Study Links Ads, Coverage of Smoking Hazards : Media: Researchers say magazines that did not take tobacco advertising were far more likely to carry articles on the perils of cigarettes.
The more money that a magazine makes off cigarette advertising, the less likely it is to cover the dangers of smoking, according to a study that suggests that journalistic self-censorship has contributed over the past 25 years to public underestimation of the risks of smoking.
The study of 99 U.S. magazines, reported today in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that those that did not carry cigarette ads were more than 40% more likely than the others to cover the hazards of smoking.
The phenomenon was especially stark among magazines that cater to women, a group heavily targeted by the tobacco industry and a group for which lung cancer recently became the leading cause of cancer deaths.
Kenneth E. Warner, a University of Michigan professor and lead author of the paper, went so far as to suggest in an interview that thousands of people have died “because magazines have not done the job they might have, had they not been dependent upon this money.”
Cigarette and tobacco companies spent about $585 million on advertising in 1990, the bulk of it in magazines, making the tobacco industry the eighth-largest source of magazine advertising revenue in the United States, according to Advertising Age magazine.
That figure is declining as tobacco firms shift their resources out of advertising and into other forms of promotion. But there was a sharp increase in advertising in print media after broadcast advertising was banned in January, 1971.
At the same time, the 1970s and 1980s saw dramatic increases in deaths from lung cancer and heart disease related to smoking. Tobacco smoking is now the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, killing between 400,000 and 500,000 people every year.
“Cigarettes kill more people than the sum total of . . . cocaine, heroin, alcohol, auto accidents, AIDS, fires, homicide and suicide,” Warner pointed out in an interview. “Aren’t you a little surprised by this? That’s the point. We don’t appreciate the magnitude.”
In their study, the most comprehensive and systematic look at the subject yet, Warner and his co-authors found that women’s magazines that did not take tobacco advertising were more than twice as likely as others to carry articles on the hazards of smoking.
The more any magazine depended upon cigarette advertisers, the less likely it was to report on smoking risks, the researchers found. Even a slight increase in the share of advertising revenue that came from cigarette ads significantly cut the likelihood of coverage.
“It is the weaker and dependent publications that are the most silenced,” observed Mike Pertschuk, co-director of the Advocacy Institute, which advises public health advocates. “Yet it is their audiences that are the most in need of information.”
Asked about the findings Wednesday, magazine editors and publishers disagreed on whether advertisers actively apply pressure or whether magazines censor themselves. A few insisted they were aware of neither censorship nor self-censorship.
Dr. Cory SerVaas, editor and publisher of the Saturday Evening Post, said her magazine stopped taking cigarette advertising in the mid-1970s after their ad salespeople reported that advertisers were refusing to appear in issues with articles on smoking and health.
Janice Grossman, publisher of Seventeen Magazine, which also declines cigarette ads, said, “I think a lot of editors would think twice about doing an expose about the hazards of smoking if they’ve got $550,000 of tobacco business. That’s a reality.”
But Rick Phillips, manager of magazine public relations for Meredith Corp., which publishes Ladies’ Home Journal and 13 other magazines, insisted that the editorial content of the publication--which does run cigarette advertising--”is not influenced by the advertising side.”
Spokeswomen foJ. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Phillip Morris USA said their companies never try to influence editorial decisions by publications. They said they base their advertising decisions entirely on readership demographics.
“Tobacco advertising in magazines ranks eighth, after cosmetics, travel, automobiles, etc.” said Brennan Dawson of the Tobacco Institute. “But you don’t see anti-travel papers in what used to be medical journals talking about how you don’t read enough about the problems of the airline industry.”
Warner’s study is not the first to find a link between cigarette advertising and coverage of smoking hazards. The American Council on Science and Health, a nonprofit public health group, reached similar conclusions after studying 20 top U.S. magazines.
Lauren Kessler, a professor at the University of Oregon School of Journalism, studied six women’s magazines between 1982 and 1986 and found “no feature articles of any kind that had anything to do with smoking-related health hazards.”
Elizabeth M. Whelan, president of the council, suggested that advertising is not the only reason why magazines avoid the issue: “Because it’s a downer, because magazines don’t think they’re nannies, because people who smoke will throw the magazine away.”
Many health experts contend that alleged neglect of the issue of smoking by magazines has enabled many Americans to underrate its dangers--an observation supported by numerous surveys suggesting that people underestimate the risk they face.
A 1983 survey of 1,254 randomly selected adults and 103 health experts found that while the experts ranked smoking as the top hazard among 24 choices, laymen ranked it 10th behind much lesser dangers such as as not having smoke detectors in the home.
