Coverup

Coverup: the sign of the double-cross

Not just a river in Egypt Denialism

Alternative facts

Uncertainty tactic Cornucopian vs. Malthusian debate Denialism QAnon Feathered dinosaurs Lysenkoism

♫ We're not listening ♫

Bill O'Reilly Michael Knowles The Exposé The Real History Channel Keith Windschuttle Robert W. Felix v - t - e

A coverup is a form of denialism in which the entity perpetrating the denial is demonstrably fully aware of their lies or the lies made by entities that they fund (astroturf groups or experts for hire). Coverups are the opposite of willful ignorance in that there is demonstrable intent to deceive, and are therefore considered an expression of consciousness of guilt. Corporations primarily engage in coverups in order to continue making bundles of money at others' expense (negative externality), and to a lesser extent to avoid or postpone criminal charges. Politicians engage in coverups to hide their scandalous behavior and thereby get reelected and to delay or avoid criminal charges.

Conspiracy theorists often include claims of coverups, but these are lacking in hard evidence.

Examples

By corporations

• Asbestos causes cancer and pulmonary disease. Asbestos was known to be dangerous to workers since the early 1900s, and insurance companies began to take notice in the 1930s. The asbestos industry attempted to cover up the risks of asbestos into the 1970s. A coverup may still be ongoing in Russia.
• Exxon (later ExxonMobil) has known since at least 1977 that global warming from fossil fuels could be an issue. By 1981, Exxon was "already factoring climate change into decisions about new fossil fuel extraction". In 1995, there was an internal Exxon report that unequivocally stated that "burning the companies' products was causing climate change and that the relevant science 'is well established and cannot be denied.'" Exxon/ExxonMobil, for example, has funded the climate change denialist group Heritage Foundation since 1992, including $780,000 from 1998-2012.
• Facebook frequently conducts research about effects of its social media platforms on its users. Facebook knows about the harmful effects of its social media, but does not act upon it and keeps the research confidential until someone leaks it.
• The Lead Industries Association engaged in a coverup of the hazards of lead by trying to publicly minimize the hazards of lead and blaming parents for their children's exposure while simultaneously conducting private research on lead hazards. Lead was considered to be hazardous since ancient times.
• Starting with the U.S.'s entry into World War I, the radium industry became powerful by hiring young women, mostly between the ages of 11-16, to paint watch dials using radioactive glow-in-the-dark paint. As they were told to lick the brushes, dentists started noticing that the workers' jaws began disintegrating, as well as facing serious ulcers and tumors. However, the radium companies responded by saying that radium was perfectly safe and even encouraging doctors to list the workers' cause of death as syphilis rather than radium poisoning. The denialism only ended after a lawsuit in 1928 revealed to the public the damages that radium was causing to the workers' bodies, and it also revealed that male workers from the company would often wear lead aprons to protect from radioactivity, while the female watch painters received no such protection.
• In 2016, it was revealed that the Sugar Research Foundation (now known as the Sugar Association) "paid nutrition experts from Harvard University to downplay studies linking sugar and heart disease". The experts published a 1967 review in the New England Journal of Medicine, which wrongly influenced nutritionists for decades.
• The first known report that tobacco might be linked to cancer was in 1898 when Hermann Rottmann proposed that tobacco dust might be causing elevated rates of lung cancer in German tobacco workers. In 1900, it was demonstrated that tobacco juice caused cancer in animals. The link between primary tobacco use was firmly established in the 1950s, but Big Tobacco has been in near-continuous denial of tobacco's carcinogenicity: no longer denying primary tobacco use but in denial of secondhand tobacco exposure at least into the 1990s. Leaked internal documents showed that "tobacco companies had long known the grave dangers of smoking, and did nothing about it."

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  Asbestos promotion in 1946

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  Lead paint advertisement from 1912

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  Radium advertisement from 1921

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  An advertisement from 1970, implying that one could lose weight by eating more sugar

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  Advertisement from 1977: If sugar is so fattening, how come so many kids are thin?

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  20,679 doctors can't be wrong!

By governments/politicians

• Watergate — Nixon was captured on his own White House tape recording system acknowledging that he knew about the burglary committed by his underlings (headed by G. Gordon Liddy), the blackmail by E. Howard Hunt Jr., and the ongoing coverup. The subpoena of this tape led to his resignation.
• Ronald Reagan denied the selling of heavy arms to Iran, the United States's enemy, and tried to cover it up (Iran-Contra).
• Famously, the People's Republic of China has done its best to censor any mentions of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and its attempted coverup of the event began shortly afterwards in 1989 and is still ongoing to this day.
  • China is also attempting to conceal its ongoing gross mistreatment of the Uighur people from the rest of the world.
• The government of Turkey adamantly refuses to acknowledge its role in the Armenian genocide. Unlike China's outright censorship of discussion of its abuses of power, Turkey simply denies that the Armenian genocide ever happened.
• Japan has a strong ultranationalist sect that has tried to downplay and deny its atrocities during World War II, such as the Nanking Massacre and comfort women.

See also

• Burning the evidence
• Cherry picking — a method used by denialists
• Child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church
• Limited hangout