Targeting the trades,press associations,and J-schools: Tobacco industry mapping and shaping of metajournalistic discourses

Metajournalistic discourses and the tobacco industry

In this study, I argue that the scope of research on metajournalistic discourses should be widened to include a broader set of sites and actors than have generally been the focus of previous studies. Research on metajournalistic discourses—or discourses about journalism’s identities, roles, and boundaries—can help us better understand how journalistic practices are shaped by and/or made sensible by cultural discourses inside and outside of journalism (Carlson 2016; Hanitzsch & Vos 2017). The sites that host metajournalistic discourses can be varied—from journalistic publications to political speeches—and can be inhabited by journalists and non-journalists alike (Carlson 2009). Yet few researchers have thus far focused on private corporations as actors outside of their appearance and representation in published journalism. More work should be done to understand how private industry has shaped metajournalistic discourses by infiltrating the journalism-adjacent institutions and venues where it is produced. Though journalism reviews have been included as sites and actors in previous research, the scope of metajournalistic discourse research should be broadened to include professional associations and journalism programs in higher education as important actors and sites. Including non-media institutions, like private corporations, as actors in this research will allow scholars to understand the interlinkages between fields of discourses and types of discursive actors.

Metajournalistic discourses often serve as expressions of journalists’ anxieties about external influences on their work, though they tend to focus on the influence of media corporations rather than corporations outside of media industries. For example, trade publications like Columbia Journalism Review and American Journalism Review published critiques in the early 2000s of efforts for journalism reform that attempted to resituate journalism towards the public interest as infringements upon journalists’ autonomy by corporate media imperatives (Haas & Steiner 2002). However, metajournalistic discourses have emerged in popular media and scholarly work interrogating the influence of the tobacco industry on normative practices and conceptions of journalism. The work of Oreskes and Conway (2011) focused more on the direct influence of the industry on journalism itself. Historians like Brandt (2009) have focused on the concerted efforts of the tobacco industry’s public relations apparatus to influence representations of tobacco products in media going back to the 1930s, when corporate public relations emerged as an industry (Olasky 2013). As far back as the 1960s, it was apparent to scholars that news media reflexively included tobacco industry voices in reporting on the emerging health effects of tobacco, diminishing the credence of an emerging consensus (Neuberger 1963). Scholars and policymakers further critiqued the reliance of news media on tobacco advertising money in the 1980s (Warner 1985). Likewise, media critics began to recognize the relationship between corporate-funded think tanks and what one called the growth in “idea laundering” by corporate lobbyists in op-eds and think pieces in the 1990s and early-2000s (Confessore 2003). This work shows that the tobacco industry played a long game in protecting their bottom line in a variety of forms of published journalism, but also reveals an intimate relationship between corporate public relations and journalism that manifests in the archive under scrutiny here.

Much of this work has focused primarily on published journalism as a site in which the influence of the tobacco industry has manifested. This study broadens this scope to explore how journalism-adjacent institutions—trade publications, professional/press associations, and J-schools—have been targeted by tobacco companies and their representatives as sites in which metajournalistic discourse, and by extension journalistic practices, can be mapped and shaped to the industry’s advantage.

Ironically, perhaps, fields outside of journalism studies—in particular public health—have produced compelling metajournalistic discourse research about the influence of private corporations on journalism. For example, public health scholars have explored how the soda industry has pursued a similar strategy to the tobacco industry in injecting pro-industry discourses into journalism in soda tax debates around the US (Nixon et al., 2015). Other public health scholars have looked at how the tobacco industry has monitored reporting on health issues related to smoking and shaped the practice of journalism through funding of awards and conferences (Dunsby & Bero 2003). More focused attention on this mapping and shaping of metajournalistic discourse by the tobacco industry in the context of journalism studies can reveal the modes in which journalism-adjacent actors and sites provide pathways for private corporations to shape journalistic practices.

Another public health study revealed how Philip Morris funded the education and work of journalists whose published work sowed about an EPA report on secondhand smoke (Muggli et al. 2004). As these scholars argue, these corporations turn “free speech into corporate speech” by blurring the lines of reporting and public relations. Studies like this are valuable but relatively limited to direct connections between funding of specific journalists and published work. A broader approach can show how these well-documented connections are part of a greater effort by private industry to infiltrate both journalistic practice and metajournalistic discourses.

