Flack Attack

PR Watch has reported in the past on the antics of Steven Milloy and his "Junk Science Home Page." His tobacco connections, however, were first revealed on April 8 in the Lancet, England's leading medical journal. The Lancet story detailed a covert industry campaign in the 1990s to undermine scientific evidence linking tobacco smoke to health problems in nonsmokers. The campaign was prodigiously expensive, international in scope, and even reached into the editorial offices of the Lancet itself.

For more than 50 years the tobacco industry has been a leading corrupter of science and government. Virtually every corporate hack in America has bellied up to the tobacco trough at one time or another, and their names appear in its internal documents, many of which are now online. (A list of internet archives appears on the website of Americans for Nonsmokers Rights.)

The Lancet story inspired our own visit to the tobacco archives as we were researching a new book by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. Titled Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future, it will be published by Tarcher/Putnam in January. This issue draws heavily on that research, which shows that many so-called defenders of "sound science" are in fact industry-funded enemies of any science, no matter how rigorous, that justifies regulations to protect public health.

Steven Milloy and his cohorts pose as reforming crusaders with a mission to eliminate fraud and corruption in science. The reality is quite the opposite. Tobacco hacks are not reformers, and organizations that cannot tell whether tobacco science is junk science have little right to pose as society's scientific arbiters.

The Philip Morris tobacco company has been trying to improve its image lately with feel-good TV commercials that highlight the company's charitable activities or claim the company has changed following the Master Settlement Agreement which tobacco companies signed with the Attorney Generals of 46 states and 5 territories. Under the terms of that agreement, Philip Morris was required to stop advertising and other marketing efforts aimed at kids, to close some of its long-standing front groups including the Council for Tobacco Research and the Center for Indoor Air Research, and to make millions of pages of internal company documents available to the public. Perhaps its true feelings about those changes came through in this recent advertisement which appeared in Glamour and Entertainment Weekly. It features an African-American woman's profile against a red background, with a caption that reads, "Never let the goody two shoes get you down."