Other critics, however, are a little craftier and say that selected scientists are not themselves adhering to good scientific standards: that they are being closed-minded and blind to their own self-serving interests. Some of this is based on a straightforward misunderstanding (or cynical exploitation) of how science works, based on the mistaken idea that if scientists would just gather enough evidence they could prove a theory. But this is not how science works: no matter how good the evidence, a scientific theory can never be proven true. No matter how rigorously it might have been tested, every theory is “just a theory.” Because of the way that scientific evidence is gathered, it is always theoretically possible that some future piece of data might come along and disprove a theory. This does not mean that scientific theories are unjustified or unworthy of belief. But it does mean that at some point scientists must admit that even their strongest explanations cannot be offered as truth, but only strongly warranted belief based on justification given the evidence. This alleged weakness of scientific reasoning is often exploited by those who would claim that they are the real scientists—that if science is an open process, then it should not be in the business of excluding alternative theories. Until a theory is absolutely proven, they believe, a competing theory could always be true.¹

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are... Someone who ceases to believe in the possibility of identifying certain statements as true and others as false can have only two alternatives. The first is to desist both from efforts to tell the truth and from efforts to deceive. This would mean refraining from making any assertion whatever about the facts. The second alternative is to continue making assertions that purport to describe the way things are, but that cannot be anything except bullshit.²

Those who tell the actual, literal histories of "fake news" and science denial in the US tend to focus on several significant issues, but the connection between the use of tobacco and lung cancer is a significant example we will address to demonstarte this point.

In 1951, two British physicians, Richard Doll and A. Bradford Hill, sent out a "simple questionary" to "all members of the medical profession in the United Kingdom" asking them to qualify themselves as current smokers of tobacco; former smokers. but who had discontinued smoking; or had never "smoked regularly (which we defined as having never smoked as much as one cigarette a day, or its equivalent in pipe tobacco or cigars, for as long as one year)." They then followed the 41,024 (34,494 male & 6,207 female) physicians for four years and five months, quietly compiling morbidity & mortality statistics, measured in "years of exposure" ("obtained by taking the average of the numbers of survivors at the beginning and at the end of each year and summing for the four years and five months of the study").

A total of 1,748 study subjects died during the four years of the study - all males - and their causes of death are likewise detailed.³

Before we begin to address the issues related to the tobacco industry's response to this devastating data - and the subsequent flood of research and similar data findings provoked by Doll & Hill's research findings, culminating in the US Surgeon Generals 1964 release of the landmark report, Smoking And Health: Report Of The Advisory Committee To The Surgeon General Of The Public Health Service (a pdf file), Doll & Hill appeared quite astute in addressing, preemptively, if not predictably, issues they believed were already arising. Firstly, they addressed the issue that "has been suggested," such that " smoking does not produce cancer in a person in whom cancer would not otherwise have occurred at all, but merely determines the primary site of a growth that is destined to appear in some part of the body." ⁴ This was simple enough to remedy by the fact that

In the smoking grades the total cancer rates are almost the same in the 1-14 g. and 15-24 g. groups-namely, 2.48 and 2.42-but the substantial rise in lung cancer in the heavy smoking group (1.66) is certainly not balanced by any fall in cancer of other sites. The total incidence of 4.25 per 1,000 is significantly higher than that of the other two groups of smokers and of the non-smokers. In short, our data, both retrospective and prospective, indicates total incidence of cancer in the smoking groups in excess of the incidence that would have prevailed in the absence of smoking.

Secondly, the authors addressed the idea that, because smoking is more prevalent in urban areas than in the country, the combination of smoking and pollutants - "atmospheric/environmental" conditions - in London could explain the higher mortality rates from smoking between urban & coutry settings: "An analysis of a random sample of the questionaries shows that there was remarkably little difference between the smoking habits of doctors resident, at November 1, 1951, in Greater London, in large towns, or in other districts." ⁵ And finally they conclude,

From our retrospective studies of the smoking habits of nearly 1,500 patients with lung cancer and over 3,000 patients with other illnesses we concluded that if large groups of persons of different smoking habits were observed for a number of years they would reveal distinct differences in their rates of mortality from lung cancer. They would show, we believed, (1) a higher mortality in smokers than in non-smokers, (2) a higher mortality in heavy smokers than in light smokers, (3) a higher mortality in cigarette smokers than in pipe smokers, and (4) a higher mortality in those who continued to smoke than in those who gave it up. In each case the expected result has appeared in the prospective inquiry here reported.⁶

In the second part of this discussion, we will focus on the tobacco industry's development of a public relations "playbook response" that we see both operative and successful to this day in managing the worst of percieved "crises," regardless of the field in which it occurs, or the topic it addresses.

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

² Frankfurt, Harry, G. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ & Oxford, UK. 2005, p.31.

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

⁴Ibid. p.1077.

⁵Ibid., p.1078.

⁶Ibid., p. 1081.