Another public health study found that local newspaper coverage of the tobacco industry’s corporate social responsibility programs was often positive and excluded critics of the industry and supporters of tobacco regulations, especially in the southern United States where the tobacco industry is located (McDaniel et al. 2018). Journalism organizations, particularly financially strapped news outlets like local newspapers, are particularly vulnerable to being manipulated by public relations campaigns by private corporations. Journalism practice may not always need a metajournalistic discourse about fairness or objectivity to legitimize industry narratives; it may be just as much a matter of material considerations for struggling media organizations.

The role of journalism norms and values in tobacco’s metajournalistic discourses

Foundational journalism studies scholarship has shown that values like objectivity arise out of the journalism industry’s need to validate the work of journalists who can not verify the claims of all of their sources due to finite time and resources (Tuchman 1972). In a sense, journalistic norms and values flow from the practical considerations of journalistic institutions. Yet metajournalistic discourses serve to make common sense of journalistic norms and values no matter their origin. Journalism studies scholars have suggested that the false balance that comes with adherence to objectivity as a norm has resulted in some of U.S. journalism’s most remarkable failures: sowing doubt about the effects of tobacco smoke and man-made climate change, and the red-baiting of the McCarthy era (Swisher & Reese 1992). We could add the kowtowing of journalists to George W. Bush and the apparatus of the War on Terror, and in more recent years, the relatively unexamined growth and dominance of Big Tech. Exploring how these institutions and actors exert pressure on journalists and outlets via journalism-adjacent institutions and venues can help scholars better critique how these values function to prop up power.

Though metajournalistic discourses might serve to police failures in journalistic practice, they often result in a perceived paradigm overhaul that only reaffirms and never questions journalistic values like “objectivity” (Cecil 2002). Metajournalistic discourses often include memories of past deviance from journalistic norms in order to repair current and future practices (Carlson 2014). As I show below, tobacco companies and their representatives often aimed to identify deviance in their mapping and shaping of metajournalistic discourses—not to alter the paradigm of journalism, but to reaffirm it and seek out ways of influencing it within those paradigmatic norms. The tobacco industry didn’t aim to identify or introduce new values into metajournalistic discourse but only to highlight those which would lead journalists to amplify doubt about scientific evidence.

Scholars have long acknowledged that the normative practices of journalism have a fraught relationship with scientific knowledge, showing, for instance, that news media have used the existence of gaps in scientific knowledge to reinforce the appearance of objectivity in their work (Stocking & Holstein 1993). These existing journalistic norms have been cultivated and used by corporate interests to sow doubt in public discourses about policy issues in which there is not unanimity—in other words, all policy issues. Journalistic norms have determined which climate change stories, for example, get covered and how they get covered (Boykoff 2011). We can take this one step further and dig into the institutions and venues in which these norms are negotiated and made sensible to better understand how private interests not only shape the stories directly but shape the norms that determine which stories make it into coverage. The journalistic norm of balance, Boykoff and Boykoff (2004) found, served to benefit the fossil fuel industry in press representations of global warming and environmental activism, leading to a divergence between popular and scientific discourse around these issues. Norms like balance are often reinforced through the metajournalistic discourses examined here, leading to the journalistic practice of false balance which gives equal voice to legitimate and illegitimate claims, to interested and disinterested parties.

The tobacco industry’s influence on higher education and professional associations

Though the topic is understudied, some research has revealed that tobacco companies exerted material influence not just on commercial media industries, but also on institutions of higher education and journalistic professional organizations. Universities in the U.S. and elsewhere continued to accept money from tobacco companies through the 1990s and into the 21^st century, sometimes prompting protest from faculty (Cohen 2001). The increasingly commercial nature of higher education has made private industry, like tobacco, and universities and colleges more intertwined. The lectures given by Tobacco Institute representatives at colleges, analyzed below, show how these relationships provided avenues for the tobacco industry to shape metajournalistic discourses in sites not normally associated with private industry lobbying. Furthermore, the tobacco industry sought to discredit the work of researchers at universities as part of their broader concerted efforts to undermine scientific research into tobacco’s health effects (Landman & Glantz 2009). Yet these overt efforts to silence critical work were always paired with efforts to infiltrate the discourses of journalism leaders—particularly editors and educators—in order to reaffirm a journalism paradigm that would be friendly to the tobacco industry. The goal was never to discredit journalism or higher education across the board but to shape them and benefit from their legitimacy with the public. The present study extends this work to further examine tobacco’s influence on institutions of higher education, specifically journalism schools.

