Industries reframe public harm debates as battles against big government

Evidence

Framing justifications of harmful practices as protection against big government is a recurrent strategy used across diverse industries. For example, as we will see in Chapter 5, the tobacco industry used the same strategy to diffuse public protests against its marketing campaigns that get teenagers hooked on nicotine. With the help of a clever wordsmith, the tobacco industry successfully reframed the public debate from children against big tobacco to tobacco against big government. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 818

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ and the general pattern of moral controversies being reframed as freedom-vs-tyranny struggles; also to Milgrom on how framing shapes institutional perception.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘big government’ as the universal get-out-of-jail card — the rhetorical move industries deploy to convert accountability debates into liberty debates.