摘要：We examined the tobacco industry’s rhetoric to frame personal responsibility arguments. The industry rarely uses the phrase “personal responsibility” explicitly, but rather “freedom of choice.” When freedom of choice is used in the context of litigation, the industry means that those who choose to smoke are solely to blame for their injuries. When used in the industry’s public relations messages, it grounds its meaning in the concept of liberty and the right to smoke. The courtroom “blame rhetoric” has influenced the industry’s larger public relations message to shift responsibility away from the tobacco companies and onto their customers. Understanding the rhetoric and framing that the industry employs is essential to combating this tactic, and we apply this comprehension to other industries that act as disease vectors. Throughout the history of tobacco control, as concerns over health have prompted public calls for reform, the tobacco industry has attempted to combat criticism and influence public health debates through the use of rhetorical techniques that deflect attention from corporate responsibility. 1,2 The tobacco industry’s use of personal responsibility frames, or arguments, to protect its business interests against litigation 3 (p870–873), 4 (p820), 5–8 and regulation and tobacco control measures 9,10 (p197–198), 11–14 (p406) has been widely recognized. Although previous studies have enumerated and described many of the key frames employed by the tobacco industry and its allies, there is still important work to be done in more rigorously analyzing the relationships between the content of this rhetoric and its origin in either the legal or public relations (PR) context. Such an analysis helps illuminate the importance of subtle variations in the deployment of similar language to convey diverse meanings that can sway public opinion and regulators’ actions. 15 This study also can inform efforts aimed at other industries that produce products that have a negative impact on public health, such as sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) and junk food, all of which employ techniques the tobacco industry originated and perfected. 16 Framing refers to the use of key concepts familiar to the listener that help guide the understanding of an issue. 17 In particular, frames structure for the audience the cause of social problems and prescribe which actors should and should not act to address them. 18 Powerful default frames such as personal responsibility indicate that those who suffer the consequences of consuming certain risky products, such as smokers, are to blame for their injuries and that it is not the role of social institutions such as the government to intervene and protect them. 19 Analyzing which frames are present—and absent—in public discourse such as the news is especially valuable as these frames influence policymakers by helping set the agenda for public debates, and signaling which issues are salient and which others are less urgent. 20,21 The trajectory of the tobacco industry’s use of personal responsibility framing and argumentation began in 1954, when the major US tobacco companies reacted to the release of scientific studies linking smoking and cancer by hiring a PR firm to craft an advertisement called “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers,” which claimed the industry “accept[ed] an interest in people’s health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business.” 9 The industry’s purposely ineffectual efforts to address the dangers of smoking amounted to little more than whitewash and PR rhetoric, with a major emphasis on obfuscation and delay in verifying whether its products were deadly, along with an effort to maintain this as an “open scientific controversy.” In 1964, US Surgeon General Luther Terry released a landmark report that analyzed and evaluated the existing scientific research, concluding that smoking causes disease and death. 22 Closely following was the passage of the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act (FCLAA) in 1965, which required warning labels on cigarette packages (mandatory warnings for cigarette advertising were later added in 1969) with the tepid and equivocal verbiage “Caution: Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous To Your Health.” 2,23 At that time the emphasis by the public and regulators was largely on governmental accountability for addressing the problems cigarette smoking caused, while the tobacco industry escaped most culpability and accountability, even weathering the imposition of mandatory warning labels by turning it to its advantage as another way of assigning blame to smokers for their illnesses. 24 In 1986, Congress passed the Comprehensive Smoking Education Act, which required rotating warning labels that were phrased unequivocally linking smoking with particular diseases. 25 In the 1970s, after warning labels were imposed and both governmental agencies and voluntary health organizations had committed massive resources to educating the public about the dangers of smoking, responsibility for avoiding smoking-related illness was generally viewed as a matter of individual responsibility. 12 Tipping the scales further in that direction was a growing sentiment in US society that escalating health care costs could only be contained if individuals changed their unhealthy behavior. 26 Pushing back against these forces was the effort by public health advocates to highlight the dangers of secondhand smoke, with the result that “the hazards of smoking were relocated from the individual’s risky behavior to that of his or her smoking neighbor, [and] exposure was no longer a matter of choice but was involuntary victimization.” 12 (p339) Thus, the onus shifted once more toward government regulation to ban public smoking, with a concomitant call for businesses to ban smoking in their premises in the absence of governmental action. Up to this point, the tobacco industry had largely escaped accountability by either the public or government despite wide recognition and acceptance of cigarettes’ causal responsibility for disease and death. 24 The tobacco industry’s use of explicit personal responsibility rhetoric reached its height in the 1980s, during a wave of consumer litigation in which the tobacco defendants countered injured smokers’ lawsuits with claims that ultimately the responsibility for the consequences of smoking cigarettes belonged to the smoker who voluntarily consumed them. 27 As the 1990s began, particularly negative pressure was brought to bear on the industry when whistleblowers began leaking internal corporate documents that showed a clear conspiracy to produce an addictive product while ignoring the health hazards of which the tobacco companies were well aware, thus confirming corporate responsibility for the harm the industry’s products caused. 9,28,29 As a result of the document leaks and in the face of increasing public demand for industry accountability, many of the industry’s usual allies in business and government began to abandon its cause. This led to a flood of litigation against the industry. Cases brought by state attorneys general seeking Medicaid reimbursement for smoking-related illnesses culminated in the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement. 29,30 In the late 1990s and into the 2000s, several juries found in favor of injured smokers in private litigation, with damages being awarded in the millions and even billions of dollars. 31 These types of cases continue to be litigated, primarily in Florida, where a jury in a class action found the tobacco industry liable, setting the stage for thousands of individual claims. 32,33 Despite continuing to use personal responsibility arguments in smokers’ litigation, 34 currently the tobacco defendants are losing about two thirds of the Florida cases, with the juries apportioning responsibility between the plaintiff and the defendant in each case. 35 Adding to existing scholarship, we sought a deeper understanding of the tobacco industry’s framing, rhetoric, and tactics, and their application, based on both content and legal analyses. Our first study examined the early debate about tobacco and the initial scientific revelations that it was harmful (from 1952 to 1965) and found an unexpected lack of personal responsibility rhetoric by any of the speakers but rather an emphasis on the government’s responsibility to address the issue, which culminated in the passage of the FCLAA. 24 Our next study focused on determining when the debate shifted and the tobacco industry began explicitly referring to smokers’ individual personal responsibility, which we found began in the 1970s and gained prominence in the late 1980s, during what has been called the “second wave” of tobacco litigation. 27 In our study, we examined the specific rhetoric used by the tobacco industry to frame personal responsibility arguments in both the media and the courtroom, and analyzed how the 2 influenced each other. This study’s findings have application not only for tobacco control advocates, but also for others focusing on public health issues arising from the consumption of numerous other products that cause avoidable noncommunicable disease and death, such as obesogenic food and beverages, 16,36 alcohol, 37 electronic gambling machines, 38 and firearms, 39 because those industries are now replicating and refining successful tobacco industry tactics and rhetoric. Comprehension of the evolution and cross-pollination of corporate litigation and communications strategy and a focus on corporate malfeasance and deceit will furnish public health advocates with ammunition for developing countermarketing strategies to denormalize health-compromising products and the industries that produce them. 40–42