The same can be said of journalistic professional organizations. Public health scholars have also found evidence of a quid pro quo between tobacco companies and the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a black press trade organization (McCandless et al. 2012). Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds sponsored events and publications celebrating the black press while ramping up their ad buys and received favorable coverage in black press outlets from the 1960s through the 1990s. Studies like this show how journalism-adjacent discursive actors and sites, like trade associations, serve to shape journalistic practice through their relationships with corporations, whether there is an overt quid pro quo or not.

Trade publications

Tobacco companies and their representatives tracked metajournalistic discourses in journalism trade publications, and occasionally injected pro-industry voices in these discourses, often through their proxy, The Tobacco Institute. The archive shows that the industry surveyed an array of journalism trade publications to analyze their likely receptiveness to pro-industry influence, specifically focusing on the profile of these publications’ advertisers and how conflicts between corporations and the public were represented in their pages (e.g. “Media to media” 1995). A Philip Morris-commissioned research report from 1997 noted that these publications “tend[] to be liberal, and advertising is dominated by media-holding companies (e.g. Knight-Ridder, Gannett) or media-production companies” and further noting that non-media companies often appear as sponsors of journalism scholarships in their pages (Reiss 1997, 3).

Documents in the archives indicate that the Tobacco Institute had been monitoring press criticism more broadly starting in the 1960s and 1970s (Christenson 1965; “Radio TV reports” 1971). For example, the institute analyzed a 1965 Columbia Journalism Review article about Reader’s Digest’s right-wing biases and the Digest’s decades-long commitment to publishing work critical of tobacco products (Christenson 1965). There’s some irony in this particular metajournalistic discourse, considering the industry’s later intermingling with right-wing media operations and think tanks.

The institute continued, through the remainder of the 20^th century, tracking metajournalistic discourses in journalism trade publications like CJR, American Journalism Review, Editor & Publisher, and The Quill, specifically monitoring those that published work about the regulation of tobacco advertising in the context of free speech issues and journalistic norms (“Attack on tobacco ads” 1987; Friedheim 1987). In an interoffice letter in 1977, a Philip Morris executive expressed concern about an ongoing editorial conversation at the Columbia Journalism Review in which a Columbia University faculty member critiqued the publication for publishing cigarette ads (Saunders, 1977). The Philip Morris executive noted that CJR’s editor thought of the publication as “a magazine devoted to free speech” and would consider picking and choosing advertisers—i.e., banning tobacco advertising—antithetical to this mission (1).

In the mid-1980s, the institute gathered clippings of pro-industry voices in trade publications. These voices often emphasized existing journalistic norms in their metajournalistic discourses, but often to urge journalists to be less critical of private industry. One such article from the January 1986 issue of The Quill by Schmertz (1986), a PR executive at Mobil, advised journalists on how they might produce more “credible” reporting. Schmertz’s campaign of lecturing to working journalists was also waged by speaking “in front of press groups” (21). His recommendations include “Cool the sensationalism,” “Give adequate coverage to good news,” “Play fair,” “Obey the law,” “Improve news reports’ professional competence,” “Cover your own profession as news,” and “Enforce a code of ethics” (21). None of these are particularly groundbreaking recommendations, but they are used to urge journalists, who may be covering Schmertz’s industry, to cover energy and environmental issues in a less critical, more “balanced” way—i.e., in a way that paints his industry in a better light. In 1989, the institute developed a plan that involved “‘chastising’ the journalism community for its handling of controversial scientific issues… The focal point of this effort will be an article authored by a respected member of the journalism community and published in a major journalism review” (“Public smoking programs” 1989, 3). The industry saw the advantage of having journalists, rather than just industry representatives, lecturing journalists on their practices.

Not only did tobacco companies and their representatives target popular (and often critical) trade publications like Columbia Journalism Review and American Journalism Review as sites for critiquing journalism practice (Rubin, Barney, & Birger, Inc. 1996), members of the Tobacco Institute appeared as sources in some of these publications as a “balance” to the industry’s critics (e.g. “Attack on tobacco ads” 1987). However, the archive seems to indicate that the industry more often sought to find journalism professors and professional journalists sympathetic to the industry whose work might appear in these publications.

