YOU can’t beat doubt as a corporate strategy – especially if your product is life-threatening when used as directed. These days we don’t have to speculate as to whether industries have manufactured doubt. They have admitted it too many times.
In 1972, Tobacco Institute vice-president outlined his industry’s “brilliantly executed” defence strategy. A key tactic was “creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it” while “encouraging objective scientific research.”
“Objective scientific research”: those words would almost make you believe that Panzer was talking about objective science. But when doubt is your goal, the misuse of language is just another way to confuse the public.
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Where tobacco led the way, coal and chemicals followed. And, of course, the fossil fuel industry has been working overtime – and with shocking success – creating doubt about climate change.
Techniques appear to be limited only by the imagination and integrity of the campaigners – which is to say, there don’t appear to be any limits. One of the best is to just flat-out lie.
A coalition of US coal and electricity companies set the tone in the 1990s with the creation of the . It’s purpose: to “reposition climate change as a theory not a fact”.
ICE hired a PR firm to create advertising messages. These ranged from the ridiculous – “Who told you the Earth was getting warmer… Chicken Little?” – to the blatantly false – “If the Earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis getting colder?” But the focus groups found them effective, and that is all that mattered.
ICE also hired scientists to sign querulous opinion-page articles and PR agencies to harass journalists. Today, journalists – embattled, overwhelmed and committed to “balance”, no matter how spurious – are useful conduits for spreading doubt.
Other corporate tactics include the creation of phoney grass-roots organisations. The pioneer was The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), set up in 1993 by a group of tobacco, nuclear energy, agribusiness, chemicals and oil companies. TASSC’s stated goal was to “encourage the public to question – from the grass roots up – the validity of scientific studies.”
ICE and TASSC are no more, but their tactics live on. The doubt industry has ballooned in the past two decades. There are now scores of think tanks pushing dubious and confusing policy positions, and dozens of phoney grass-roots organisations created to make those positions appear to have legitimate following.
It’s a hardball world. Never doubt it.
Read more: Special report: Living in denial