[acdha]

There’s a pipeline you can see when they’re workshopping ideas where things start at some think tank or other very openly ideological organization and moves through Reason, TNR, Fox, on to the WSJ and NYT where at each level the issue is pitched as more of a “lots of people are talking” kind of phenomenon detached from the source.

A really good example of this happened a decade ago when you started seeing these public reconsiderations where an NYT oped or someone on a Sunday news show was asking whether Rachel Carson was responsible for increased numbers of Africans dying from malaria. If you didn’t follow it before then, it looked like an organic discussion reconsidering whether an environmental success has unintended consequences.

If you had followed it, however, it was actually funded by the tobacco companies as part of an attack against public health agencies. They started with places like their lobbyist’s blog, got traction in the libertarian / right-wing blogosphere, then Reason, then the unabashed right-wing media, etc. until the more mainstream media felt the need to cover this story “everyone” was talking about:

https://www.wired.com/story/ddt-battle-scientific-skepticism...

https://web.archive.org/web/20080517020543/http://www.prospe...

It’s not uncommon to find that cycle behind “runaway government” news stories where the mainstream coverage doesn’t mention that someone’s full-time job was pitching that story to reporters.