One of the most common claims made by those who do not like some particular scientific result is that the scientists who found it were biased. At some level, one might expect that this sort of recognition of the harmful effect that nonempirical (religious, political) beliefs can have on empirical investigation would be a mark of respect for high scientific standards. Unfortunately, this is not customarily the case. In fact, it is quite common for those who oppose particular scientific findings to be quite comfortable applying their own ideological litmus test to an area of inquiry (even though they may deny that this is what they are doing) under the guise of 'openness' and 'fairness.' The goal here is a cynical attempt to undercut the idea that science is fair and raise doubts that any empirical inquiry can really be value neutral.¹

The group announced its existence with “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers.” Run as a paid advertisement on January 4, 1954, in more than four hundred newspapers around the country, the statement claimed:

1. That medical research of recent years indicates many possible causes of lung cancer.

2. That there is no agreement among the authorities regarding what the cause is.

3. That there is no proof that cigarette smoking is one of the causes.

4. That statistics purporting to link cigarette smoking with the disease could apply with equal force to any one of many other aspects of modern life. Indeed the validity of the statistics themselves is questioned by numerous scientists.²

We are left with a superlative, detailed history of the tobacco industry's public relations "playbook response" to the crisis set off by Doll & Hill's dramatic reports of the association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer ³, particularly insight into the motivation:

The economic side of this story, as opposed to the ideological one that later arose from it, is crucial to understanding how what may seem like politically based opposition can have its roots in monetary interests. In this, it corroborates the story of how there came to be so much grass-roots push back on climate change (which was funded by oil interests). It also presages the story we will tell later about how fake news evolved from profit-seeking clickbait to full-blown disinformation. Capitalizing on the idea that science had shown “no conclusive link” between cigarettes and cancer (for science can never do this for any two variables), the The Tobacco Industry Research Committee was created to cast doubt on scientific consensus that smoking cigarettes causes cancer, to convince the media that there were two sides to the story about the risks of tobacco and that each side should be considered with equal weight. Finally it sought to steer politicians away from damaging the economic interests of the tobacco companies. took out a full-page ad in numerous American newspapers—reaching forty-three million people—which had the effect of creating confusion and doubt on a scientific question that was close to settled.

Obviously, Big Tobacco had a massive national & international market to preserve, leading to some of the most absurd ad campaigns - even in retrospect & context - imaginable, including posed physicans, sports heroes, and even actors-turned-governers-turned-presidents:

Obviously, this a "casebook" form of rhetoric that we did and would literally see successfully utilized by obfuscating politicians and political operatives - particularly those with a fortune to lose and/or gain - decades on either side of this and similar issues. As we have noted in our dealings today, and predictably will continue to do so time and again in the forseeable future, the greatest losses will be the truth.

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¹ McIntyre, Lee. Post-Truth. The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA & London, England. 2018, p.27

² Rabin-Havt, Ari, and Media Matters for America. Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics. Anchor Books: New York, p.35

³ Doll, R. and Hill, AB. Lung cancer and other causes of death in relation to smoking. BMJ. 10 Nov., 1956. 1071-1081.