Trust Us, We're Experts PA

by Sheldon Rampton

  By 1989, the states of Massachusetts and New York had banned the chemical, and the American Academy of Pediatrics was urging a similar ban at the federal level. “Risk estimates based on the best available information at this time raise serious concern about the safety of continued, long-term exposure,” stated an EPA letter to apple growers which estimated that 50 out of every million adults who ate apples on a regular basis would get cancer from long-term exposure to Alar—in other words, 50 times the human health hazard considered “acceptable” by EPA standards. The danger to children, the letter warned, was even greater. Aside from these urgings, however, federal agencies failed to take regulatory action.

  On February 26, 1989, the public at large heard about Alar’s dangers when CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes aired an exposé titled “A is for Apple,” which became the opening salvo in a carefully planned publicity campaign developed for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The NRDC is one of the handful of environmental groups that can afford to hire a public relations company, and it chose the firm of Fenton Communications, which developed and helped distribute public service announcements featuring actress Meryl Streep, who warned that Alar had been detected in apple juice bottled for children. An NRDC report, issued at the time of the 60 Minutes broadcast, stressed that the cumulative risks to children were higher than those to adults, because children consume far more apple products per pound of body weight. The NRDC report itself focused on inconsistencies in government regulatory policies and the need for better policies to protect children. Nowhere did it suggest that eating a single apple or drinking a single glass of juice posed a significant risk. Nevertheless, the prominence of 60 Minutes and Streep’s movie-star status helped produce a dramatic public reaction, as some mothers poured apple juice down sink drains and school lunchrooms removed apples from their menus.

  The apple industry, its back to the wall, hastily abandoned its use of Alar, and the market for apples quickly rebounded. Within five years, in fact, growers’ profits were 50 percent higher than they had been at the time of the 60 Minutes broadcast.8 Apple growers in Washington State filed a libel lawsuit against CBS, NRDC, and Fenton Communications, claiming that the “scare” had cost them $100 million and sent orchards into bankruptcy, but their case was eventually dismissed. The judge who presided over the lawsuit pointed to failures in the federal government’s food-safety policies and noted that “governmental methodology fails to take into consideration the distinct hazards faced by preschoolers. The government is in grievous error when allowable exposures are calculated . . . without regard for the age at which exposure occurs.”9 Notwithstanding years of industry efforts to disprove the merits of NRDC’s warning, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1993 confirmed the central message of the Alar case, which is that infants and young children need greater protection from pesticides. The NAS called for an overhaul of regulatory procedures specifically to protect kids, finding that federal calculations for allowable levels of chemicals do not account for increased childhood consumption of fruit, for children’s lower body weight, or for their heightened sensitivity to toxic exposures. “NRDC was absolutely on the right track when it excoriated the regulatory agencies for having allowed a toxic material to stay on the market for 25 years,” stated Dr. Philip Landrigan, who chaired the NAS study committee. Subsequent reports by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer and the National Toxicology Program of the U.S. Public Health Service also concurred that Alar is carcinogenic.

  In and of itself, the Alar saga is only one fairly minor skirmish in a decades-long struggle between industry and environmental groups. For industry’s defenders, however, the “great Alar scare” has acquired an almost mythic status, thanks to a massive and still-continuing industry propaganda campaign that has successfully transformed Alar into a symbol of junk science and journalistic irresponsibility. The counterattack was led by Elizabeth Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), a self-proclaimed defender of sound science whose funding comes largely from the chemical, food, and pharmaceutical industries.

  “It was the great Alar scare of 1989 that boosted Whelan into the media stratosphere,” notes Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz.10 ACSH and Whelan were fixtures on the anti-environmental scene long before the Alar issue emerged, downplaying risks from DDT, dioxin, asbestos, and a host of other polluting chemicals, but Whelan’s prominent role in the Alar counterpublicity campaign helped make ACSH a common source for journalists seeking expert commentary on public health issues. “Television producers like Whelan because she’s colorful and succinct,” Kurtz says, “skewering her adversaries with such phrases as ‘toxic terrorists’ and referring to their research as ‘voodoo statistics.’ Newspaper reporters often dial her number because she is an easily accessible spokesperson for the ‘other’ side of many controversies.”11

  Between 1990 and 1995, ACSH held at least three press briefings on Alar at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. In its version, Alar was a beneficial and safe chemical that had been forced off the market by a deliberate scare campaign. Other groups affiliated with the chemical and food industries joined in reinforcing this interpretation of the Alar controversy. The apple industry paid the Hill & Knowlton PR firm more than $1 million to produce and distribute advertisements claiming that children would have to eat “a boxcar load” of apples daily to be at risk. Hill & Knowlton widely circulated a statement by former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop proclaiming that apples were safe and that the scare was overblown. Porter/Novelli, a leading agribusiness PR firm, helped an industry group called the “Center for Produce Quality” distribute more than 20,000 “resource kits” to food retailers that scoffed at the scientific data presented on 60 Minutes.12 Industry-funded think tanks such as the Cato Institute, Heartland Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute hammered home the argument that the “Alar scare” was an irrational episode of public hysteria produced by unscrupulous manipulators of media sensationalism.

