The Corporate Blame Game

How companies shed liability, shift responsibility, and avoid accountability.

(Image credit: Created by the author with DALL-E)

Ever noticed how corporations, when backed into a corner, always manage to point the finger somewhere else? It’s a cunning tactic, a sort of rhetorical dodgeball where consumers — ordinary folks like you and me — become the convenient targets. They call it “personal responsibility,” but in reality, it’s an elaborate deflection strategy, honed over decades to protect their bottom lines.

Big Tobacco is perhaps the most infamous example.

For years, tobacco companies denied any link between smoking and cancer, spinning slick PR campaigns and sowing doubt in scientific studies. Once the evidence became undeniable, they pivoted. Suddenly, the issue wasn’t their addictive, cancer-causing product — it was the smoker’s personal choice and self-control. If you got lung cancer, well, that was your fault.

The food industry learned a lot from tobacco’s strategy.

Sugar was steadily found to have detrimental effects, especially its role in the growing epidemics of obesity and diabetes. But instead of addressing deceptive labeling or addictive additives, companies framed the problem as a lack of discipline. “Your sweet tooth is to blame,” they implied, conveniently ignoring the engineered…