San Jose State University biology professor J. Gordon Edwards, irked by negative publicity about the hazards of chemicals in foods, swallowed a spoonful of the pesticide DDT on television to demonstrate the widely used chemical’s purported safety. Spartan Daily (San Jose State University), vol. 67, no. 2, Sept. 3, 1976. Via Wikimedia Commons.
To this day, many in the United States recall the 1950s as the height of the era of “better living through chemistry.”[1] But it was also the moment when much of the public started to worry, in earnest, about whether the growing number of synthetic chemicals in food, water, air, and the earth were doing more harm than good. That meant it was also a time when the chemical industry honed a set of tactics to defend their bottom lines: denying unfavorable evidence about the risks associated with their products, distracting public attention away from such evidence, and producing their own countervailing evidence. Eventually, these strategies evolved to incorporate deliberate deceit of the public—taking the American public down a path toward the rampant disinformation strategies still used to undermine science today.[2]
Undermining science was not necessarily what the chemical industry had in mind back in 1950. That year, House Democrat James J. Delaney invited scientists from universities, hospitals, food companies, and agriculture companies to testify in federal hearings about the use and toxicity of the bountiful new postwar chemicals. Many of these chemicals were increasingly turning up in the food supply, and some were there very deliberately. In response to shortages during the Second World War, new chemicals had been introduced into every stage of food production, from fertilizing soil for crops to keeping bread soft as it sat on grocery-store shelves. But some, including new chemicals used in pesticides and food packaging, were never meant to be consumed, which had some scientists raising alarms.
At first, neither the news media nor the chemical and food companies paid much attention to the hearings. In fact, Delaney’s initial invitations to corporate representatives were often declined. But as the hearings continued over three years, university and hospital scientists shared increasingly worrisome tales of deadly chemicals, such as the well-known pesticide DDT building up in bodies and potentially contributing to then-current epidemics, such as the mysterious Virus X disease and cancer. Delaney’s committee peppered the companies’ representatives with questions. Alarmed, the committee began drafting legislation to protect the public. Before any such legislation moved forward, however, newspaper editorials started to warn that if chemicals in food were regulated, jobs would disappear and food prices would jump, all unnecessarily. “Foods themselves are chemicals,” one editorial noted, “The salt and sugar grandma used in home canning are home chemicals.”[3]
When a congressional committee launched an investigation into the safety of chemicals in foods in 1950, executives of the nation’s biggest chemical producers began strategizing about how to “balance” the testimony of “institutional and government scientists.” Via toxicdocs.org.
Behind the new messages in the media was a public relations firm hired by the Manufacturing Chemists’ Association (MCA), an organization of top executives from the nation’s biggest chemical makers, including Dow, DuPont, and Monsanto. Troubled by the hearings, the MCA had hired a Manhattan public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, whose principal, John Hill, sat in on their meetings to help devise a plan to protect the reputation of synthetic chemicals. The plan involved cultivating relationships with journalists, bombarding them with select facts about chemicals, and securing plentiful prime airtime on radio stations across the country for chemical company executives to talk about the necessity and safety of chemicals.[4]
Hill & Knowlton planned to drown out any negative news about chemicals with an opposing point of view that both distracted from and denied scientific claims of harm. Over time, their plan worked spectacularly. By the late 1950s, the use of pesticides, fertilizers, preservatives and other chemicals—not limited to those used in food production—had climbed to new heights. Delaney faced fierce opposition over the better part of a decade as he tried to introduce new regulations to curb the use of chemicals with known hazards. If the public were worried, it didn’t show in consumer product sales, which also steadily climbed.
Strategies such as distraction and denial were so effective that Hill & Knowlton employed and expanded on them for the tobacco industry in the 1960s. After a high-profile report strongly linked smoking to cancer, the industry’s defenders not only denied and distracted from the science, but also insisted that the science wasn’t settled yet, further cultivating public doubt. They also created an organization to conduct its own research on tobacco’s impact on health, sponsored by the tobacco industry itself. After a brief drop in tobacco sales, the industry quickly rebounded and sales even rose, too.[5]
These strategies weren’t what we would call misinformation (innocently mistaken information) or disinformation (intentionally deceptive information) today. But they leaned in that direction. Over the next several decades, the industry playbook expanded to include other tactics, especially those that involved tarnishing the reputation of industry critics and deliberately dissembling scientific findings.