  Since 1989, this revisionist version of the Alar story has been repeated over and over again, distorting events and omitting facts to transform the story into a morality tale about the dangers of environmental fearmongering, government regulatory excess, and media irresponsibility. By 1991, an opinion poll by the Center for Produce Quality found that 68 percent of U.S. consumers believed the Alar crisis was overblown. This ACSH view of Alar has been picked up and repeated uncritically by countless pundits and journalists, many of whom are genuinely unaware of its ideologically driven distortions. A search of the NEXIS news database for the decade following the 60 Minutes broadcast turned up nearly 5,000 references to the Alar affair. All but a handful treated the affair as a case of Chicken Little environmentalism, with headlines such as “Enviros Accused of Inciting Paranoia,” “The Century of Science Scares,” “Coalition Fights Restrictions of Food Police,” “The 60 Minutes Health Hoax,” and “Pseudoscientific Hooey the Scare Tactic of Choice Nowadays.” Among journalists, the word Alar has become a near-universal shorthand for an irrational health scare stemming from junk science.

  Tobacco Science Meets Junk Science

  For big tobacco, the industry campaign against “junk science” presented an interesting opportunity—a chance to reposition itself as something other than a pariah in the scientific community.

  Just as every action in the physical world begets an equal and opposite reaction, every risk to public health seems to beget an equal and opposite effort at denial from the industry whose products are implicated. The tobacco industry, which U.S. Surgeons General have cited since the 1960s as “the greatest cause of illness, disability and premature deaths in this country,”13 helped invent the strategy of using scientists as third-party advocates, and if Oscars were given for such campaigns, tobacco would certainly win a lifetime achievement award. Prior to the 1950s, tobacco companies routinely advertised tobacco’s alleged health “benefits” with testimonials from doctor
s and celebrities. When the first scientific studies documenting tobacco’s role in cancer and other fatal illnesses began to appear, the industry was thrown into a panic. A 1953 report by Dr. Ernst L. Wynder heralded to the scientific community a definitive link between cigarette smoking and cancer, creating what internal memos from the industry-funded Tobacco Institute refer to as the “1954 emergency.” Fighting for its economic life, the tobacco industry launched what must be considered the costliest, longest-running, and most successful PR crisis-management campaign in history. In the words of the industry itself, the campaign was aimed at “promoting cigarettes and protecting them from these and other attacks,” by “creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it, and advocating the public’s right to smoke, without actually urging them to take up the practice.”14

  For help, the tobacco industry turned in the 1950s to what was then the world’s largest PR firm, Hill & Knowlton, which designed a brilliant and expensive campaign that was later described as follows in a 1993 lawsuit, State of Mississippi vs. the Tobacco Cartel: As a result of these efforts, the Tobacco Institute Research Committee (TIRC), an entity later known as The Council for Tobacco Research (CTR), was formed.

  The Tobacco Industry Research Committee immediately ran a full-page promotion in more than 400 newspapers aimed at an estimated 43 million Americans . . . entitled “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers.” . . . In this advertisement, the participating tobacco companies recognized their “special responsibility” to the public, and promised to learn the facts about smoking and health. The participating tobacco companies promised to sponsor independent research. . . . The participating tobacco companies also promised to cooperate closely with public health officials. . . .

  After thus beginning to lull the public into a false sense of security concerning smoking and health, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee continued to act as a front for tobacco industry interests. Despite the initial public statements and posturing, and the repeated assertions that they were committed to full disclosure and vitally concerned, the TIRC did not make the public health a primary concern. . . . In fact, there was a coordinated, industry-wide strategy designed actively to mislead and confuse the public about the true dangers associated with smoking cigarettes. Rather than work for the good of the public health as it had promised, and sponsor independent research, the tobacco companies and consultants, acting through the tobacco trade association, refuted, undermined, and neutralized information coming from the scientific and medical community.15

  To improve its credibility, the TIRC used the third party technique, hiring Dr. Clarence Little in June of 1954 to serve as its director. Previously, Little had served as managing director of the American Society for the Control of Cancer, the forerunner to today’s American Cancer Society. 16 He promised that if research did discover a direct relationship between smoking and cancer, “the next job tackled will be to determine how to eliminate the danger from tobacco.” This pretense of honest concern from a respected figure worked its expected magic. Opinion research by Hill & Knowlton showed that only 9 percent of newspapers expressing opinions on the TIRC were unfavorable, whereas 65 percent were favorable without reservation.17

  There is no question that the tobacco industry knew what scientists were learning about tobacco. The TIRC maintained a library with cross-indexed medical and scientific papers from 2,500 medical journals, as well as press clippings, government reports, and other documents. TIRC employees culled this library in search of any and every scrap of scientific data with inconclusive or contrary results regarding tobacco and the harm to human health. These were compiled into a carefully selected 18-page booklet, titled “A Scientific Perspective on the Cigarette Controversy,” which was published in 1954 and mailed to more than 200,000 people, including doctors, members of Congress, and the news media.

