Fox News’s smoking gun

Regarding the March 8 front-page article “Fox News documents in suit show Trump rift”:

The remarkable discrepancy between the public and private views within Fox News on the 2020 election harks back to the behavior of the tobacco industry decades ago. For many years, the industry publicly denied addiction and causation. But privately, all was admitted. One industry attorney wrote secretly in 1963, “We are, then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug.”

The only difference between the hypocrisy of Big Tobacco and that of Fox News is that the previously secret internal industry documents stayed hidden for decades. Fortunately, the Fox fraud was revealed much more quickly. Mitchell Zeller, Gaithersburg The writer is the retired director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products.