Rare is the CEO today who, in the face of public concern about a potentially dangerous product, says, “Let’s hire the best scientists to figure out if the problem is real and then, if it is, stop making this stuff.”
In fact, evidence from decades of corporate crisis behavior suggests exactly the opposite. As an epidemiologist and the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health under President Obama, I have seen this behavior firsthand. The instinct for corporations is to take the low road: deny the allegations, defend the product at all costs, and attack the science underpinning the concerns. Of course, corporate leaders and anti-regulation ideologues will never say they value profits before the health of their employees or the safety of the public, or that they care less about our water and air than environmentalists do. But their actions belie their rhetoric.
Decision makers atop today’s corporate structures are responsible for delivering short- and long-term financial returns, and in the pursuit of these goals they place profits and growth above all else. Avoidance of financial loss, to many corporate executives, is an alibi for just about any ugly decision. This is not to say that decisions at the highest level are black-and-white or simple; they are dictated by factors such as the cost of possible government regulation and potential loss of market share to less hazardous products. And, of course, companies are afraid of being sued by people sickened by their products, which costs money and can result in serious damage to the brand. All of this is part of the corporate calculus.
Unfortunately, though, this story is old news: most people, especially Americans, have come to expect corporations to put profit above all else. Still, we mostly don’t expect there to be mercenary
scientists. Science is supposed to be constant, apolitical, and above the fray. This commonsense view misses the rise of science-for-sale specialists over the last several decades and a “product defense industry” that sustains them—a cabal of apparent experts, PR flaks, and political lobbyists who use bad science to produce whatever results their sponsors want.
There are a handful of go-to firms in this booming field. Consider, as a silly but representative example, the “Deflategate” controversy in the National Football League (NFL)—the allegations that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady directed that footballs be deflated during a 2014 championship game. As part of the ensuing investigation, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell hired an attorney who in turn hired Exponent, one of the nation’s best-known and most successful product defense firms.
These operations have on their payrolls—or can bring in on a moment’s notice—toxicologists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, risk assessors, and any other professionally trained, media-savvy experts deemed necessary (economists too, especially for inflating the costs and deflating the benefits of proposed regulation, as well as for antitrust issues). Much of their work involves production of scientific materials that purport to show that a product a corporation makes or uses or even discharges as air or water pollution is just not very dangerous. These useful “experts” produce impressive-looking reports and publish the results of their studies in peer-reviewed scientific journals (reviewed, of course, by peers of the hired guns writing the articles). Simply put, the product defense machine cooks the books, and if the first recipe doesn’t pan out with the desired results, they commission a new effort and try again.
I describe this corporate strategy as “manufacturing doubt” or “manufacturing uncertainty.” In just about every corner of the corporate world, conclusions that might support regulation are always disputed. Studies in animals will be deemed irrelevant, human data are dismissed as not representative, and exposure data are discredited as unreliable. Always, there’s too much doubt about the evidence, and not enough proof of harm, or not enough proof of
enough harm.
This ploy is public relations disguised as science. Companies’ PR experts provide these scientists with contrarian sound bites that play well with reporters mired in the trap of believing there must be two sides to every story equally worthy of fair-minded consideration. The scientists are deployed to influence regulatory agencies that might be trying to protect the public, or to defend against lawsuits by people who believe they were hurt by the product in question. Corporations and their hired guns market their studies and reports as “sound science,” but in reality they merely
sound like science. Such bought-and-paid-for corporate research is sanctified, while any academic research that might threaten corporate interests is vilified.
Individual companies and entire industries have been playing and fine-tuning this strategy for decades, disingenuously demanding proof over precaution in matters of public good. For industry, there is no better way to stymie government efforts to regulate a product that harms the public or the environment; debating the science is much easier and more effective than debating the policy. In earlier decades—as documented in detail by a great deal of scholarship, including Naomi Oreskes’s and Erik Conway’s
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (2010) and my earlier book
Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health (2008)—we have seen this play out with tobacco, secondhand smoke, asbestos, industrial pollution, and a host of chemicals and products. These industries’ strategy of denial is still alive and well today. Nor is this practice of hiring experts and hiding data about harms limited to health concerns and the environment. Beyond toxic chemicals, we see it with toxic
information as well. (Consider the corporate misbehaviors of Facebook.)
This is not to assert that the conclusions of every study or report produced by product defense experts are necessarily wrong; it certainly is legitimate for scientists to work to prove one hypothesis in the cause of disproving another. One means by which science moves toward the real truth is by challenging and disproving supposed truth and received wisdom. Maybe there are two sides to every story—but maybe not two
valid sides, and definitely not when one has been purchased at a high price, and produced by firms whose financial success rests on delivering the studies and reports that support whatever conclusion their corporate clients need.
The strategy of manufacturing doubt has worked wonders, in particular, as a public relations tool in the current debate over the use of scientific evidence in public policy. In the long run, product defense campaigns rarely hold up; some don’t pass the laugh test to begin with. But the main motivation all along has been only to sow confusion and buy time, sometimes lots of time, allowing entire industries to thrive or individual companies to maintain market share while developing a new product. Doubt can delay or obstruct public health or environmental protections, or just convince some jurors that the science isn’t strong enough to label a product as responsible for terrible illnesses.
Eventually, as the serious scientific studies get stronger and more definitive, and as the corporate studies are revealed as unconvincing or simply wrong (then generally forgotten, with the authors paying no penalty for their prevarications), the manufacturers give up and acknowledge the harm done by their products. Then they submit to stronger regulation, sometimes even costing themselves more money than they would have paid in the first place. But they can do the math: they have also been
making a lot of money for all those years. Their wealth compounds. And as for the people who have been sickened or worse in the interim? Or the despoiled environment? Well, those are unfortunate. Sorry. (...)
It is not an exaggeration to say that in the product defense model, the investigator starts with an answer, then figures out the best way to support it. As often as not, the product defense investigator starts with someone else’s answer, then reviews the evidence or subjects an important study to a post-hoc “re-analysis” that magically produces the sponsor’s preferred conclusions—that the risk is not that high, the harm not that bad, or the data fatally flawed (or maybe all of these at once). These are the studies that are flogged to regulatory agencies or in litigation.
Recognizing these firms’ methods can be tremendously valuable in trying to frame public discourse in today’s toxic political environment. What follows is a kind of disinformation playbook: a field guide to the way science gets sold.
by David Michaels, Boston Review |
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