The Origins of Personal Responsibility Rhetoric in News Coverage of the Tobacco Industry

Abstract

The tobacco industry consistently frames smoking as a personal issue rather than the responsibility of cigarette companies. To identify when personal responsibility framing became a major element of the tobacco industry’s discourse, we analyzed news coverage from 1966 to 1991. Industry representatives began to regularly use these arguments in 1977. By the mid 1980s, this frame dominated the industry’s public arguments. This chronology illustrates that the tobacco industry’s use of personal responsibility rhetoric in public preceded the ascension of personal responsibility rhetoric commonly associated with the Reagan Administration in the 1980s.

The notion of personal responsibility is a dominant frame within contemporary political discourse sometimes used to thwart government action on public health issues.^1,2 Framing refers to how an issue is portrayed and understood: frames “promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation.”^1(p52) The personal responsibility frame references any argument that advances this concept or discourages alternatives.¹

The tobacco industry has deftly used this rhetoric and the related notion of choice to oppose regulation. The industry claims that smoking should be the “free choice” of adult consumers, putting the onus on those who smoke as solely responsible for any health consequences rather than the companies producing or marketing toxic (and deadly) products.^2–7

Because personal responsibility framing dominates current debates, it is tempting to believe that it has always been a prominent feature of US political discourse and debate about tobacco policy. To better understand its roots, we first studied tobacco industry arguments about responsibility in the news from the early 1950s through 1965,⁸ when the health hazards of smoking initially stoked national attention and Congress first considered cigarette labeling regulations.^5,7 To our surprise, the tobacco industry rarely raised personal responsibility in news coverage then, instead denying that its products harmed health.⁸

We next searched for personal responsibility rhetoric in internal tobacco industry documents dating from 1966 onward, which showed the industry’s inner strategizing and the motivation for its public actions. We found that in the mid 1960s, when Congress was considering federal cigarette labeling regulations, the industry began using legal concepts such as “assumption of the risk” and “common knowledge” in its public relations tactics to defend itself to regulators and the public. Not until the late 1970s and the second wave of litigation throughout the 1980s, culminating in the Cipollone trial,⁹ did explicit personal responsibility arguments become a cornerstone of the industry’s courtroom strategy to blame the plaintiff and its wider public relations communication strategy.¹⁰ Industry executives used arguments evoking smokers’ right to choose as a litigation defense strategy throughout the 1990s and 2000s.⁶

There remains the question of when the tobacco industry first began to use personal responsibility framing in the news between 1966, after the passage of the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act (FCLAA), and the Cipollone case in the 1980s, when it was a firmly established legal strategy. News coverage is important because it sets the agenda for policymakers and the public about which issues to address^11–14 and influences both what they consider the causes of problems and whom they view as responsible for solving them.¹⁵ Understanding the tobacco industry’s use of personal responsibility and choice rhetoric in the news is critical because of its history of trying to manipulate the news to distort scientific evidence about tobacco and to oppose measures to protect the public’s health.^16–18

METHODS

Three trained coders (P.M., A.C., and Priscilla Gonzalez) searched for news coverage of tobacco industry responsibility rhetoric from 1966 to 1991. By 1991, with the Cipollone case well under way and the close of the second wave of product liability legislation, the tobacco industry’s personal responsibility arguments were a major public element of its litigation defense strategy.¹⁹

Sample Selection

The coders searched the ProQuest Historical Newspaper database 1966 to 1991 archives of newspapers covering key markets from around the United States that had the most complete archival records: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. Complete full-text records from 1988 to 1991 were unavailable anywhere for the latter 2 newspapers, so our final sample did not include articles from these newspapers for this 4-year period.

We collected all articles referencing the “Tobacco Institute,” the public face of the industry during this time,²⁰ along with any of the following terms: freedom, choice, adult, informed, choose, or responsibility. We excluded duplicates and articles without substantive discussion of responsibility. For example, we excluded articles that included the word “responsibility” but that lacked arguments about the Tobacco Institute’s positions on tobacco policymaking, such as articles listing the job responsibilities of Tobacco Institute employees.

Coding

The coders used an iterative method²¹ of reading a subsample of articles, coding them for responsibility frames, assessing intercoder reliability, and adjusting the coding instrument. We wanted to understand all possible evocations of responsibility used by the industry, including explicit statements about personal responsibility. The coders also captured other arguments; here we discuss only the findings relating to personal responsibility. We used Krippendorff α to establish intercoder reliability, achieving an acceptable level of reliability on all coding variables (α > .8).²²

RESULTS

We found 793 news articles published between 1966 and 1991 that included arguments from the Tobacco Institute about responsibility. Of those, 210 (26%) contained personal responsibility frames.

