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Reading
Smokeless
in Seattle
Dan Bischoff
"I must say, I was astounded by the
reaction," Seattle
Times President H. Mason Sizemore says of the attention
his paper received when it announced in June that it would
ban all tobacco ads at the end of this year. Overnight, the
Times, with a daily circulation of 239,500, became
the largest U.S. paper currently banning such ads—and the
decision generated headline news. "I must have given over
50 interviews in the first week," says Sizemore. "Reporters
called me from around the world." Sizemore was persuaded to pull the plug on the tobacco industry
in part by a lobbying campaign spearheaded by Washington Doctors
Ought to Care (DOC), a statewide health advocacy organization.
The group contends that cigarette companies aim their advertising
at children. Tobacco companies have always maintained that advertising
does not encourage new smokers to take up the habit; instead,
they say, it merely attempts to convince consumers who are
already hooked to switch to their brand. "What they want is
brand loyalty in a shrinking market," says Bill Wordham of
the Tobacco Institute, the industry trade association. "Claims
that cigarette advertising is aimed at under-aged smokers get
people's attention, but it's simply not true. The industry
has supported the minimum age laws for smoking in every
state." Nevertheless, Washington DC's critique helped convince Sizemore
and his colleagues to enact a ban. "We want our columns to be as open as they can
be," Sizemore
says, "and this is a legal product, of course. But the medical
evidence at this point was irrefutable—on cancer, on heart
disease. And their advertising in the media is so dominant
that we hardly felt that by making this decision we were in
any way restraining their right or ability to sell this product.
We just couldn't in conscience be a part of it any more."
Another Seattle Times Co. owned daily, the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin,
also announced in June that it would institute a ban. At least 12 U.S. newspapers currently ban cigarette advertising.
They range in size from the 7,800-circulation News Sun in
Kendallville, Indiana, to the Times. Not all bans have been prompted by public health considerations;
many of the oldest standing bans have religious or moral origins.
The Christian Science Monitor and Salt Lake City's Deseret
News, which is owned by the Mormon Church, have always banned
liquor and cigarette advertising. Other tobacco-free papers
have their roots in the temperance movement of the first three
decades of this century. Among them is the Daily American
in Somerset, Pennsylvania, which has been owned by the same
family for three generations. Since 1964, when a U.S. surgeon general's report alerted the
public to the dangers of smoking, at least nine newspapers
have instituted bans. At least seven papers, however, have
dropped them over the last three decades. They include perhaps
the two largest to ban tobacco advertising, the 500,000-circulation
Boston Globe and the 349,000-circulation St. Louis
Post-Dispatch. In any case, in 1990, tobacco ads accounted for only $71 million
of the $32.3 billion spent on newspaper ad lineage-a meager
2 percent, according to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and
Newspaper Association of American (NAA) data. In Seattle,
the percentage is even less. "Tobacco ads account for maybe $100,000 to $150,000 a year
in Times revenues," Sizemore says. "As a percentage of our
ad base, which is at about $200 million, it's insignificant-though
in these times, when ad revenues are down, any decision like
this is a weighty one." Tobacco companies play a larger role as sponsors of sports
and cultural events, like golf tournaments or local festivals,
and in magazines, for which they provide nearly 3 percent
of all ad revenue, according to the FTC. Only a very few publications,
such as Good Housekeeping, Mother Jones, the New Yorker,
Reader's Digest, Seventeen and the Washington
Monthly, refuse tobacco ads. Until recently, tobacco advertising was as prevalent in Canadian
publications. That changed in the late 1980s, when the decision
of one respected publisher, Michael Davies of the Whig
Standard in Kingston, Ontario, to ban such ads led to
a chain reaction at nearly all major press outlets in the
country. Those bans, and a concerted lobbying effort by anti-smoking
activists, convinced the government to pass the most restrictive
legislation on tobacco advertising in the world. The U.S. government banned cigarette advertising on radio
and television in the early 1970s, and recently there have
been bills introduced in Congress to further regulate such
ads in the print press. But short of government action, and
given that most U.S. newspapers already editorialize against
tobacco, isn't there an inherent conflict in accepting ads
encouraging readers to smoke?
Sizemore thinks so. "These ads
were designed to kill our readers," he says, "so we decided
to refuse them."
Freedom of Speech?
The medical evidence of tobacco's addictive and deadly consequences
is overwhelming. The World Health Organization estimates that
3 million people die each year from heart disease, cancer,
emphysema and more than a dozen other illnesses caused or
exacerbated by smoking. The U.S. government estimates that
in the United States alone 418,690 deaths a year are directly
attributable to tobacco. Although the incidence of smoking in the United States has
dropped over the last 20 years, 25 percent of Americans still
smoke; it's estimated that as many as one third of them will
die from smoking-related diseases. The tobacco industry maintains there is no direct link between
smoking and disease. "The industry acknowledges there are
health risks associated with smoking," says Wordham of the
Tobacco Institute, "but no causation has been proven." Forty years ago, newspapers and radio were the primary beneficiaries
of tobacco industry advertising, but cigarette companies largely
abandoned papers for television in the early 1950s. When Congress
banned broadcast ads for cigarettes in 1971, instead of returning
to newspapers, the companies turned to promoting cultural
and sporting events. The industry spends a lot of money to promote its products.
