The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread

by Cailin O'Connor

Soon more evidence came in. During the summer of 1953, a group of doctors at Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital completed a study in which they painted mice with cigarette tar. The mice reliably developed malignant carcinomas.3 Their paper provided a direct and visceral causal link between a known by-product of smoking and fatal cancer, where previous studies had shown only statistical relationships. It produced a media frenzy, with articles appearing in national and international newspapers and magazines. (Time magazine ran the story under the title “Beyond Any Doubt.”)4 That December, four more studies bolstering the case were presented at a research meeting in New York; one doctor told the New York Times that “the male population of the United States will be decimated by cancer of the lung in another fifty years if cigarette smoking increases as it has in the past.”5 The bad press had immediate consequences. The day after it reported on the December research meeting, the Times ran an article contending that a massive sell-off in tobacco stocks could be traced to the recent coverage. The industry saw three consecutive quarters of decline in cigarette purchases, beginning shortly after the Reader’s Digest article.6 (This decline had followed nineteen consecutive quarters of record sales.) As National Institutes of Health statistician Harold Dorn would write in 1954, “Two years ago cancer of the lung was an unfamiliar and little discussed disease outside the pages of medica...