  During the 1950s, tobacco companies more than doubled their advertising budgets, going from $76 million in 1953 to $122 million in 1957. The TIRC spent another $948,151 in 1954 alone, of which one-fourth went to Hill & Knowlton, another fourth went to pay for media ads, and most of the remainder went to administrative costs. Despite TIRC’s promise to “sponsor independent research,” only $80,000, or less than 10 percent of the total budget for the year, actually went to scientific projects.18

  In 1963, the TIRC changed its name to the Council for Tobacco Research. In addition to this “scientific” council, Hill & Knowlton helped set up a separate PR and lobbying organization, the Tobacco Institute. Formed in 1958, the Tobacco Institute grew by 1990 into what the Public Relations Journal described as one of the “most formidable public relations/lobbying machines in history,” spending an estimated $20 million a year and employing 120 PR professionals to fight the combined forces of the Surgeon General of the United States, the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, and the American Lung Association.19

  Smoke-Filled Rooms

  The tobacco industry’s PR strategy has been described by the American Cancer Society as “a delaying action to mislead the public into believing that no change in smoking habits is indicated from existing statistical and pathological evidence.”20 Of course, no propaganda strategy can permanently mask the mountains of evidence that have accumulated regarding tobacco’s deadly effects. By the 1980s, virtually no one believed the industry’s attempts to deny that smoking causes cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and a long list of other diseases. Even the industry’s own spokespersons could barely stand to repeat the same old lies. Philip Morris would not publicly admit that smoking causes cancer until the year 1999, but its attorneys and PR advisers were already planning a strategic retreat from this position as early as the 1970s. Rather than continue to defend a scientific position that everyone knew was bogus, they set out to build a scientific case against the mounting body of evidence showing that nonsmokers were also suffering adverse health effects from second-hand smoke inhaled in bars, restaurants, and other public places.

  Secondhand smoke appears under a variety of names in the industry’s internal memoranda, which refer to it variously as “indirect smoke,” “passive smoke,” “sidestream smoke,” or “environmental tobacco smoke” (often abbreviated ETS). Industry executives realized early on that the issue of tobacco’s indirect effects posed a potentially greater threat to business profits than the issue of its direct effects on smokers themselves. Once the public discovered that cigarettes were killing nonsmokers, anti-tobacco activists would press forward with increasing success in their campaigns to ban smoking in public places. “If smokers can’t smoke on the way to work, at work, in stores, banks, restaurants, malls, and other public places, they are going to smoke less,” complained Philip Morris political affairs director Ellen Merlo in a speech to tobacco vendors. “A large percentage of them are going to quit. In short, cigarette purchases will be drastically reduced and volume declines will accelerate.”21 A 1993 Philip Morris budget presentation complained that “smoking restrictions have been estimated, this year alone, to have decreased PM profits by $40 million.”22

  The campaign to cultivate pro-industry scientists on the issue of secondhand smoke was massive, multifaceted, and international. Some scientists were positioned as public voices in defense of tobacco, while others played behind-the-scenes roles, quietly cultivating allies or monitoring meetings and feeding back reports to the tobacco industry’s legal and political strategists. A 1990 confidential memorandum by Covington & Burling, one of the main law firms representing Philip Morris, reported on efforts by industry consultants in Lisbon, Hanover, Budapest, Milan, Scotland, Copenhagen, Switzerland, Norway, Australia, Finland, and Asia. “Our European consultants have organized and will conduct a major scientific conference in Lisbon next month on indoor air quality in warm climates,” it stated. “More than 100 scientists from throughout the world will attend. . . . The focus of the conference will not be tobacco; rather, the point of the conference is to show the insignifi
cance of ETS by emphasizing the genuine problems of air quality in warm climates. Some degree of ‘balance’ in the presentation of the issues is of course necessary to achieve persuasiveness, but the overall results will be positive and important. . . . A major meeting of the Toxicology Forum will be held in Budapest in July, and will include a session on ETS delivered by one of our consultants. . . . We ask our consultants to cover all substantial scientific conferences where they can usefully influence scientific and public opinion. They also attend many other conferences on their own, as part of their ordinary scientific activities.”23

  In addition to scientific conferences, consultants were at work giving media briefings; trying to sway airline flight attendants in favor of in-flight smoking; producing and appearing in videos and op-ed pieces; and testifying in court proceedings regarding allegations of fraud in tobacco advertisements. “Our consultants have created the world’s only learned scientific society addressing questions of indoor air quality,” the report boasted. “It will soon have its own periodic newsletter, in which ETS and other [indoor air quality] issues will be discussed in a balanced fashion to an audience of regulators, scientists, building operators, etc. It will also have its own scientific journal, published by a major European publishing house, in which [indoor air quality] issues will again be addressed.”24