According to the FTC, tobacco companies spent $1.14 billion
on newspaper, magazine, billboard, transit and point-of-sale
advertising in 1990, and another $2.8 billion on promotions
such as coupon giveaways and on public events. Only $71 million,
or 1.8 percent, of their total outlays went to newspaper ads. Cigarette manufacturers say the question of whether to allow
tobacco advertising hinges on the legal right of corporations
to hawk their wares. "We believe it is clearly unconstitutional
to ban ads for a legal product," says Wordham. Max Thomson, publisher of the New Castle News in Pennsylvania,
echoes the most common rationale given by news managers who
print tobacco ads. "I feel this is a freedom of speech
issue,"
he says. "The market should decide on any legal product."
The News, which has a circulation of 21,000, was founded 114
years ago as a prohibitionist paper and had banned liquor
and cigarette ads until the Thomson chain of 110 papers bought
it five years ago and reversed the policy in 1991. (Max Thomson
is not related to the Thomson newspaper family.)
The Newspaper
Association of America says papers should be free to accept
tobacco ads. "We think legal products have the right to
advertise,"
says NAA President Cathleen Black. "It is the publisher's
discretion to accept or reject advertising and editorial." The distinction between constitutionally guaranteed free speech
and commercial free speech is fuzzy, but several recent court
decisions have indicated that when speech involves advertising
for a "vice" such as gambling, alcohol or tobacco, legislatures
have a wide latitude in regulating, even banning, it. If the
Supreme Court were faced with deciding whether a ban on tobacco
advertising was constitutional, says Patrick Maines, president
of the Media Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit
research organization, the court might narrowly support that
ban. But Maines is opposed to any restrictions on free speech,
commercial or political, to achieve social goals. "Once you ban tobacco ads, where do you
stop?" he says. "Do
you ban other products that used one way or another are damaging
to health? Do you ban products that you simply don't like
morally, like war toys? I don't think it's a slippery slope.
It's a cliff." If it's a cliff, many newspapers have already jumped off.
Newspaper publishers have routinely rejected all sorts of
ads in their self-appointed capacity as moral guardians of
the community. The New York Times refuses ads for bust
developers, the San Diego Union-Tribune won't accept ads that
refer to abortion, and the Bluffton, Indiana, Newsbanner rejects
adoption ads. Last January Baltimore's Sun banned all handgun
ads, as have other papers around the country, including the
Seattle Times and Los Angeles Times. And "family"
newspapers have long struggled with questions of taste raised
by for X-rated movies, topless bars and condoms. Often enough
they've answered those questions either by banning sex-related
ads outright or making suggested changes in copy and illustrations.
Community standards for the décolletage for porn stars, for
example, are still met in the makeup rooms of many small town
papers with a few strokes of a Magic Marker. Tobacco is unique, however; there is no other product advertised
in the media, including liquor, that has no safe use. Some anti-smoking activists allege that tobacco ads are not
only harmful to readers, but corrupt the way newspapers deal
with the issue. In Canada, says Garfield Mahood, executive
director of the Non-Smokers Rights Association, newspapers
were running soft editorials on smoking and health issues,
if they ran them at all. "Take my word for it , the minute
you get tobacco ads out of the newspapers, the difference
in their editorials is striking," says Mahood, whose group
is widely credited with pushing through Canada's Tobacco Products
Control Act, which bans cigarette ads. "Overnight they become
advocates. It's hard to do that when your editorial or news
story is printed on the back of a full page spot for Player's
cigarettes." John Banzhaf, founder of the Washington, D.C.-based Action
on Smoking and Health(ASH), doesn't see the same influence
here. "Our concerns about undue influence on editorial policy
are not serious with most [newspapers]," he says. "Direct
conflicts are far more numerous at slick magazines; that's
because magazines get more of their revenue from tobacco ads
and also because most newspapers have a greater commitment
to journalistic standards than magazines do. Our concern is
that by continuing to run [tobacco] ads newspapers give cigarettes
a kind of legitimacy and respectability they should not
have."