The publication of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, prompted the chemical industry to find new ways to undermine critics of their products in the public sphere. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The MCA started attacking unwelcome messengers in earnest after the publication of William Longgood’s 1960 book The Poisons in Your Food. A journalist by trade, Longgood was easy to discredit as a non-scientist. But two years later, when writer Rachel Carson published Silent Spring on the dangers of pesticides, the industry slightly changed tack. They resolved not to combat her arguments in public but, instead, to quietly influence “those who mold public opinion” and support members of the scientific community who were already criticizing her. In the media firestorm surrounding Carson’s book, influential figures dismissed her as a “communist” and “spinster,” as the MCA paid bundles to broadcast as much negative information about Carson as they could—whether it was true or not.[6]
While the personal attacks on Carson continued, a public crusade to ban one of the chemicals she had written about, DDT, gained momentum at the end of the 1960s. The effort to ban DDT was led by the new Environmental Defense Fund in cooperation with the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, who together succeeded in convincing the EPA to hold hearings about the chemical. The MCA, the National Agricultural Chemicals Association, and their allies—experts in academia and government who believed a DDT ban was misguided—drew on all their practiced defense strategies. They held press conferences, spoke to journalists, and pulled television stunts that included eating DDT by the spoonful on camera. They dismissed the activists as “bird-watchers”—that is, hobbyists with no scientific credentials. Because worldwide DDT was mostly used to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes, they circulated the argument that a DDT ban amounted to Third World “genocide” supported by self-centered elites in the United States.[7]
DDT was banned nonetheless, as were several other pesticides with similar chemical characteristics, by the latter 1970s. However, as with food chemicals and tobacco, pesticide use also rose by the end of that decade. The 1970s nonetheless came to be known as the era of bans, and they were followed by a hard anti-regulatory push in the 1980s, led by industry trade groups and conservative think tanks. Industry and free-market defenders coined the term “junk science” to discredit any scientific evidence claiming harm from chemical exposures—including research on the hazards of Agent Orange, asbestos, and lead.[8]
The “junk science” label was just the outward manifestation of yet another form of deception taking place during decades of distraction, denial, doubt, and personal damage. In the 1990s, it became clear that industry executives, scientists, and their allies had also long actively and deliberately deceived the public. Two examples are, by now, well known. Tobacco industry executives stated that the industry had no evidence that tobacco was addictive, when in fact they did. Similarly, fossil fuel industry flacks asserted that climate scientists were divided over fossil fuels’ contribution to global warming, when in fact broad scientific consensus had already linked the two. By then, both forms of deception had been going on for decades.[9]
At the end of the 1990s, these industry tactics took yet another twist. News stories and on-air journalists began reporting that DDT’s ban was a mistake based on errors in Carson’s Silent Spring, and that the ban had led to the death of millions of children in malarious countries around the world. The news stories traced back not to the chemical industry, but to a campaign financed by the tobacco industry.[10] Big Tobacco was facing growing regulations; the story about Carson and DDT was a convenient way to undermine public support for regulation generally, without raising any suspicion that tobacco was behind the effort.
The layers to this form of deception pointed to something new in industry’s objectives.[11] In the 1950s, MCA’s public relations team was protecting a market; by the 2000s, tobacco’s public relations campaign was spreading an ideology to protect markets generally. Contemporary discourse on disinformation, which has a history much longer and broader than that sketched here, often emphasizes its political aims. This modern history of environmental disinformation, however, is an example of commercial aims shading into ideological ones, an example of how disinformation’s peddlers realized that to sell products, they needed to sell a set of political beliefs—all while making it seem like they were just explaining science more clearly to the public.
That objective—protecting profits by shaping ideology—fuels the environmental and scientific disinformation that metastasizes across social and news media today, at a speed and volume previously unimaginable. Contemporary disinformation campaigns employ the same tactics that have worked for the better part of a century, albeit now with new tools, like AI. But ultimately, the campaigns have the same old aims: power through control of what the public thinks and deliberately confusing what the public knows. And they work because decades of conditioning the public to doubt and distrust science have created optimal conditions for disinformation to grow.
Elena Conis is a professor in the School of Journalism and Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT and Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization.
[1] See for example, Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (2013); Jody A. Roberts and Nancy Langston, “Toxic Bodies/Toxic Environments: An Interdisciplinary Forum,” Environmental History, 13 (2008), 629–35; Michelle Mart, Pesticides, A Love Story: America’s Enduring Embrace of Dangerous Chemicals (2018); and Sarah A. Vogel, Is It Safe? BPA and the Struggle to Define the Safety of Chemicals (2013).
[2] Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (2011); David Michaels, Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health (2008); David Michaels and Celeste Monforton, “Manufacturing Uncertainty: Contested Science and the Protection of the Public’s Health and Environment,” American Journal of Public Health, 95 (July 1, 2005), S39–48.
[3] Elena Conis, How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT (2022), 100.
[4] Merlin Chowkwanyun, Gerald Markowitz, and David Rosner, “Toxic Docs: Version 1.0,” (2018), http://www.toxicdocs.org.
[5] Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (2007).
[6] Conis, How to Sell a Poison. See also Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (2009); Mark Hamilton Lytle, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement (2007); and Maril Hazlitt, “Voices from the Spring: Silent Spring and the Ecological Turn in American Health,” in Seeing Nature Through Gender, ed. Virginia J. Scharff (2003), 103–28.
[7] Conis, How to Sell a Poison.
[8] Christian Warren, Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning (2000); Edwin A. Martini, Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty (2012); Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children (2014); Jessica van Horssen, A Town Called Asbestos: Environmental Contamination, Health, and Resilience in a Resource Community (2016).
[9] David Michaels, The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception (2020).
[10] Elena Conis, “How the Battle over a Pesticide Led to Scientific Skepticism,” Wired, April 12, 2022, https://www.wired.com/story/ddt-battle-scientific-skepticism/.
[11] Ibid.
