When Will the Media Go on a Health Binge?

It was nice to read in The New York Times the other day that some big money will get behind anti-smoking efforts. Microsoft founder Bill Gates and another billionaire, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, "will spend $500 million to stop people around the world from smoking," the newspaper reported.

The Times explained that "a multipronged campaign ... will urge governments to sharply raise tobacco taxes, outlaw smoking in public places, outlaw advertising to children and free giveaways of cigarettes, start anti-smoking advertising campaigns and offer their citizens nicotine patches or other help quitting."

The mega-funded campaign will focus on five countries "where most of the world's smokers live: China, India, Indonesia, Russia and Bangladesh." But, according to the Times, the USA will still be involved: "Third world health officials, consumer groups, journalists, tax officers and others will be brought to the United States for workshops on topics like lobbying, public service advertising, catching cigarette smugglers and running telephone hot lines for smokers wanting to quit."

This is good news. I hope that American involvement in a global anti-smoking effort will help roll back the deadly tobacco industry. But I regret that so little has been done so far — including in our own country — to seriously challenge the methods and messages of cigarette marketers.

In fact, if the news media in the United States had been on the anti-smoking job in a big way during the last few decades, the cigarette habit would be significantly less common in this country. And the American example — from television, Hollywood and other sources of mass-cultural export — would have been distinctly less prone to encourage smoking from Moscow to Jakarta.

It's painful to contemplate the reporting by the Times that the new international anti-smoking drive "promises to be a struggle" — and that "cigarettes are not only highly addictive and supported by huge advertising campaigns, they are also an important source of income for many foreign governments."

They are also an important source of income for many domestic media outlets.

Thumb through the glossy magazines on any supermarket rack, and you're liable to see a large number of slickly designed cigarette ads.

Many are clearly preying on the insecurities of women, young people and others who might worry about their sex appeal, capacity to project confidence or ability to have a good time with friends.

But the most glaring contribution by news media is in the realm of omission. By any measure, if you contrast the amount of critical journalistic attention devoted to cigarettes with any number of other high-media-profile threats to human life — for instance, from street crime or "terrorism" — the tobacco habit comes close to entirely escaping media scrutiny.

Giant conglomerates that manufacture and market cigarettes also own huge food product companies. That helps to explain why TV and radio broadcasters — while legally forbidden to air cigarette commercials — have plenty of financial incentive not to go after the tobacco industry in any sort of concerted way.

Anti-smoking messages — based on facts about health effects — should be part of routine media coverage. Considering the human toll that cigarettes take, it's notable that such a tiny proportion of U.S. media ink and airtime is devoted to informing and reminding the public that their own lives are at risk from smoking as well as secondhand smoke.

True, to do the journalistic job right, it might cost the U.S. news media well over $500 million. But clearly the corporate media in the United States are not inclined to pay any such price.

Norman Solomon's books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." A documentary film of the same name, based on the book, has been released on home video.

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