CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Doubt
Is Their Product, Public Health Be Damned
22 Corporate Crime Reporter 20, May 19, 2008
“Doubt is our product,” a cigarette executive said once. “It
is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists
in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing controversy.”
The tobacco industry might have been the best at creating doubt in the public mind.
But the corporate pushers of other deadly products have learned their lessons well.
Asbestos. Vioxx. Beryllium. Diacetyl. Hexavalent chromium.
If you are a corporation that makes a dangerous product, you too need to create doubt in the public mind. To pressure the regulators to back off.
And there are companies that specialize in this. The big public relations firms all do it. For years, it was a specialty at Hill & Knowlton. Then the mercenary scientists realized that they didn’t have to give some big DC based PR firm a cut. They could do it themselves.
And
so, they started setting up their own firms – ChemRisk, Exponents, and
the Weinberg Group – to name three.
The corporate campaign to pervert public health science has cost the nation
unknown thousands of lives and injuries by delaying life-saving regulations.
How they did it is the subject of a new book – Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health (Oxford, 2008).
The author is David Michaels. He’s director of the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy at George Washington University. (defendingscience.org)
“It started with the tobacco industry that funded some of the groups that yelled junk science the loudest,” Michaels told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “And they invented this phrase sound science to create this mythical creature.”
“When I hear them use the phrase sound science, I recognize that they are looking for something that sounds like science but isn’t,” Michaels said. “They are looking for studies that can’t be done because they are absolutely perfect. All studies, especially the studies on humans, have problems. They are rarely perfect.”
In his book, Michaels documents how industry executives have hired unscrupulous scientists and lobbyists to dispute the scientific evidence that would alert the public to dangerous corporate products.
“Their goal is to manufacture doubt,” Michaels says.
[For a complete transcript of the Interview with David Michaels, see 22 Corporate Crime Reporter 20(9-16), print edition only.]
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