This is Chapter 15 of my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” that is being published online chapter by chapter.
Recall all the power of public relations that has been discussed in these various strategies. Now understand that in the USA there are more than four and a half PR people for every reporter. This number has grown over the years, but PR people have outnumbered journalists since 1980.
The majority of those PR people started out as journalists themselves. Why? The pay is better and there are a lot more jobs available. But it was a long road to this position we find ourselves in today. Big Tobacco helped to pave that road.
One of the biggest plays of public relations is to get stories out to the public. If you can influence what is covered in the news and what is not you can influence the public at large.
This started as early as the 20’s, when Bernays proposed the Tobacco Information Service Bureau, a PR arm for American Tobacco. He launched the “torches of freedom” campaign in order to get women to smoke in public. One of his main goals was getting journalists to cover events, getting photos taken of women smoking cigarettes publicly. This stirred up controversy that he used to get even more press.
Fast forward to 1954 when The Frank Statement to Smokers was released. This was a PR masterstroke as it generated a massive amount of favorable press. Hill & Knowlton ran opinion research after it was released. They found that 65% of coverage of the TIRC was favorable. Only 9% was critical.
No PR campaign ends with a single ad. This was followed by the TIRC paper, A Scientific Perspective on the Cigarette Controversy. This featured eighteen pages of quotes from doctors and scientists doubting the link of cancer and cigarettes. Over 200,000 copies are distributed to doctors and media. That year the TIRC’s budget was almost $1 million which almost exclusively went to Hill & Knowlton for media ads and administrative costs.
What was this money for if not for influencing how journalists covered the topic? Journalists are taught to cover both sides of an argument. Hill & Knowlton, through the TIRC, made sure their side was out there and ever present.
“Every time the TIRC issued a press release, the Hill & Knowlton organization had initiated ‘personal contact,’” wrote Brandt. “The firm systematically documented the courtship of newspapers and magazines where it could urge ‘balance and fairness’ to the industry. Hill & Knowlton staff, for instance, assisted Donald Cooley in preparing an article entitled ‘Smoke Without Fear’ for the July 1954 issue of True Magazine and then distributed more than 350,000 reprints to journalists throughout the country.”
We can see this in 1955 when Edward Murrow covered the tobacco controversy in two consecutive broadcasts at CBS. Hill himself made sure that the coverage was a “balanced one”.
Dick Darrow of Hill & Knowlton directed his staff in 1955 to focus on the “stature-building attention on Dr. Little and his own work.” They made Little, their front man, available to journalists and the media as much as possible.
The PR defense was always ready. They sought to know about scientific findings before they were published so they could attack them as soon as they were released. Carl Thompson explained, “One policy that we have long followed is to let no major unwarranted attack go unanswered. And that we would make every effort to have an answer in the same day—not the next day or next edition. This calls for knowing what is going to come out both in publications and meetings.” Sometimes they even preemptively rebutted new science.
When the defense of “we need more research” began to fade, there were other tactics available. In the last chapter we covered the legal defense of big tobacco. Legal action, including just the threats of lawsuits, were more arrows in the quiver of Big Tobacco to control others including journalists.
ABC’s Day One program featured a whistleblower from R.J. Reynold’s in February of 1994. Philip Morris sued for libel. “This lawsuit was never about libel. It was about intimidation and discouraging other news organizations from covering them,” said Jane Kirtley, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
The Tyndall Report was a journalism newsletter which tracked and analyzed nightly newscasts since 1987. The editor, Andrew Tyndall said, “In the first six months of 1994, before Philip Morris sued ABC for libel, the three broadcast networks devoted 177 minutes to the tobacco story. In the second half of 1994, after the lawsuit was filed that May, the coverage dropped to 43 minutes…There definitely was a chilling effect of the lawsuit.”
While legal action was one tactic, it wasn’t the only one. Another tactic can be used simultaneously for more leverage. This includes threatening to pull advertising. Even though at this time cigarettes weren’t advertising on TV, they still had a card to play. Philip Morris has bought brands such as Kraft Foods and Miller Beer. They were able to threaten to pull advertising on these which amounted to more than $100 million a year.
Journalism pays its bills through advertising. The threat of pulling millions of dollars per year in advertising is a powerful stick that Big Tobacco was absolutely willing to wield.
A memo between tobacco defense lawyers stated, “Through a studied investment of its advertising dollars, the industry both coerced the print media to avoid coverage of anti-smoking stories and enlisted the media’s support in opposition to proposed restrictions on print advertising.”
Ultimately, because of the lawsuit, ABC went on to apologize for their coverage in a carefully worded broadcast. They had to pay between $15 million in legal fees to Philip Morris. “Many saw the apology as an example of powerful corporate interests trumping journalistic practice,” writes Brandt. “It soon became clear that executives at Walt Disney Company, on the verge of acquiring ABC, wanted the case settled before the purchase went into effect.”
