Re: "Restaurant Group Fights Ban" (Our Town, May 11, 1995)
The May 11 Our Town will stand as a textbook example of how advertising dollars affect news coverage.
It must have been thrilling to receive all that Philip Morris money for a full page inside-front-cover ad ("Accommodation"), but did you have to rush to accommodate your benefactor by publishing "Restaurant Group Fights Ban" in the very same issue?
I've never seen Our Town address this issue before. No one reading Our Town would know of the reams of uncontested testimony on the health effects of second-hand smoke that were presented at four day-long City Council hearings. But now Our Town gets a Philip Morris ad under its belt, and it suddenly decides to cover the issue--from a wildly pro-tobacco viewpoint.
Williams' piece consists simply of regurgitated opinions, without a whiff of investigation or counterpoint. This kind of misleading "news" item appears everywhere smoking bans are initiated. It's nothing new; on the contrary, it's an old trick. The industry is known for releasing these opinion "studies" after a smoking ban--it even funds and creates them, as reported by Consumer Reports in "The 30% Myth" (CR, April, 1994).
Williams mentioned Beverly Hills' rescinded ban. Ironic--the Beverly Hills Restaurant Association was the first to start spreading the 30% myth now propagated by Williams, Borkowski, et.al. BHRA's then-president, Barry Fogel, wrote to the City Council about his regretted participation in BHRA--an organization he admitted was set up and primarily financed by the tobacco industry.
The fact is that studies of actual cash register receipts have shown no serious diminution of business in the communities that have gone smokefree--and some have shown an increase. While the tobacco industry wouldn't dare to testify on the proven health effects of ETS at the NYC hearings, it did drag out the 30% myth--which was demolished by fact-based studies.
I have seen absolutely no diminution of business in New York City restaurants. If anything, they seem more packed than before. And only the few most recalcitrant and cantakerous restaurateurs are having any trouble complying with the law.
In Maryland, in California, in Michigan, in Vermont, the pattern is the same: front groups, hysterical fear-mongering, and fake news items. And in the end, each community finds nothing is lost, the laws are self-policing, and everyone is happier--even many smokers. The only people left out are those whose livelihoods depend on selling cigarettes.
So NSA President Humber is "hell-bent" on winning this fight. Of course, that's what he's paid for down there in Washington--to come all the way up here to New York to fight for the tobacco industry's interests. After all, the industry created the NSA. Humber was--and may still be--Vice President of Philip Morris' PR firm Burson Marsteller--which also happens to do work for the NSA.
As a newspaper, you have some responsibility to be objective in the stories you cover, and to resist letting your advertisers' interests affect your news treatment. It doesn't take a brain or a lung surgeon to see what's going on here. I'm shocked that Our Town would play such a bald and shameless role in it.
Gene Borio
PS: We've had the Beverly Hills Restaurant Association, the Restaurants for a Sensible Voluntary Policy, the Vermont Restaurant and Business Coalition, 1988's Californians Against Unfair Tax Restrictions, 1994's Californians for Statewide Smoking Restrictions--the list of groups taken at face value by lazy reporters like Mr. Williams seems endless. Now it's 1995, and we have "New Yorkers United" providing fodder for a conveniently blind--but richer--news media.
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