Articles framing smoking or smoking-related illnesses in the context of personal responsibility first appeared in news coverage in 1977. The number of articles rose in the late 1980s with coverage of the Cipollone trial (Figure 1); one sixth (17%) of the articles addressing personal responsibility appeared in 1988, the year the verdict was announced.

FIGURE 1—

Articles (n = 210) with tobacco industry use of personal responsibility frames in major US daily newspapers: 1966–1991.

Many of the tobacco industry’s earliest invocations of personal responsibility combined individual rights and the freedom to choose. The industry insisted that concerns about secondhand smoke, for instance, were “best resolved by individuals exercising common sense.”²³ The industry evoked freedom throughout this period, critiquing a proposal in Fairfax County, Virginia, mandating nonsmoking sections in restaurants with the argument, “This should be a matter of freedom of choice.”²⁴

The other major personal responsibility frame used by the tobacco industry during this period emphasized that smokers made the choice to smoke and thus were responsible for the consequences. This argument often referenced FCLAA’s on-package health warnings as providing smokers with an informed choice. As early as 1978, the Tobacco Institute argued that

The decision to smoke or not to smoke is a personal decision. Anyone who has not heard or read the surgeon general’s warnings would have had to be a cave dweller … you can’t legislate personal behavior.²⁵

In the 1980s, amid the second wave of product litigation (during which the industry focused on the plaintiff’s personal responsibility instead of merely denying causation), news coverage featured arguments reflecting industry officials’ courtroom position that smokers were to blame for any health harms. One industry analyst asked, for example, “When you’ve got on the label for 20 years that cigarettes can kill you, how can you sue?”²⁶

News coverage of the Cipollone trial highlighted tobacco industry defense attorneys arguing that the industry had adequately warned customers about the health risks of smoking,²⁷ and that Mrs. Cipollone was “frequently warned by her husband and family and by her reading”²⁸ and

when someone is bright, well-read, and independent like Rose Cipollone was, and believes smoking causes lung cancer, as Rose Cipollone did, but enjoys smoking, that is her choice to make, and we shouldn’t second guess her.²⁹

This framing of smoking as a consumer choice ignores tobacco addiction, implying that a consumer is capable of a truly free choice—and consequently, that smokers like Mrs. Cipollone, not the industry, are responsible for the health consequences.

DISCUSSION

The tobacco industry has parlayed the powerful American notion of personal responsibility³⁰ to frame tobacco problems as a matter for individuals to solve.^5,7,31 Not until the late 1980s, after it had fully exercised its courtroom strategy, did the tobacco industry frame smoking primarily as a “choice” in news coverage, implying the consumer’s accountability.

Previously, we found that personal responsibility framing was not prominent in the national debate over cigarettes and health from 1952 to 1965.⁸ After FCLAA, however, the tobacco industry could claim that consumers were now informed of risks, so anyone who still smoked should be held responsible, a successful courtroom strategy that allowed the tobacco industry to prevail in litigation throughout the end of the Cipollone case.

This study identified the genesis of what has become a pillar of the tobacco industry’s strategy to deflect regulation and derail litigation.^5,7,31 The emergence of the industry’s public use of personal responsibility rhetoric in the late 1970s illustrates that its tactics preceded the ascension of personal responsibility rhetoric commonly associated with the “Reagan revolution” in the 1980s. Indeed, the industry used the personal responsibility frame regularly throughout most of Reagan’s presidency, most intensely during the Cipollone trial. This chronology also supports research documenting decades-long support from the industry in fomenting the rhetorical origins of the conservative movement that became the Tea Party in the late 2000s.³²

Our analysis likely underestimated tobacco industry use of personal responsibility rhetoric in the news during this period because of missing years of archived newspapers and because we captured only arguments made by Tobacco Institute representatives in major national newspapers. Additionally, we investigated the tobacco industry’s initial use of personal responsibility rhetoric and its evolution only until 1991, although research has shown that the industry continued to use this strategy in other forums during subsequent litigation.⁶

Future research could explore the industry’s rhetorical tactics in the news after 1991 as the industry faced growing pressure brought by state attorneys general and as personal responsibility rhetoric continued to diffuse throughout other industries’ attempts to preempt potential regulation. Because tactics similar to the tobacco industry “playbook” are being used by industries from fossil fuels³³ to packaged foods and beverages,^31,34 understanding these arguments is a matter of increasing importance for advocates seeking to regulate industry practices and products that may harm the public’s health.³⁵