Corporate/Government Propaganda: A Tutorial
Robert Malone cites the work of Paul D. Thacker, who describes how powerful entities such as corporations and governments deceive us through propaganda. It was a technique developed by cigarette companies and it has been used ever since, including by COVID grifters. Here's an excerpt:
In December 1953, the CEOs of America’s leading tobacco companies cast aside competitive rancor and gathered at New York City’s Plaza Hotel to confront a menace to their incredibly profitable industry. An emergent body of science published in elite medical journals cast doubt on the safety of cigarettes and threatened to destroy a half-century of corporate success. Joining them at the Plaza was John W. Hill, the president of America’s top public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton. Hill would later prove a decisive savior.
Hill had closely studied Edward Bernays, whose work on propaganda in the 1920s and 1930s laid the foundation of modern public relations and defined common techniques to manipulate popular opinion. Hill understood that any traditional campaign would fail to sway society, which perceived advertising as little more than corporate propaganda. Effective public relations required comprehensive off-stage management of the media. At its best, it left no fingerprints.
Instead of ignoring or denigrating new data that found tobacco dangerous, Hill proposed the opposite: embrace science, trumpet new data, and demand more, not less research. By calling for more research, which they would then fund, tobacco companies could harness academic scientists in a battle to confront a major scientific controversy and amplify skeptical views of the relationship between tobacco and disease. Such a scheme would let companies shroud themselves in doubt and uncertainty—core principles of the scientific process, in which every answer leads to new questions.
Hill & Knowlton’s campaign for the five largest US tobacco companies corrupted science and medicine for decades to follow, laying the foundation for financial conflicts of interest in science, as other industries mimicked tobacco’s techniques to protect their own products from government bans and regulations—later, from consumer lawsuits. While tactics have varied over time, the core strategy has changed little since tobacco wrote the playbook, providing a menu of techniques now employed across industries.
