Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death in the world today but attracts relatively little coverage in the print media compared with other, less serious, health problems. Based on...

Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death in the world today but attracts relatively little coverage in the print media compared with other, less serious, health problems. Based on anecdotal evidence of retaliation by tobacco companies against publications that carry stories on smoking, many observers have asserted that the presence of tobacco advertising discourages coverage of tobacco-related issues. To address this question quantitatively, Warner and Goldenhar* took advantage of the “natural experiment” that occurred when broadcast advertising of cigarettes was banned in 1971, which resulted in cigarette advertisers greatly increasing their reliance on print media, with a concomitant increase in advertising expenditures there. For the years from 1959 to 1983, they collected data on the number of smoking-related articles in 50 periodicals, 39 of which accepted cigarette advertising and 11 of which did not. They used these data to compute the average number of articles related to smoking published each year per magazine, with separate computations for those that did and did not accept cigarette advertising. They also collected data on the amount of cigarette advertising these magazines carried and their total advertising revenues and computed the percentage of revenues from cigarette ads. To control for changes in the “newsworthiness” of the smoking issue, they observed the number of smoking-related stories in the Christian Science Monitor, a respected national newspaper that does not accept cigarette advertising (the data are in Table D-7, Appendix D). Do these data support the assertion that the presence of cigarette advertising discourages reporting on the health effects of smoking?

Table D-7