Astroturfing and misinformation

A Brief History of Astroturfing

To examine the history of astroturfing — a targeted misinformation campaign common in many industries — we have to begin far from the disappearing Bangladeshi coastline... Our story lands in a cool corporate headquarters in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

My interest is personal. About a dozen years ago, I picked up a weekly newspaper in Nova Scotia for the very first time, and found my name emblazoned on the cover. The newspaper's publisher had written a long editorial refuting a column that I had written about the dangers of secondhand smoke.

On the surface, casual readers no doubt thought the publisher had handed me my ass on a platter. He quoted scientific studies left and right to show that I was just blowing smoke, and didn't know what I had been talking about. Secondhand smoke wasn't dangerous, he opined, just annoying.

But I had done my research, so I was able to fire back — with both barrels — in The Coast, Halifax's alternative paper, a week later.

In just a few paragraphs, I was able to demonstrate that the comprehensive study that he had quoted extensively had, in fact, been written and paid for by big tobacco companies, and every so-called fact he had quoted was demonstrably false. The publisher of a small newspaper had been duped, by the latest and greatest form of false advertising: Astroturfing.

Here's what I wrote to show how the confusion was propagated, and how the tobacco companies were managing to get the media to proclaim what they could not.

Consider this tangled web. Lung specialist Gary Huber works at the University of Texas, but his research is fully-funded by a law firm that merely funnels money from the tobacco industry. One day, Huber writes an article for a small consumer magazine stating that the research and epidemiological studies on secondhand smoke are poorly-conceived and flawed. Writer Michael Furmento, unaware of Huber’s tobacco company connections, writes an article that quotes Huber — and five other researchers whose work is funded by big tobacco — extensively in an article for Investor’s Business Daily.

Joshua Sullum, a prominent pro-business journalist with The Wall Street Journal really likes what he’s reading, and writes a series of articles that are based on Fumento and Huber’s original articles.

The folks at a major tobacco company — RJR Reynolds — also like what they’re reading, and so they gleefully reprint one of Sullum’s opinion pieces in a nationwide full-page ad with the banner: If We Said It, You Might Not Have Believe It. Phillip Morris goes even further, reprinting Sullum’s article in most major national newspapers in the US for six days.

With such incredible expenditures, no wonder the waters are muddied, and columnists at small Halifax, Nova Scotia weeklies are hoodwinked. [His] column last week asserts that one truly comprehensive study on the direct level of exposure to “passive” smoke by nonsmokers has determined that, on average, nonsmokers who are exposed to sidestream smoke — because their partners indulge — are inhaling the equivalent of one cigarette per week.

Even I can admit that hardly sounds significant.

But see how clever it is, for the assertion contains just a whiff of truth. If you only consider nicotine, which is barely present in sidestream cigarette smoke — that figure is accurate. But while nicotine is addictive, it doesn’t cause cancer.

University of California researcher Katherine Hammond discovered that the many other components in cigarette smoke, which do cause cancer, are present in much greater concentrations.

Using the [publisher's] example, a nonsmoker exposed to their partner’s pack-a-day habit will inhale six cigarettes’ worth of deadly benzene each week; 17 cigarettes’ worth of 4ABP, a known human carcinogen, and 75 cigarettes’ worth of N-Nitrosodimenthylamine, a potent animal carcinogen. Passive smoking doesn’t seem all that passive any more, and it’s certainly not harmless.

Astroturfing began just like that, when smoking companies set up dummy research institutes and foundations to help people "learn the truth." But what they were really doing was trying to confuse people, and delay the implementation of tough smoking laws. And it worked. Their money bought a 10 or 12 year reprieve from legislation, giving them more than enough time to hook another generation. They are laughing all the way to the bank.

But the story doesn't end there. The oil companies, Exxon in particular, also liked what they were seeing.

Next: Astroturfing and climate change

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A Brief History of Astroturfing