During the relaxing, post-Christmas period, I like to declare a holiday from newspaper reading. For a week, at least, I may taste the luxury known by those who manage to live without exposing themselves to “the news.” But this December, as I allowed myself idly to page through a copy of the London Sunday Times, I came across one of the most delightful stories of the year. On page three of the front section was the headline: “Revealed: the Elvis Presley killer diet.” It claimed that the King’s favorite, “Fool’s Gold” sandwich—a foot-long baguette filled with bacon, peanut butter, and strawberry jam—contained 42,000 calories—and that he ate two of them a day, besides his two other large meals. There was even a helpful little bar graph comparing the daily caloric intake of an office worker, an active young man, a polar explorer, an Asian elephant, and Elvis. Elvis consumed more calories per day than all the others put together.

Now, although it was written by the paper’s arts correspondent, that was my kind of health story.

Now, although it was written by the paper’s arts correspondent, that was my kind of health story. It had everything—except, perhaps, a claim that the recipe had been given to him by aliens. It informed and entertained and so accomplished the main purpose of good journalism, which is what, after all, we turn to the “quality” papers for. Yet in America, such a story would have been relegated to the supermarket tabloids. The health stories run by the mainstream press here tend to be about nerdy researchers, moonlighting as moralists, who have discovered something new that is not good for us. Or, more rarely, something that is good for us. The latest is that a little booze every day—even the hard stuff, which used to be considered poison—can be good for your heart. And pizza, guys, if consumed in sufficient quantities, can be a prophylactic against prostate cancer.

The news is getting better! But, generally speaking, the field is still a playground for those smug moralists and Puritans who share with journalists an invincible self-righteousness and a fondness for preaching. One result is that there is a tendency for health stories to become media stories. Of course, in America, everything is more or less a media story, since the growth of postmodern journalism has taught us that whatever reporters report on can be made more sexy with news of how the reporting was done, or how the reporter felt about it. But some stories are so morally charged that they all but cry out for such treatment, and chief among them are tobacco stories. Here is one subject where the moralists are almost unchallenged, except for the timid protests of a few civil libertarians. Smoking has a special place in the eyes of the new media because of the extra moral duty shouldered by all who write or speak of it to bear witness to its evil.

Even when they themselves resist the temptation to moralize, reporters on the smoking-and-health beat tend to regard their own importance and that of their researches as being of Himalayan proportions. In the week after I went glumly back to my newspapers, I opened up The Washington Post to find an admirably balanced and judicious piece of roughly 8,000 words by Benjamin Weiser on how it happened (and why it need not have happened) that ABC apologized to Philip Morris and paid the company’s $15 million in legal fees for having erroneously reported that it spiked its cigarettes with nicotine “from outside sources” in order to keep smokers hooked. Who on earth would want to read such a story? Its intrinsic worth would seem to be that of a paragraph under “Legal News,” yet here it was being treated as if it were Brown v. Board of Education—or, perhaps, an invasion of China.

Weiser concluded that, in the words of an anonymous ABC executive, the network “had a terrific story and they pressed it one step too far.” But this “one step” was not inadvertent. In order to use as much of the tobacco leaf as possible, tobacco companies take the otherwise unusable stems, stalks, and trimmings, soak them in water to soften them and then roll them out into paperlike sheets which can be combined with natural tobacco leaves. Because the soaking removes the nicotine from the reconstituted tobacco and because nicotine is what cigarette smokers want, that which is removed is put back at a later stage of the production process. It is this which ABC’s “Day One,” in a broadcast in 1994, insisted was tantamount to “spiking” or “boosting” the cigarettes with extra nicotine—a charge so serious in the eyes of the Food and Drug Administration that it seemed a prima facie cause for reclassifying nicotine as a drug. Moreover, “Day One” mistakenly reported that the manufacturers commonly buy nicotine extract from outside suppliers to add this extra kick.

So much is not in dispute and would seem to have provided not just Philip Morris but all the cigarette makers with grounds for a libel action. But ABC’s settlement—aggravated, as it seems, by Philip Morris’s purchase of some seven hundred full-page newspaper advertisements to publish the network’s carefully worded letter of apology—created a journalistic uproar. Weiser’s was far from the first lengthy rehash of the story. Equally exhaustive treatments of it had already appeared in both the American Journalism Review and the Columbia Journalism Review—to say nothing of shorter pieces and angry editorials in a host of other publications when the news broke last August. And the story got a new lease on life in November with the decision by CBS, fearful of another legal action, to withdraw an interview on “60 Minutes” with Jeffrey Wigand, a disgruntled tobacco company executive who promised to produce scandalous, if not incriminating, revelations. Already both the AJR and the CJR have done major investigations of this story too.

Under the circumstances, the lawyers had a point about the rather frightening extent of the network’s potential liability.

