Manufacturing public doubt about evidence is a deliberate corporate strategy for harm denial

Evidence

For years, the tobacco industry denied the addictive properties of nicotine (Glantz et al., 1996). The strategies took several forms, initially straightforward denial or minimization of adverse health effects. With mounting scientific evidence to the contrary, the strategy turned to sowing doubt and controversy about research findings. This was succinctly expressed by a Brown & Williamson executive in a company speech he gave on smoking and health. “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy” (Anonymous, 1969). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1658

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the shift from outright denial to manufactured controversy as a predictable stage in moral disengagement over damaging products.
• SHARE: For someone tracking corporate denial playbooks—the Brown & Williamson ‘doubt is our product’ line is a canonical smoking-gun quote likely to also appear in work on climate denial strategy.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1658
• XREF: connects to: Corporations manufacture doubt as a deliberate product to block climate action — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 108; The tobacco industry invented science denial as public-relations strategy — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 63