Fast-food fights: news coverage of local efforts to improve food environments through land-use regulations, 2001-2013. [corrected].

Zoning and other land-use policies are a promising but controversial strategy to improve community food environments. To understand how these policies are debated, we searched existing databases and the Internet and analyzed news coverage and legal documentation of efforts to restrict fast-food restaurants in 77 US communities in 2001 to 2013. Policies intended to improve community health were most often proposed in urban, racially diverse communities; policies proposed in small towns or majority-White communities aimed to protect community aesthetics or local businesses.

Tobacco industry use of personal responsibility rhetoric in public relations and litigation: disguising freedom to blame as freedom of choice.

We examined the tobacco industry's rhetoric to frame personal responsibility arguments. The industry rarely uses the phrase "personal responsibility" explicitly, but rather "freedom of choice." When freedom of choice is used in the context of litigation, the industry means that those who choose to smoke are solely to blame for their injuries.

The origins of personal responsibility rhetoric in news coverage of the tobacco industry.

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.

Cigarettes become a dangerous product: tobacco in the rearview mirror, 1952-1965.

Tobacco control's unparalleled success comes partly from advocates broadening the focus of responsibility beyond the smoker to include industry and government. To learn how this might apply to other issues, we examined how early tobacco control events were framed in news, legislative testimony, and internal tobacco industry documents. Early debate about tobacco is stunning for its absence of the personal responsibility rhetoric prominent today, focused instead on the health harms from cigarettes.

Soda and tobacco industry corporate social responsibility campaigns: how do they compare?

In an article that forms part of the series on Big Food, Andrew Cheyne and colleagues compare soda companies' corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns - which are designed to bolster the image and popularity of their products and to prevent regulation - with the tobacco industry's CSR campaigning.

Tobacco industry use of corporate social responsibility tactics as a sword and a shield on secondhand smoke issues.

The tobacco industry has used corporate social responsibility tactics to improve its corporate image with the public, press, and regulators who increasingly have grown to view it as a merchant of death. There is, however, an intractable problem that corporate social responsibility efforts can mask but not resolve: the tobacco industry's products are lethal when used as directed, and no amount of corporate social responsibility activity can reconcile that fundamental contradiction with ethical corporate citizenship. This study's focus is to better understand the tobacco industry's corporate social responsibility efforts and to assess whether there has been any substantive change in the way it does business with regard to the issue of exposure to secondhand smoke.

Philip Morris's website and television commercials use new language to mislead the public into believing it has changed its stance on smoking and disease.

Objectives: This paper analyses Philip Morris's evolving website and the legal strategies employed in its creation and dissemination.

Methods: Internal tobacco documents were searched and examined and their substance verified and triangulated using media accounts, legal and public health research papers, and visits to Philip Morris's website. Various drafts of website language, as well as informal discussion of the website's creation, were located in internal Philip Morris documents.

How tobacco-friendly science escapes scrutiny in the courtroom.

Although the tobacco industry helped fund the attack on "junk science," it has created its own dubious scientific scholarship for its expert witnesses. We suggest that plaintiffs' counsel should be proactive in using Daubert hearings to exclude the tobacco industry defendants' scientific expert witnesses by introducing documentation, such as we have found through researching previously privileged internal industry documents, to prove that much of their proposed testimony was developed by and for their lawyers.