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The Frank Statement: How Big Tobacco Built a Fifty-Year Lie
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In 1954, seven tobacco CEOs signed a public pledge they knew was false — and launched the most sophisticated corporate deception in American history. This episode traces the mouse painting studies, the Marlboro Man, and the deliberate manufacturing of doubt.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before nineteen fifty-three, cigarettes were sophisticated. They were aspirational.
In December of nineteen fifty-three, the chief executives of America's major tobacco companies gathered at the Plaza Hotel in New York. They hired the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton, one of the most powerful in the country, and they built a plan.
While the public relations machinery was managing the science, the advertising side was managing the culture. And in nineteen fifty-five, Leo Burnett's agency made one of the most consequential decisions in marketing history.
The Marlboro Man was a specific cultural construction. He was white, Western, and coded for a particular version of American masculinity.
By the late nineteen eighties, the industry had a problem. The adults who knew cigarettes were dangerous were quitting in meaningful numbers.
The crack in the industry's wall opened in nineteen ninety-five. A paralegal named Merrell Williams had worked for Brown and Williamson's law firm in Louisville.
Two years before Wigand's broadcast, something equally consequential had happened on Capitol Hill. Seven tobacco company CEOs appeared before a congressional subcommittee.
In nineteen ninety-eight, forty-six state attorneys general reached a settlement with the four largest tobacco companies. The total figure was two hundred and six billion dollars, paid out over twenty-five years.
The final phase of this story is still unfolding. Tobacco companies now present themselves, with considerable marketing investment, as harm-reduction advocates.
From the mouse painting studies to the Frank Statement, from the Marlboro Man to Joe Camel, from Wigand's testimony to two hundred and six billion dollars in settlement funds, the tobacco story is a fifty-year demonstration of what happens when an industry decides that the gap between what it knows and what it says is a business resource. The science was never the problem.
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