Discredit line: if you can't deal with someone's arguments, you can always attack his motives

National Review, Sept 12, 1994 by Jacob Sullum

I RECENTLY received a handwritten note in the mail. The message was simple: "After reading your article |Just How Bad Is Secondhand Smoke?' [NR, May 16] and seeing the ad for Benson & Hedges on the back of the magazine, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize you and your kind have an agenda to push."

Rather than question the plausibility of this reader's implicit accusation, let's assume that it's true: Philip Morris, NR, and I conspired to place my article in the same issue as a Benson & Hedges ad. Furthermore, I wrote the article because I secretly work for Philip Morris. Would that affect the truth of what I wrote?

I raise the question because this form of ad hominem attack is quite popular these days, especially (but not exclusively) on the Left. Groups such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and publications such as The Nation are obsessed with "following the money." When presented with conclusions they don't like, their first instinct is to ask about the author: "Who funds him?"

Motives over Evidence

ALLEGATIONS about financial ties often take the place of serious debate. Liberals criticize Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism?, for taking money from conservative foundations, while conservatives criticize Ralph Nader for taking money from trial lawyers. For the lazy mind, such attacks are an excuse to avoid the effort of considering arguments and evidence.

It's not surprising that this approach to controversy is common among newspaper reporters. In May, as part of a national advertising campaign, R. J. Reynolds reprinted an oped piece I had written for the Wall Street Journal outlining some of the problems with the Environmental Protection Agency's report on the health effects of secondhand smoke. At the time I was managing editor of Reason magazine, published by the Reason Foundation in Los Angeles. A few weeks later, I received a call from a writer for a Washington-based newspaper called the Daily Citizen. When I wrote the piece for the Journal, he asked, did I know that Philip Morris had given money to the Reason Foundation? Shouldn't I have disclosed that fact?

I asked him why, and he was not able to give me a coherent answer. But I got the drift of what he was suggesting: people should know about the donation so that they could assume I had been influenced by tobacco money and therefore discount what I had written. Well, I said, in 1993 Philip Morris gave Reason $10,000, which represented less than 0.4 per cent of the foundation's budget. It seems implausible that you could corrupt a think tank that cheaply. In any case, donations to the foundation had no impact on my pay or my job security. Furthermore, I had been taking the same positions on smoking policy for years. Not only that, but I disagreed with the tobacco companies on a number of issues, including the hazards of smoking, the propriety of "smokers' rights" laws, and the wisdom of drug prohibition.

By this point, not surprisingly, I was starting to sound a bit defensive. "I'm not trying to question your integrity," the reporter said. Of course, that is exactly what he was trying to do. He wanted to undermine my credibility by suggesting a hidden motivation. But in his enthusiasm to reveal the conspiracy behind my op-ed piece, he missed an important point: my motivation was completely irrelevant. In latching onto the donation from Philip Morris, he was committing a logical fallacy: impugn a person's motives, and you've weakened his argument.

My encounter with the Daily Citizen was just a preview. In July, Philip Morris bought full-page ads in newspapers throughout the country to reprint an article I had written for Forbes MediaCritic about press coverage of the secondhand-smoke issue. I first heard about this ad campaign from an AP reporter, who called to ask me about it. The story he wrote was fair by the usual journalistic standards, but it nevertheless implied that Philip Morris's donation was relevant in evaluating my work.

The AP story was followed by an article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch headlined, "Philip Morris aided periodical," which noted that, in addition to giving money to the Reason Foundation, Philip Morris had advertised in Reason. The reporter did quote my comment that "people should be able to evaluate arguments and evidence on their merits." But again, the very reason for the story was to cast doubt on the credibility of my article.

Both of these reporters were fair-minded enough to call me and Reason for a response. Not so the Los Angeles Times, which summed up my article in a sentence and added: "The criticism of the EPA's science in the article, however, relied heavily on researchers who have received significant tobacco industry funds in the past, such as Alvan Feinstein, a Yale epidemiologist."

This is neither relevant nor surprising. Scientists who study smoking issues and have qualms about the case against secondhand smoke are unlikely to express them. They recognize that concerns about the hazards of secondhand smoke will encourage smokers to quit, an outcome they probably welcome. And they know that voicing their skepticism would expose them to intense criticism from their colleagues and could endanger funding from government agencies and anti-smoking groups. The few who do have the courage to speak up are apt to be sought out by tobacco companies as consultants and to attract research grants from them. If such funding is grounds for doubt, so is money from private organizations, such as the American Cancer Society, and government agencies, such as the California Department of Health, that are committed to achieving "a smoke-free society."