addition there will be an Advisory Board of scientists disinterested in the cigarette industry. A group of distinguished men from medicine, science and education will be invited to serve on this Board. These scientists will advise the Committee on its research activities.
According to Hill & Knowlton’s “progress report,” this ad reached more than 43 million Americans, costing a total of just over a quarter-million dollars. This advertising onslaught accomplished its intended purpose of overshadowing research informing the public of the dangers of tobacco.
The Tobacco Industry Research Committee was created to cast doubt on scientific consensus that smoking cigarettes causes cancer, to convince the media that there were two sides to the story about the risks of tobacco and that each side should be considered with equal weight. Finally it sought to steer politicians away from damaging the economic interests of the tobacco companies. Hill & Knowlton helped the industry carry out this mission.
Due to the success of Hill’s strategy, the methods he pioneered would be employed by a variety of players in Lies, Incorporated, over the decades to come, impacting the public debate on issues including climate change, health care, and gun control. If your goal is simply to keep the status quo in place, in this case keeping millions of people addicted to a dangerous product with no government intervention, then confusion is a useful tool. If the science is in doubt, why take action that would harm the economic well-being of farmers and thousands of others who work in the tobacco industry, as well as telling millions of Americans they should not engage in a favorite leisure activity? What made this strategy morally reprehensible was that the companies knew from the moment they launched their effort that cigarettes were killing millions of people. Their success at delaying action by the federal government and other health care authorities, caused by an unnecessary battle over science, undoubtedly cost millions more Americans their lives, in addition to hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, in health care costs.
The “Frank Statement” was the first step in a major public relations campaign whose goal was to undermine scientific research. It represented a major break from previous PR strategies. The tobacco industry’s prior instinct had been to mitigate the health risks suggested by the research, rather than to attack science head-on. Thus, each company had been competing against the others with claims that its cigarettes were the healthiest on the market. John Hill convinced them this was a counterproductive strategy.
In May 1954, Hill & Knowlton presented the Tobacco Industry Research Committee with a booklet titled “A Scientific Perspective on the Cigarette Controversy.” More than two hundred thousand copies were printed and sent to 176,000 doctors as well as to thousands of reporters around the country.
Seeking more heft, Hill & Knowlton hired a scientific adviser to serve as a public face for its efforts. Dr. Clarence Cook Little, who previously served as a director of the American Cancer Society, took on the role with vigor.
Little had impeccable credentials. He was a research biologist and a former assistant dean of Harvard and president of the University of Maine and the University of Michigan. At the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, Little supervised the distribution of millions of dollars in grant money, maintaining for decades that “there [was] no demonstrated causal relationship between smoking or any disease,” even after the science on the subject was indisputable. He insisted lung cancer was a genetic condition, not one caused by smoking.
Early on, Little’s role created controversy in the medical community. In The Atlantic, Dr. David D. Rutstein, head of the Preventive Medicine Department at the Harvard Medical School, wrote “An Open Letter to Dr. Clarence Cook Little” in October 1957. Citing eighteen studies in five countries, Rutstein accused Little of having “consistently ignored or brushed off all of the human evidence whenever a statement relating cigarette smoking and lung cancer has been released to the press by a research worker, by the British government through its Medical Research Council, or by the Surgeon General of the United States Public Health Service speaking for the United States government.”
He asked, “Is there really any justification for your continuing to demand the discovery of the ‘cause’ of lung cancer before we attempt to save human lives by recommending a decrease in cigarette smoking?”
If by 1957 the medical community had already reached consensus on the fact that smoking cigarettes caused lung cancer, why would a scientist like Dr. Little resist? Little was a believer in eugenics, which, post–World War II, had fallen out of favor. For Little, this belief was grounded in the notion that genetics predetermined the maladies our bodies were susceptible to, including cancer. The idea that cigarette smoke and not our DNA was the cause of cancer would undermine his belief structure. He would not be the first to turn a blind eye to facts in order to preserve his belief system. The scientists who work at the behest of corporate interests as part of Lies, Incorporated are often driven by ideology, sometimes tangentially linked to the subject at hand, not simply by money.
Employing scientists like Dr. Little as part of their effort would become a critical strategy for Lies, Incorporated. As Harvard science historian and coauthor of the book Merchants of Doubt Naomi Oreskes explained to me, “The credibility of the disinformation campaign depends upon having at least some real scientist who can stand up in public and make it seem as if there is a real scientific debate.”
In addition to publishing its own tobacco “research,” Hill & Knowlton ran an active campaign to alter news stories that were critical of the tobacco industry. The firm bragged about a story in “Cosmopolitan magazine that ‘was already in type’ ” when their efforts “resulted in ‘seven revisions and five qualifying additions.’ ”
Most helpful customer reviews
82 of 85 people found the following review helpful.
Lies are... lies are... name the day
By enubrius
This is an extremely well-written, clear, concise itemisation of the far too many lies that organised corporations, interest groups, political parties, etc. have been telling the American people in order to maximise profits, maintain or achieve power, and, simply keep themselves and their friends in one position and the rest of us in a, shall we say, less desirable one.
It SHOULD be an eye-opening book
It SHOULD lead to outrage and reform and, at the LEAST peasants with pitchforks storming the palace
Only
You know, and I know, and, sadly, I'm sure the author(s) know that the only people who will read this are those who already do know, or suspect, what Rabin-Havt reveals AND who have been shlepping that pitchfork for a while now just waiting for the others to catch up
The big question, problem, and drawback is, as always: How do we get people OUTSIDE the choir to join in the song?
I don't know the answer, I just thought the question needs asking
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Well reasearched and well written!
By DGR6989
This slim volume provides a useful overview of some of the deception campaigns that make legislative and regulatory solutions to pressing problems so difficult. Using the tobacco industry's infamous deception campaign as a model, this well researched and well written volume identifies a number of other deception campaigns aimed at forestalling or promoting legislation. Allthough some of this will be familiar to readers who have read Merchants of Doubt or similar works, this work is up-to-date and covers a number of importaint topics, including public health care, the impact of the national debt, immigration reform, gun safety, voter suppression laws, and gay marriage. This should be required reading for the news anchors and producers.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Read between the lies!
By ricky rocket
Very detailed and well written book on who and how lies get created for the political wedge issues. I always knew things such as "death panels" were lies but I didn't know how they originated until I read this book. There are 30+ pages of references in the back to counter those who might think this is just the left's spin on these issues.
I was watching the news last night about how NC overturned their voter id law. The Republican spin was that these laws are put in place to stop voter fraud. I immediately yelled "Bulls*%t!" at the TV screen after remembering the Voter ID chapter in the book that presented evidence that there essentially is no voter id fraud. My favorite detail is about a lady who filled out and turned in an absentee ballot for her daughter who was away at college, not realizing her daughter had already voted. She turned herself in and paid a fine.
As others have mentioned, the last chapter on how to solve this problem is weak. While it's true that there is not a silver bullet, and that in general "we the people" need to better educate ourselves on these issues, I am looking forward to the folllow-up book "Lies, Incorporated: "The People Awaken" which will provide solutions on how to help stop this epidemic.
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