Reversing Bans
The irony for newspapers in the tobacco advertising controversy
lies in the way that their news columns have heightened public
concern. And it's especially telling when a paper reverses
its stand on the issue. That's what happened when the New
York Times Co. bought the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, a strong
anti-tobacco advocate, and rescinded its ad ban. The Times itself had a history of dealing with the smoking
issue head-on. After the surgeon general's report on the dangers
of tobacco appeared in 1964, the Times coverage of the issue
was among the most detailed and committed in the nation. Around
1969-about the time the Boston Globe and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
announced their tobacco ad bans -the Times mandated that because
of its concern about the effects of smoking, all tobacco companies
would be required to include health warnings on any ad it
ran. Every tobacco company withdraw its advertising in protest. In 1972 the FTC declared that all tobacco ads had to carry
the surgeon general's warning. The Times' management promptly
announced that the text of the warning label met the essential
goals of the paper's policy, and one by one the major cigarette
companies resumed their ad buys. Today the Times earns about
$1 million a year from cigarette ads, most of which appears
in its Sunday magazine. The Times does ban certain kinds of ads. Besides those for
bust developers, it won't publish ads for mail-order handguns,
astrologers or fortune tellers, private lotteries, and novelty
real estate offers, like sales of "one square inch of Irish
soil" on St. Patrick's Day. It also refuses any ad in a foreign
language unless there is a translation, and any ad for condoms
that does not explicitly recommend them as the best means
of preventing the spread of venereal disease and AIDS. As
of July 15, it refuses odorous perfume and cologne scent strips
in the Sunday magazine. But cigarette ads sail by unchallenged. Before the Times bought it in 1982, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune
had been a leader in opposing the tobacco industry. It banned
ads immediately after the 1964 surgeon general's report and
even demanded that Family Weekly, a now-defunct competitor
of Parade, print a special smokeless edition for the Sarasota
market. The Herald-Trib's zeal was due to one executive's personal
encounter with cigarettes. In 1964, Publisher David Lindsay's
father, his predecessor, was still walking around the building,
speaking only in a whisper because of larynx cancer brought
on by heavy smoking.
"There have been some protests from readers since the ban
was lifted," says Waldo Proffitt Jr., who runs the paper's
editorial page. "But we still editorialize against smoking
and the companies that sell tobacco. Is there a conflict?
I don't think so. I think the Lindsays, the whole family,
was very much opposed to tobacco and did the right thing as
a private company reflecting their values. And I think the
New York Times did the right thing as a publicly held company
concerned about its shareholders." The drive for profits was largely responsible for the reversal
of tobacco bans at the Boston Globe and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
"After the surgeon general's report, we carried a number of
news articles and editorials on the evils of smoking, and
we thought we should be consistent on the other side of
house,"
says William Taylor, publisher of the Globe, which is in the
process of being purchased by the New York Times Co. The Globe
is the largest U.S. paper ever to ban tobacco ads. "My father was the publisher then," Taylor recalls.
"We banned
cigarette ads in 1968 or '69, and there was a big furor. Parade
had to print a smokeless version for us.... In 1973 the paper
went pubic, and that, along with the economic situation at
the time, led us to consider reversing at the ban, which we
did the next year. I believe my father felt a responsibility
to the shareholders and the board." Then-Publisher and Editor Joseph Pulitzer Jr. banned tobacco
ads at the Post-Dispatch for a short period around 1967 because
of concerns over health problems related to smoking, recalls
Robert Lasch, at the time the paper's editorial page editor
and a strong proponent of banning such ads. He says a Washington
lobbyist for the paper who had lost his wife to cancer also
pushed Pulitzer for the ban. A few days after Pulitzer called
a meeting with the two men and the business staff to present
arguments for a ban, "he kicked [the tobacco advertisers]
out," Lash says. Soon after, however, "the hard times came
and the business department needed more revenue, so they talked
him into lifting it." Four other papers that have reversed tobacco bans-the New
Castle News in 1991, the West Central Tribune in Wallmar,
Minnesota, in 1982, the Geneva Finger Lakes Times in Upstate
New York in 1990, and the Morristown Daily Record in New Jersey,
in 1987-are smaller, ranging from the Tribune's circulation
of 17,000 to the Record's 60,000. In each case, the reversal
came after the paper was sold.
Congressional Action?
Refusing certain ads for moral reasons is about as old as
the mass circulation press. When Horace Greeley founded the
New York Tribune in the 1840s he refused to take ads from
Madame Costello and Madame Restell, two high-profile Manhattan
society "female physicians" who were known by most to by abortionists.
Greeley not only refused their ads, he trumpeted his decision-thereby
enhancing the credibility of his paper vis-à-vis the rest
of the penny press. Today, however, most news managers see little credibility
to be gained by banning cigarette ads. For that to change,
tobacco opponents will have to change their tactics. Meanwhile, there is legislation pending on Capitol Hill that
would place tighter restrictions on the tobacco industry.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) introduced a bill last March that
would cut tobacco companies' tax deductions for advertising
from 100 percent to 50 percent. The additional tax revenue
would be used by the government for anti-smoking campaigns.
