Mirabella Smokes Out Pro-Tobacco Influence : Magazines: Importance of cigarette ads to women’s organizations and publications is detailed. Magazine Week, meanwhile, says 165 periodicals would die without them.
What would happen if a much-discussed ban on print tobacco advertising took effect? For one thing, 165 magazines might gasp their last breaths. That’s according to a recent study by a group called the Leadership Council on Advertising, reported in the March 19 Magazine Week.
Another thing, not mentioned by Magazine Week, is that there just might be some impact on the estimated 1,600 American teen-age girls who each day smoke a first cigarette, or on the reported 400% increase in lung cancer deaths among women since the 1950s.
While male smokers are quitting at a steady rate, the number of women smokers has, until very recently, been growing. Experts cite various interrelated reasons why women are taking up and refusing to kick an addiction that makes their lungs a breeding ground for one of the most aggressive and deadly forms of cancer. One reason that can’t be overlooked is the campaign the tobacco industry wages in the pages of women’s magazines.
In a pause from business as usual that’s truly refreshing, the April Mirabella says to hell with advertisers and stares the issue down.
“The prosperous tobacco industry makes a generous friend and a formidable foe,” writes Sue Woodman in a piece titled “Target.”
“It supports women’s sports events like the Virginia Slims tennis tournament; women’s education and fellowships to the Women’s Research and Education Institute, and women’s arts projects,” she says. “Women’s organizations and magazines, which provide vital channels of information, support and role models for women, receive hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from tobacco advertising or sponsorship.”
The piece cites a British study speculating that teen-age girls read women’s magazines, and are exposed to the advertising.
“Often those messages are received at a time when a young woman’s self-image is at its shakiest, and when she may be most open to a cigarette ad’s nonverbal messages,” Woodman writes.
The image promoted is that smoking makes women beautiful, successful and slender. But as a professor of surgery at UCLA points out: “The reality is that smoking leads to disease and death, and dying from lung cancer is a terrible way to die.”
A spokesman for the Tobacco Institute called Mirabella’s assertion that advertisements hook girls on smoking “a transparently false argument.”
“It completely ignores the experience of countries around the world which have banned advertising of cigarettes altogether and seen no drop in the cigarette consumption of men, women or children. . . . None of the countries in Eastern Europe have had advertising in over 30 years and they have some of the highest cigarette consumption in the world.”
Of course, a proposed American ban on cigarette ads is fraught with constitutional perils. But self-regulation may not be as unlikely as it sounds.
According to a spokeswoman for Mirabella, the magazine tipped off its tobacco advertisers that it planned to run Woodman’s article. There is not a single cigarette ad in the April issue.
REQUIRED READING
Anyone who doubts that a totalitarian undercurrent underlies certain streams of environmental thinking has been paying more attention to T-shirt aphorisms than “green” literature. Anyone who believes that the environmental movement is “an ideology every bit as powerful as Marxism and every bit as dangerous to individual freedom and human happiness” has overdosed on Ayn Rand. That alarmist quote is the low point of an essay by editor Virginia I. Postrel in the April Reason magazine. The piece is at least as politically slanted as any eco-screed. But if more environmentalists were as well-read in their own theorists and as lucid in their thinking as Postrel, the “green revolution” would be in much better shape.
Recognizing the rapid destruction of natural wildlife habitat around the globe, photographer James Balog “created images of animals in exile from that lost Eden, adrift in the ether of a planet now alien to them.” The resultant studio-type portraits of creatures including a chimpanzee, a manatee, a black rhino and an Atlantic green turtle are at first unsettling, then mesmerizing. In the April National Geographic.
“Water is not the safe, harmless substance everyone thinks it is,” a representative of the organization CSIP contends in the April 15 issue of The Wine Spectator. “It rots wood and rusts iron. Thousands of people drown every year.” The same issue also reports that Inglenook has promised to scrub 60 million gallons of Navelle Burgundy from the Mendocino Coast after a wine tanker ruptured. Readers who aren’t too tanked to think clearly will quickly recognize that this is the biweekly publication’s annual April Fool’s issue.
NBC president Brandon Tartikoff dismisses David Lynch’s new television series “Twin Peaks” by saying: “I probably would want to live in a country where (“Twin Peaks”) could work, but I suspect it will be a tough road for them.” The April 6 Entertainment Weekly dismisses him as a “cynical, anti-art” kind of guy. The only mildly condescending review gives “Twin Peaks” an A-plus for refusing “to condescend to television.”
SHREDDER FODDER
Siskel and Hoving? Hoving and Ebert?
In the April Connoisseur, editor-in-chief Thomas Hoving reviews all 289 films he has watched on VCR. Give Hoving a thumbs up for his iconoclasm (among the films he pans: “Citizen Kane,” “Catch 22,” “Fellini Satyricon” and “Platoon”). Give him a thumbs down for thinking anyone cares.