For example, in 1994, a Morgan Stanley researcher produced a report for Philip Morris detailing the media criticism work of Cynthia Gorney, then a journalism professor at Lehigh University (Penney 1994). The report argues that Gorney’s work could be useful specifically to the tobacco industry because it offered an argument against sensationalist (but true) stories about tobacco’s ill effects. In an essay for Media Critic published the same year—which also appeared in the archive—Gorney (1994) argued that journalists had recently been engaging in “litigation journalism,” producing sensational stories about product safety, which overwhelmingly favored litigants over corporations. Gorney’s critique assumes the facts of any given lawsuit reside in more official sources and “Media coverage of lawsuits, when it is one-sided and sensational, violates the principles of fairness, balance and responsibility in reporting” (57)—meaning in practice that more deference should be paid to the industry’s defense. These high modern conceptions of journalism, which had particular salience in the metajournalistic discourses of the time, could be used to protect corporate interests, as highlighted in Gorney’s work and Philip Morris’s interest in it. Though there is no evidence in the archive that Gorney collaborated directly with the tobacco industry, her media critiques represented an opportunity for tobacco interests to highlight existing metajournalistic discourse that might align with their interest.

Professional and press associations

Tobacco companies and their representatives mapped the field of professional and press associations, including regional press associations, national publishers associations, and professional associations, documenting and engaging in opportunities to influence metajournalistic discourses in these sites. The tobacco industry developed different relationships with each of these sets of institutions. Members of the tobacco industry engaged regional press associations as PR vehicles connecting corporations who paid dues with journalists at media outlets, distributing press releases and providing clipping services (e.g. Carlsen 1980; “Information hotline” 1992; “Research” 1995). The tobacco industry found relevant synergies between their economic imperatives and those of the journalism industry by tracking and sponsoring discourses of national publishers associations (e.g. Carpenter & Freidheim 1987; Fuller 1992). Finally, the tobacco industry both sponsored and supplied speakers for meetings of professional associations in order to reiterate existing journalistic values in a context favorable to their interests (e.g. Plante 1991; Rubin, Barney, & Birger, Inc. 1996).

A 1980 letter from an executive at the Virginia Press Association in response to an inquiry from The Tobacco Institute regarding membership, noted that the association already provided services for members in the liquor, fossil fuel and tobacco industries, showing that corporations in the tobacco industry had already been using the association’s clipping services and ability to connect industries with “key people in Virginia journalism” (Carlsen 1980). In a 1992 edition of the New England Press Association Bulletin, the Tobacco Institute is listed on the “Information Hotline” page which “is designed for newspaper staff members as a directory of public information officers, press relations officers and designated contacts at leading organizations in our six-state region” (“Information hotline” 1992, 14). In 1995, Philip Morris even made plans for “hosting a dinner and providing a key note speaker or hosting a hospitality suite for journalists” at the Kentucky Press Association’s summer conference (“Research” 1995, 4). Broader historical research focusing on these regional press associations—which does not appear yet to exist—might reveal more clearly how they functioned as sites for private industries to shape metajournalistic discourses and journalistic practices.

Tobacco companies and their representatives also found willing partners in publishers associations, who represented the business concerns of publications, finding synergy between the economic interests of tobacco and journalism. The Tobacco Institute retained records of a 1987 letter campaign conducted by executives at the Magazine Publishers Association and the American Newspaper Publishers Association addressed to U.S. representatives, arguing that a ban on cigarette advertising supported by these representatives would hurt the magazine and newspaper industries (Carpenter & Freidheim 1987). In 1992, Philip Morris sponsored the biannual convention of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, an association of black press publishers (Fuller 1992). In these cases, institutions of metajournalistic discourses may offer private industry opportunities to align their interests with those of publishers, though they may not represent the interests or ideologies of working journalists who actually produce reporting on the industry.

Tobacco companies and their representatives also pursued relationships and activities with professional associations that more broadly represent working journalists. In 1991, the Media Institute, a lobby shop working for the tobacco industry, partnered with the Radio and Television News Director’s Foundation (RTNDF)—the educational wing of the Radio and Television News Director’s Association (RTDNA)—to hold what they called “the Environmental Reporting Forum (ERF) to educate broadcast journalists on the issues of environmental coverage” (Plante 1991, 1). In a summary of the forum produced for R.J. Reynolds, it is apparent that the panels had been assembled to stress “fairness” and “balance” in the increasingly prominent reporting on the environmental impacts of large corporations. In general, the panelists argue that more skepticism of scientists and environmental groups is in order, or as one panelist put it, “We have to be very, very careful about environmental advocacy groups and make sure they don’t get the upper hand” (Plante 1991, 17). That RTDNA, a major professional/press organization, would partner with a tobacco industry think tank to produce this forum demonstrates how private corporations can directly shape metajournalistic discourses by selecting the participants in and topics of such discourses.

