The Committee’s loaded questions appeared to raise doubts about the link between cigarettes and cancer, but only because they seriously mischaracterized the existing research and distorted basic logical principles. The claim that cigarettes are safe because they don’t give
every smoker cancer is illogical: common sense dictates that something can be harmful without harming
everyone who comes into contact with it. So is the claim that, if cigarettes cause cancer, then different cities can’t have the same smoking rate but different lung cancer rates. No scientist seriously thought that cigarettes were the
only cause of lung cancer. Ultimately, Oreskes and Conway argue that the media wrongly applied a
political concept of “balance” (covering two legitimate, competing sides) to
science (in which scientific consensus is legitimate, and baseless claims that go contrary to it are not).