Hey, what happened to all those wild tobacco ads you've been running? Oh, I see--you ran Guy Trebay's article, "Smoking Zone," which happened to tell people a little bit about tobacco. Too bad. How much of a hole did that article punch in your ad budget?

It amazes me people like Trebay haven't wondered _why_ they know so little about this incredible plant, which is so deeply enmeshed in our country's origin, history, economy, government and society.

In fact, this is the proverbial story of the century, right under his nose.

Look, either an addictive, deadly product is killing over 400,000 people a year in this country alone, or it's not.

If not, then there is a massive and monolithic conspiracy--adhered to by everyone in the health and scientific communities from ward nurse to surgeon general--to unjustifiably besmirch a single plant.

If so, then there is a far smaller but more cohesive, brilliantly-executed conspiracy by an industry seeking to subvert medical findings and subvert our own government so that people will not have certain information, and so that the industry can continue to sell an addictive, deadly drug to kids (no black market here. Remember, it's been over-the-counter to kids for 40 years).

Either way, what a story! But no one knew. Why not?

That's a third story, of compelling interest to journalism students and those in favor of an informed society.

The Voice, of course, like most other tobacco-ad-filled periodicals, has given but fleeting notice to tobacco. Like the Voice, most media outlets over the decades quickly learned their lesson--address the issue of tobacco, and your tobacco ads disappear.

The abject failure of the advertising-driven model of journalism in the latter half of the twentieth century is a great story, harrowing and deep.

Journalism's cowardly failure to inform is exemplified exquisitely by the Village Voice. Its readers got almost all their information about tobacco from ads. How many in hospitals today may have read an article in the Voice 30 years ago that would have finally made them stop and think--or prevent them from taking up smoking in the first place? Had the Voice been brave, of course.

The Voice's near-total editorial silence on tobacco for the last 40 years is shameful and deafening.

Gene Borio
Tobacco BBS

PS: Here are a few salient moments in the history of publishing and advertising. The following periodicals lacked their usual complement of tobacco ads when they ran a tobacco story:

• MOTHER JONES January, 1979 ("Why Dick Can't Stop Smoking." MoJo says it lost _years_ of tobacco and liquor advertising for running the story.)
• NEWSWEEK June 6, 1983 ("Showdown on Smoking." The articles author has said Newsweek may have lost as much as $1 million.)
• TIME April 18, 1994 (Federal tobacco issues)
• US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT April 18, 1994 (Federal tobacco issues)
• PEOPLE, May 20, 1996 (Stanton Glantz profile; "The Runaway Jury" excerpt. PEOPLE ran 2 stories, but only lost one issue's worth of ads. Clever!)
• VANITY FAIR May, 1996 (Jeffrey Wigand story)
• FAIRFIELD COUNTY (CT) WEEKLY , early Oct., 1996 ("Smoke Screen," about industry-created political "watchdog" groups)
• (Madison, WI) ISTHMUS, early Oct., 1996
• VILLAGE VOICE, September 23, 1997 (Guy Trebay, "Smoking Zone")

PPS: Yes, I know VV still has the ads for PM and RJR's all-important bar promos--they can hardly be expected to cut off their noses in this new and all-important campaign.

END OF DOCUMENT

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