The term disinformation is most commonly associated with the internet and social media posters spreading conspiracy theories, but when you really think about it, disinformation is actually just lying at an industrial scale. 

While various authoritarian governments have used lying and propaganda forever, the history is crystal-clear: In the United States, the modern-day tactics of lying to the masses were invented in the mid-20th century by huge tobacco companies desperate to stave off federal regulation of their disease-causing products.

This is a history worth exploring because all of the disinformation techniques that Big Tobacco used have been subsequently adopted by fossil fuel companies to fight public accountability and then further adopted by Donald Trump into a political marketing program that is essentially a personality cult. 

Joining me in this episode to talk about the history of disinformation and the tobacco industry is Matthew Rozsa, he is a climate change journalist at Salon.com who’s written about Big Tobacco and propaganda and how its deceptive techniques were later adopted to oppose climate change mitigation policies.


GUEST INFO
Matthew Roza's Salon archive:
https://www.salon.com/writer/matthew_...

On Twitter:
  / matthewrozsa  

"How Big Tobacco used bad science to avoid accountability — and set the blueprint for Big Oil"
https://www.salon.com/2021/12/04/how-...

"Climate change denial hit its stride in the Bush-Cheney era, precipitating today's climate disaster"
https://www.salon.com/2023/06/19/clim...


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