LLFCC is pleased to publish Bob Mason [1]'s series exploring the logic of the tobacco industry's use of media and propaganda to accomplish its goals.

 

Introduction: Given the overwhelming evidence of corporate crime in the tobacco industry documents, I propose a framework for understanding the industry’s successful ongoing project of evading culpability for those crimes. I call this framework The Big Tobacco Innocence Project.

Evidence: The tobacco industry carried out a self-confessed conspiracy to hide, minimize and undermine public awareness of the enormous suffering and death caused by cigarette smoking over many decades. The singularly well documented evidence of this is available at legacy.library.ucsf.edu [2] and bat.library.ucsf.edu [3].

Innocence: The Big Tobacco Innocence Project [BTIP] comprises all the propaganda that denies or minimizes the culpability of the tobacco corporations for the crimes mentioned above. I will attempt a justification of the term ‘propaganda’ below. The BTIP rests on a set of concepts that I try to unpack in this essay. I list these now, describing them in the way the BTIP presents them. Later I will analyze them in their social context in what I hope is a realistic, rather than propagandistic, way:

• Adult informed choice [3]

• Tobacco companies are innocent of the charge of causing people to harm themselves because smokers are intelligent adults who choose to smoke.

• Individual Responsibility

• Anyone who smokes bears sole and total responsibility for the consequences of their smoking.

• Free Will

• Free people in a free society have the right to do hazardous things. Since people have free will, they cannot be not forced to smoke, nor should they be prevented from smoking by the government. Such government restriction is the major evil in our society.

• Common Knowledge

• We all know, and have known for over half a century, that smoking is harmful. Hence, corporations who provide cigarettes cannot be said to deceive consumers about the risks involved.

• Addiction

• Smoking is not an addiction, because there is no similarity in the behavior or the character of smokers contrasted with narcotics or cocaine addicts. Cigarette smokers, as opposed to addicts, have free will and therefore the ability to stop – as is shown by the millions of people who have stopped.

  Conclusions The Propaganda of Innocence in turn relies on the Big Tobacco Smoking Narrative (BTSN), a description of how and why people smoke, and how and why cigarette companies market to them. This narrative absolves the tobacco companies of any responsibility. It goes like this: people smoke because they are adults who wish to exercise their free will, and they choose to indulge in the pleasures of cigarette smoking while fully aware of the health hazards that entails. Cigarette advertising merely lets them know what the choices are, and to draw them from one brand to another. It does not attempt to coax people who do not smoke into smoking. It certainly is never aimed at children.

  This narrative reveals an emphatically anti-social and hyper-libertarian world view. Not anti-social in the sense that it encourages socially destructive behavior (although that is also true), but because it denies descriptive and explanatory legitimacy to frameworks that discuss human behavior, motivation, and responsibility in a social context. The resulting ideology has wide, perhaps ‘hegemonic’ application in both hiding and justifying centralized corporate power.

  The Tobacco Industry can be understood as a producer of political ideas and of ideology, as much as a producer and distributor of cigarettes. The industry is in the business not only of delivering nicotine, but of creating a popular ideology and a milieu in which this mass poisoning is feasible, legitimate and legal. The manufacture and distribution of this ideology is a prerequisite for the manufacture and selling of cigarettes. The tobacco documents can then be understood as not merely documentation of an industry’s behavior, but as constituting themselves major and central products of the industry.

  Next: Our Tobacco Problem - And Theirs [3]

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  [4]   [5]   [6]   [7]   [8]   [9]   [10]   [11]   [12]   [13]