In the House, Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Mike Synar
(D-Okla.) are working on a bill that would require cigarette-pack
warning labels similar to those now in Canada, require tobacco
companies to disclose cigarette ingredients, allow the government
to regulate the ingredients, ban free samples, require warning
labels on all promotional material (such as hats and belt
buckles), and limit ads to "tombstone" announcements, which
are similar to ads for stock offerings that have no pictures,
only type. Several countries have already passed laws similar to the
one proposed by Waxman and Synar, and when Canada required
tobacco companies to disclose their ingredients to the national
government, two major U.S. tobacco companies stopped selling
their products in that country. Waxman held hearing on a similar
bill in 1990, but was not able to get it voted out of committee.
He plans to hold hearings for the new version sometime this
fall. An aide to a Republican congressman says that although chances
that anti-smoking legislation will pass improve every year,
Waxman's bill probably will not go very far-especially if
the government significantly increases the federal excise
tax on cigarettes. The American Civil Liberties Union has come out against both
the Senate and House bills on First Amendment grounds. "Both
bills are unconstitutional," says Robert Peck, ACLU legislative
counsel. "The Harkin bill takes a legal product and puts it
in a disfavored position. You could do it across the board,
but by penalizing speech for a particular product you're violating
the First Amendment. Waxman's tombstone ads discriminate on the basis of the contents
of the message. Certain securities transactions are required
to use tombstone ads because of the complex nature of the
offerings and the sophistication of the ads' target audience.
This isn't applicable to cigarettes, which is a legal product
that is being presented in a nonmisleading way. There is no
complexity to whether you want to buy X brand over Y brand." Regulating tobacco ads, or banning them outright, does appear
to help cut down on the number of smokers. Canada introduced
large tax increases on tobacco products and started phasing
in its total ad ban in January 1989; tobacco sales fell by
7 percent that year. Since then the government has imposed
a 3-cent-per-cigarette tax; by the end of last year sales
had dropped by about 20 percent. Companies are still allowed
to sponsor public events, but early next year they will have
to print black-and-white "death notice" label warnings covering
as much as 35 percent of the front and back panels of cigarette
packs, and disclose "toxic constituents," such as carbon monoxide,
nicotine and tar, on a side-panel label. Canada's tax hike and ad ban were greeted enthusiastically
by U.S. anti-smoking advocates, who hope the example set by
Garfield Mahood's Non-Smokers' Rights Association will be
matched here. NSRA briefed the Clinton transaction team just
before the inaugural, and the group has been working with
several U.S. anti-smoking coalitions to devise a workable
strategy. That's why the Seattle Times' decision looms large
on the radar of the tobacco industry: The most striking aspect
of the Canadian ban was the prominent role newspapers played
in jump-starting the movement. "Our first real break came in 1986 when Michael Davies of
the Kingston Whig Standard...agreed not only to ban cigarette
ads but to privately call on other publishers to do the
same," Mahood says. "He then steered us to several who were thinking
along the same lines.... After 15 months, the largest circulation
daily in Canada, the Toronto Star, had joined the ban, and
by 1988, when the Tobacco Control Act was up for passage,
many of the major newspapers in the country supported it." "Of course, the U.S. economy is several times larger than
Canada's, and passage of a similar ad ban faces steeper obstacles
on this side of the border. One major hurdle is money. Most
of the established U.S. health groups compete for funding
and have tended to shy away from direct confrontation with
the tobacco industry. Mahood's group spent more than $1 million
on its campaign and had the support of the Canadian health
establishment. A similar effort here might cost 10 full time
lobbyists in Ottawa working to pass the Tobacco Control Act,"
Mahood says. Currently U.S. ad ban proponents have no full
time lobbyist working on the issue. John Banzhaf of ASH wants Congress to strengthen tobacco regulations
and argues that the First Amendment does not preclude tighter
controls. "Some distinctions between commercial and political
speech have long been made in American law," he says. Although Waxman's original bill died in committee, Banzhaf
predicts that by the end of the decade there will be stronger
government restrictions on tobacco ads-if not an outright
ban. Certainly there are many signs of a heightened antagonism
toward smokers, including the growing number of citywide smoking
bans in restaurants and public buildings. But the prospects
that Congress will ever pass Canadian-style restrictions,
let alone an ad ban, don't look that promising at this point.
And the question remains whether Congress should. "If your social goal, because of the health care costs or
whatever, is cut down on the number of smokers in your population,
is there any evidence that banning tobacco advertising is
more efficacious than other things?" asks Patrick Maines of
the Media Institute. "What about prohibitive excise taxes?
Why don't you make the product illegal? It simply shows no
generosity of spirit to achieve this goal by attacking free
speech." Seattle Times President Sizemore, no friend of tobacco, also
opposes any government ban on such ads. "This is our decision
to make," he says. "Not theirs."
(From American Journalism Review) TOP
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