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.
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