"The new McCarthyism. "
No, just the old tobacco liars with new name badges. Maybe you approved of them?
Tobacco Master Settlement
Agreementhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agreement
November 3, 2014 Issue
A New Documentary Profiles Liars for Hire
Today’s corporations have taken a page from the tobacco industry, fooling the public and undermining science in order to boost profits, no matter the human cost.
By Eric Alterman
A new documentary shown twice at the festival, and scheduled to be released in March, got my attention. Merchants of Doubt is directed by Robert Kenner and based on the 2010 book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, two esteemed historians of science. The film, simultaneously entertaining, instructive and extremely important, traces the techniques through which profit-seeking corporations seek to undermine honest science in the public mind so that they might continue to make money poisoning our bodies and destroying our planet.
The argument can be condensed to one simple idea: the tactics perfected by the tobacco industry, which were designed to obfuscate the cancer-causing nature of its products back in the 1950s and ’60s, are now widespread throughout corporate America. When an internal Brown & Williamson memo declared decades ago, “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public,” it created the template for countless oil, coal, chemical, agricultural, tobacco and manufacturing companies, as well as the front groups they fund and, more than occasionally, invent. By paying off members of Congress and exploiting the structural vulnerabilities of “objective” journalism, these companies have been able to fool the public and enrich themselves through a kind of slow-motion “murder for hire” operation
thenation.com |
