[nostromo]

The wikipedia article you linked doesn't make this claim.

The primary example, that cigarette companies tried to hide that smoking causes cancer, doesn't prove this point -- the vast majority of people know this and the propaganda effort was a failure.

[xdavidliu]

You are missing the point: there's an entire field of study about the claim and the various ways that it's true. The wikipedia article is about that field of study. Hence, the only way the claim would be false would be if that entire field of study were completely junk (e.g. homeopathy or neurolinguistic programming), which from the wikipedia article, it doesn't look so.

[JadeNB]

> the vast majority of people know this and the propaganda effort was a failure.

The vast majority of people know this now, but it was just as much a subject of motivated doubt in its time as climate change is now. It's only because of a massive counter-propaganda effort (in a good cause, but it's still propaganda) that it seems so obvious to us now, and so inevitable in retrospect that people of sense would see the truth.