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The Tobacco Industry Research Committee (later renamed the Council for Tobacco Research) was a research group that tobacco companies created to spread doubt about the health impacts of cigarette smoking from the late 1950s until the 1990s.
Tobacco Industry Research Committee Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by Tobacco Industry Research Committee or refer to Tobacco Industry Research Committee. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1
Quotes
Over the next half century, the industry did what Hill and Knowlton advised. They created the “Tobacco Industry Research Committee” to challenge the mounting scientific evidence of the harms of tobacco. They funded alternative research to cast doubt on the tobacco-cancer link. They conducted polls to gauge public opinion and used the results to guide campaigns to sway it. They distributed pamphlets and booklets to doctors, the media, policy makers, and the general public insisting there was no cause for alarm.
The industry’s position was that there was “no proof” that tobacco was bad, and they fostered that position by manufacturing a “debate,” convincing the mass media that responsible journalists had an obligation to present “both sides” of it.
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Tobacco Industry Research Committee Term Timeline in Merchants of Doubt
The timeline below shows where the term Tobacco Industry Research Committee appears in Merchants of Doubt. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...positive messages about cigarettes, and fund their own research. They founded the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, which declared that the evidence linking cigarettes to cancer wasn’t yet conclusive. They also met...
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...definitively proven the link between cigarettes and cancer—and the tobacco executives knew it. But the Committee confused the media by flooding it with information and funding research into questions that were...
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The Committee also sent out thousands of pamphlets full of loaded questions about cancer. For instance, the...
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Next, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee started funding researchers, medical students, and national medical associations. It got so close to the...
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...to the growing controversy, rather than admitting the dangers of cigarettes, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee simply rebranded itself as the “Council for Tobacco Research” and started funding even more research....
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