These same tactics sometimes proactively killed other news before it aired, as occurred with CBS’ 60 Minutes program featuring another whistleblower, tobacco executive and lead research at Brown & Williamson, Jeffrey Wigand.
The threat of “tortious interference” was enough to get CBS to not air the program, where they could possibly be liable for damages in Wigand breaking his confidentiality agreement. If not for producer Lowell Bergman leaking out the transcript of this interview to other news outlets it may never have seen light of day.
Brown and Williamson also went on the offensive against Wigand. They hired private investigators to dig up any and all dirt they could on him creating a 500-page dossier that included sub-headings such as “Wigand’s Lies About His Residence,” “Wigand’s Lies Under Oath” and “Other Lies By Wigand.”
Many news organizations used this dossier to run what amounted to hit pieces on Wigand’s credibility. Further checking on the stories, as The Wall Street Journal found that “many of the serious allegations against Mr. Wigand are backed by scant or contradictory evidence. Some of the charges — including that he pleaded guilty to shoplifting — are demonstrably untrue.”
Interestingly enough it turns out the CBS Chairman was Laurence Tisch and his son, Andrew Tisch, was CEO of Lorillard tobacco. All of the CEO’s, at that time, were under investigation from the justice department for committing perjury in front of Congress. Whether or not this played any role in CBS’ decision I cannot say for sure, though relationships such as this should be looked at with a skeptical eye.
What was clearer was how money influenced such decisions. Like ABC being sold to Disney, CBS was looking to be acquired by Westinghouse Electric Corporation for a sum of $5.4 billion. The possibilities of a huge lawsuit could be enough to stop the sale. The general counsel for CBS, Ellen Kaden, who argued against airing the program, was set to receive $1.2 million from the sale herself.
The New York Times reported, “Without putting up a fight, CBS has managed to create an ugly precedent. ‘Tortious interference with contract’ has now been added to the legal armory of enemies of the press without so much as a single decision endorsing it.” They also wrote, “The most troubling part of CBS’s decision is that it was made not by news executives but by corporate officers who may have their minds on money rather than public service these days.”
Another tactic useful for influencing journalism is paying high profile people that can make news for you in opinion pieces and such.
British philosopher Roger Scruton criticized the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control put forth by the WHO (which will be explained more in the next chapter), saying “It cannot be the function of a health bureaucracy to cure us of such self-imposed risks…to classify as a dangerous disease what is in fact, a voluntary activity and a source of pleasure, the risk of which falls entirely on the smoker…Big tobacco is an easily demonized opponent, and one currently as defenceless as a chained and baited bear.”
It turns out Scruton was working for Japan Tobacco International, one of the world’s biggest producers and exporters. Leaked emails were revealed by The Guardian. Scruton sought to get a £1,000 raise on his existing £4,500 monthly fee because he was providing “good value for money.”
“We would aim to place an article every two months in one or other of the WSJ [Wall Street Journal], the Times, the Telegraph, the Spectator, the Financial Times, the Economist, the Independent or the New Statesman,” says an email from 2001, from Sophie, Scruton’s wife and business partner. “While one or more of these articles might be written by RS, we would do our best to get other journalists to join in.”
Lastly, you can go straight after the journalists themselves. Philip Morris paid a CBS TV anchor to do a mock TV show at one of their conventions. Later, she co-hosted a newsmagazine segment on tobacco taxes. This segment contained factual errors and prominently featured an interview with a paid consultant to the Canadian Tobacco Manufacturers Council. This conflict of interest was not disclosed in the program.
Influencing journalism is a mainstay strategy that involves a wide variety of tactics. The sad fact is that today, with heavy consolidation and links across industries, journalism has suffered far more from these tactics than in Big Tobacco’s zenith.
Key Takeaways on Influencing Journalism
- There are more PR people than journalists, who receive higher pay for their duties.
- The overall journalism strategy involves to get more favorable coverage and downplay or squash any negative coverage. Getting more favorable coverage includes:
- Staging PR events that push your agenda forward
- Distributing positive coverage in one media source to other media sources.
- Using a network of media contacts to get coverage far and wide.
- Using opinion polling to gauge your effectiveness, and tweaking campaigns from there.
- Building up the credibility of your front people and their research or other efforts.
- Pay to have high-profile people write puff pieces about you.
- Pay journalists themselves through consulting, speaking fees, etc.
- Downplay or squash any negative coverage includes tactics such as:
- Being aware of science or other negative threats before they’re published so they could be attacked right away or even preemptively.
- Lawsuits for libel, tortious interference and more, including just the threat of lawsuits.
- Pulling advertising dollars, including the threat of pulling advertising.
- Opposition research to smear opponents.
- Relationships among industry executives and news executives might be used to influence media coverage. This becomes even more likely with greater business consolidation.
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Links to all published chapters of The Industry Playbook can be found here.
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This is such an excellent series. Thank you !
You’re welcome!