The efficacy of a broader infiltration of professional associations by the industry is less clear from the archive, though the industry’s efforts persisted. In 1996, a PR firm contracted by Philip Morris pursued pro-tobacco “speaking engagements with regional and national press and business associations” of which they compiled a comprehensive national inventory (Rubin, Barney, & Birger, Inc. 1996, 12). A 1998 Philip Morris strategy document explicitly describes a plan to infiltrate such associations by “joining press clubs and other organizations that provide regular contact with journalists, on a structured, companies-wide basis” (“Strategy recommendation summary” 1998, 4). Another planning document mentioned an “Inventory List of Press Associations” but acknowledged that such organizations often have limited resources and potentially limited influence, though its authors found that “Some are Appropriate to Work With” (“Proactive media relations” 1998, 8). In 1998, Philip Morris planned to “Explore [a] Society of Professional Journalists Relationship” (“Proactive media relations” 1998, 18).

Tobacco companies and their representatives also floated plans to build a network of “grassroots” associations to monitor journalistic practices and produce metajournalistic discourses in their favor—a form of astroturfing in which the industry would fund and facilitate such discourses, even as they would appear to be coming from the public. A 1997 research report produced for Philip Morris recommended making contacts with press clubs “to help establish local newscouncils” (Reiss 1997, (2) which would “act as a ‘check’ on the media” (1). Another Philip Morris document from 1998 elaborated plans to directly fund news councils “to help the media police itself” (“Strategy recommendation summary” 1998, (6) in states throughout the US:

The understanding would be that there are no strings attached to the money as long as it is used to set up a news council. News councils would cost $80,000 to $100,000 per state to set up. They cost about $200,000 a year to run (we will be visiting the Minnesota newscouncil in October). We would recommend setting up one or two in the first year. We would evaluate after one year. If the test markets are going well, we could solicit support from other potential contributors, (other companies), and continue funding. We may at that point reconsider our role in helping other states start up. (8)

In these documents, the language of metajournalistic discourses is used—the 1997 document includes a discussion of the agenda-setting power of different institutions—demonstrating how the industry might facilitate its own sites of metajournalistic discourse, encouraging “grassroots” local news councils—which feel like a sinister echo of right-wing citizens councils of the previous half-century. A search in the archives did not reveal any further pursuit of these plans for funding newscouncils and the Minnesota newscouncil seems to have been one of only a few councils to emerge (Hermanson 1993; Brauer, 2011), indicating that Phillip Morris and their representatives found existing journalism-adjacent structures more promising sites for influence.

Journalism schools and other institutions of higher education

The archive demonstrates that tobacco companies and their representatives saw journalism schools and institutions of higher education more generally as sites of metajournalistic discourses to be mapped and shaped if possible. The industry produced and presented lectures to journalism students (e.g. The Tobacco Institute 1981), participated in journalism forums held at colleges and universities (e.g. “Public smoking programs” 1989), and engaged the services of faculty and administrators in their mission to shape metajournalistic discourses more broadly (e.g. Cory and Ricke 1985; Houlberg 1995; Wolf 1995). These activities were part of a broader effort to materially support and influence higher education in general, such as Philip Morris’s grants in the early 1990s to Teach for America, which it publicized in Education Week and The Chronicle of Higher Education (Fuller 1992). Here the tobacco industry imbricated itself in higher education institutions and discourses to influence young aspiring journalists and to call upon the authority of higher education institutions and individuals to cast doubt on existing journalistic practices.

The archive contains the text of a lecture from 1981, called “The Cigarette Consumer Controversy” which was “presented by members of the staff of The Tobacco Institute to… graduate and undergraduate students in journalism” and other fields (The Tobacco Institute 1981, 1). The lecture cites the work of journalists and scholars—not necessarily those who are skeptical of the science around tobacco’s health effects, but those whose work on journalistic and scientific standards and practices could be used to support a general skepticism of the growing consensus on the science. The lecture traffics in the types of arguments and evidence that journalism students would encounter in the academic settings in which this lecture was given. The lecture also catalogs a more vernacular form of journalistic practice of the time, in which folksy commentators represent anti-smoking activists as prudish and hysterical. An editorial in New West magazine quoted in the lecture noted non-smokers’ “exaggerated coughs and annoyed looks …a torrent of unjustified humiliations” (quoted in The Tobacco Institute 1981, 17). A quoted New York Times column read,

A little group of willful persons, representing no opinion but their own, has rendered the great smoking public helpless and contemptible. Today the smoker, tomorrow the onion-eater, and the day after tomorrow the person who prefers cheap perfume to taking a bath. (quoted in The Tobacco Institute 1981, 22)

The institute thus lectured journalism students on the complexity of scientific consensus and gave them pithy examples of ways to “balance” their reporting.

