Letter to the New York Times, June 7, 1998
Letter to the New York Times, June 7, 1998
Re: The Times' Cigar Promotion
Editor
New York Times
229 W. 43 St.
New York, NY 10036
letters@nytimes.com
Noted with interest in Sunday's New York Times (June 7, 1998):
--The graphic for the article, "In China, Tomorrow Belongs To Greed" (Page 14, Business section) features a man meant to represent affluence--he has a cell phone, wears a tuxedo, and most pointedly, is furiously smoking a cigar--and he has 3 others handy in his breast pocket. Nowhere in the article are cigars mentioned.
--The graphic for "Fish Story" (Page 1, Week in Review Section) features a moneyed, tuxedo-clad fisherman with a cigar in his mouth.
--A graphic for the article, "As Modern and Swanky as All Those Swells," Page 39, Arts & Leisure) features "William Auerback-Levy's disembodied George Gershwin" smoking a cigar.
--The sole graphic element in an advertisement for the Criterion Group (Page 22, New York Times Magazine) is a woman with a cigar.
--The Nat Sherman ad (Page 3, The City Section) features cigars as Father's Day gifts.
According to a February, 1998 Baltimore Sun article, Robert T. Henkel told the Cigar Association of America that the cigar industry needed a public relations effort, often disguised as news and entertainment, that would focus on cigars as a status symbol, associating them with women and youthfulness, and highlighting cigar-smoking celebrities as role models. "How will we do all this?" Henkel told the group. "We will write news stories, develop feature articles, take photographs, produce radio and television news tapes."
With the help of the New York Times on a near-daily basis, the Cigar Association will not have to spend much money to counteract the devastating results of recent studies:
--"[T]he toxic substances and carcinogens in cigar smoke . . . are associated with increased risks of several kinds of cancers as well as heart and lung disease. . . cigars are not safe alternatives to cigarettes and may be addictive." ("Cigars: Health Effects and Trends," National Cancer Institute, April 10, 1998)
--Daily cigar smoking causes cancers of the lip, tongue, mouth, throat, larynx, esophagus, and lung, as well as chronic obstructive pulmonary (lung) disease and coronary heart disease. ("Cigars: Health Effects and Trends," National Cancer Institute, April 10, 1998)
--Cigar smokers face nearly double the risk of dying from all forms of cancer combined and from various cardiovascular ailments. (Kaiser Permanente, March 19, 1998)
--Cigars, even unlit, are a source of high doses of nicotine (Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, March 28, 1998)
I see little evidence the New York Times even covered these stories. Readers depending on The New York Times for dependable information about cigars are seeing The Big Lie over and over and over, sans any contradictory information whatsoever. And we know the Big Lie repeated often enough comes to be seen as the truth.
Doesn't the Times have some sort of journalistic responsibility to properly inform its readers--or at the very least to not consistently disinform them on a daily basis?
Gene Borio
Tobacco BBS
PO Box 359
Village Station, NY 10014-0359
Tobacco BBS: 212-982-4645
Tobacco BBS WebSite: http://www.tobacco.org
geneb@tobacco.org
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