The archive shows that the industry viewed journalism schools as sites in which they could materially and discursively shape the education of young journalists even when they were not directly producing lectures. In 1989, the Tobacco Institute participated in a symposium at McGill University, home of a prestigious journalism program, as part of their broader effort to “educate science and health reporters” on the effects of secondhand smoke, and a subsequent plan to “sponsor a…journalism school seminar on science reporting” (“Public smoking programs” 1989, 2–3). In 1995, a Philip Morris research report noted that

the University of Kentucky is in the process of soliciting funding for a new “Media Center of the Future” for its School of Journalism. If Philip Morris is looking for a three- to five-year return on its investment, funding such an endeavor is a practical way to reach journalists of the future. Involvement with the Center would reach young journalists in the heart of tobacco country which, in turn, would produce journalists with a greater understanding of the issues down the road. … It is important to note that Philip Morris has donated millions of dollars to UK over the recent years, they know us well and understand the importance of our relationship. (“Research” 1995, 4–5)

Likewise, Philip Morris executives had earlier sought to convince the administrators of the Polk Awards in Journalism at Long Island University’s Center for Communication to offer an award for “unbiased science reporting”—ostensibly reporting more favorable to the industry (Cory & Ricke 1985, 1). In 1998, Philip Morris planned efforts to influence journalism education within established journalism schools through “various types of funding of ethics programs, scholarships, chairs, etc.,” specifically targeting “top tier schools,” assuming that other schools would “follow in line” if prestigious J-schools were open to tobacco-funded initiatives (“Strategy recommendation summary” 1998, 9).

The archive also gives evidence that tobacco companies and their representatives monitored presentations at institutions of higher education, often specifically journalism schools, both by critics of science reporting and by policymakers and supporters of regulating the industry. The Philip Morris documents include a program for a 1999 forum on “Teen Smoking” at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University at which FDA and CDC officials and anti-smoking activists gave speeches and answered questions relevant to “working journalist[s]/writer[s] interested in teen smoking” (“Teen smoking” 1999, 2). The Philip Morris documents include the text of a speech by a science editor at The Independent given at Templeton College, Oxford, in 1995, in which the speaker makes that case that much of the public is illiterate when it comes to science and processes scientific information more based on the perceived authority of the source than on the quality of science (Wilkie 1995). This can be used, as the speaker does, to call into question science around things like climate change. Yet, the speaker’s assessment is the culprit in misinforming the public was that the “the journalism was bad” (7), not that industries or special interests might have injected unfounded doubt into public discourses.

Tobacco companies and their representatives also engaged the services of faculty members of media and communication programs to produce research and reports favorable to their interests. A mass media professor at the University of Rochester provided quotes for the 1981 Tobacco Institute lecture (The Tobacco Institute 1981). In 1989, the institute identified a specific faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh and solicited a proposal for research on the “anti-tobacco ‘industry’” from them (“Public smoking programs” 1989, 4). Two faculty members in the department of media and communication at San Francisco State University produced reports for The Tobacco Institute in 1995 pushing back against an FDA report that elaborated the effects of cigarette advertising aimed at young people (Houlberg 1995; Wolf 1995). The two media scholars dissected the FDA’s use of social scientific methods and its operationalizing of certain terms—like “youth” and “smoker”—to cast doubts on the connections drawn by the report.

At other times, the institute sought the input of journalism school faculty when developing their public and press communications. A 1983 institute report on “The Tax Burden on Tobacco” was “sent to three journalism schools for analysis and comment” before being distributed to the press (The Tobacco Institute 1983, 3). The industry also called upon specific administrators at journalism schools, such as in 1985 when Philip Morris consulted with the dean of Columbia Journalism School, to develop its media messaging (Cory & Ricke 1985). The expertise cultivated and supported by journalism schools here becomes a tool for the tobacco industry’s public relations operations. The cooptation of media and communication scholars to delegitimize public health research and to hone their media messaging demonstrates that these metajournalistic discourse sites and actors have direct links to discourses around public health policy and therefore the regulation of private industry.