As has The Washington Post, whose media reporter, Howard Kurtz, asked in the “Style” section before Christmas: “Is ‘60 Minutes’ Still Ticking?” Kurtz was interested not only in CBS’s putative poltroonery in failing to face down the tobacco men, but because the incident led to some dissension in the ranks at “60 Minutes.” Mike Wallace, the interviewer of Wigand, had adopted on the air a pose self-righteous even by his standards and had let it be known that he was strongly opposed to, but powerless against, the advice of the network’s lawyers. He neglected to mention to some of his colleagues, however, that Wigand had been paid a $12,000 consulting fee (on a different show) by CBS and that he had been indemnified by the network against legal action taken by his former employer Brown & Williamson, with whom he had signed a confidentiality agreement. Under the circumstances, the lawyers had a point about the rather frightening extent of the network’s potential liability. Morley Safer, for one, felt that he had been left “twisting slowly in the wind” when he had publicly joined in Wallace’s criticism of the network in ignorance of these circumstances.

Kurtz’s story quotes “a former employee” of the show as calling it “a dysfunctional family” because of the recriminations which broke out over the cancelled Wigand interview. Hilariously, Don Hewitt, the executive producer claims to Kurtz the excuse of naïveté: “I think we do what we do better than anybody. What we don’t know how to do is be spin doctors and lawyers. We were playing a game we knew nothing about.” Wallace, too, pretends to be a plain, blunt man, unsophisticated but honest, when he asks Kurtz: “Can a company that is poisoning people, killing people, hide what they do behind a confidentiality agreement at the same time that people are dying from what they do?” It is to Kurtz’s credit that he adds: “In the office next door, Safer, lighting up his fifth Rothman’s of the morning, has a sharply different view of the dispute.”

Safer’s view is that “We should not be inviting The Washington Post or The New York Times or anyone else into our newsroom and our process. The chicken-[expletive] that goes on in any newsroom, it’s gossip. Personalities within this shop have become the subject of journalists-turned-gossip columnists.” Kurtz also notes the irony of this prescription for stonewalling from one of those who had been so indignant about the secretiveness of Brown & Williamson. But he is hardly being critical when he notes that “Don Hewitt pleads guilty to being stuck in the past”:

“Everything in America looks different,” he says. “The buses look different. The gas stations look different. The banks look different. The only thing in America that looks the same as it did when you were a kid is ‘60 Minutes.’ I think that’s a plus. It’s like when you go to grandpa’s house and the screen door still squeaks.
“If anybody thinks we couldn’t have done Joey Buttafuoco, Heidi Fleiss, Kato Kaelin, O. J.’s mother, they were all out there. I had no interest in Lorena Bobbitt cutting off her husband’s [penis]. I just felt we had more important fish to fry.”

Part of the reason for the widespread indignation about these tobacco stories among the self-congratulatory “media professionals” is such romantic notions about the past when people, it is supposed, were not so interested in sleazy stories and corporations weren’t so committed to “the bottom line.”

It’s all a myth, of course. It was back in the 1880s when Frank Harris discovered that the secret of making the London Evening News a success was to think like a fourteen-year-old (now it would have to be ten). “My obsessions then were kissing and fighting,” he wrote, neglecting to mention that they were so long afterwards, too: “when I got one or other or both of these interests into every column, the circulation of the paper increased steadily.” In fact, our unhealthy interest in salacious sex and crime stories is really just a sort of down-market version of the highbrow’s Puritanical eagerness to spy into abuses by outwardly respectable “merchants of death” (as they used to call the arms industry in the good old days). But the sins of the latter are of relatively little interest outside “the media.”

That is why their activities are such a staple of the likes of the American Journalism Review and the Columbia Journalism Review. These journals, infallible gauges of what stories journalists think are important, would have been unnecessary when there was less divergence on this subject between journalists and the ordinary consumers of journalism. But now tobacco has become as important to them as it is to the more popular glossy magazines: to some it supplies revenue; to others, moral indignation. The CJR, in fact, ran successive cover stories on the ABC/Philip Morris and the CBS/ Brown & Williamson affairs. The subtext of both, as of most of the serious treatments of the subject is the shame of yielding to the tobacco companies, even on issues of justice or fairness, and the greed if not corruption in the networks’ boardrooms which such yielding betokens. It is a journalistic point of honor to brook no qualification of the judgment that tobacco merchants are hardly better than wanton killers.

Nor is this semi-hysterical attitude towards the manufacturers of a legal product limited to the professional journals.

For example, in yet another discussion of the evils of tobacco (this time featuring tobacco advertising) a couple of years ago, the AJR quoted with approval the words of H. Mason Sizemore, proprietor of the Seattle Times, who had just banned cigarette advertisements from his paper: “These ads were designed to kill our readers, so we decided to refuse them.” If the tobacco company executives had said anything so obviously inaccurate about themselves, the journalistic professionals would unquestionably have pointed it out. AJR uses the executives’ suppositious intention to kill as its pull quote. Nor is this semi-hysterical attitude towards the manufacturers of a legal product limited to the professional journals. A. M. Rosenthal of The New York Times was one of many who excoriated “60 Minutes” for yielding to illegitimate and “disgusting” pressures from big business trying to silence the program.

To Rosenthal, although he was writing before all the circumstances of the Wigand interview became known, there was a readiness to assume that the moral issue was simplicity itself: the press were the good guys and the tobacco companies were the bad guys. Bad guys claiming their rights under, say, the laws of libel or of contract are just trying to cover up their badness. They should have no rights, at least in the view of the press, which apparently sees no issue in equity why the law should restrain it from publishing anything discreditable about them. Rosenthal writes,

Perhaps there was risk, under legal interpretations in some states. But taking risks for an important cause is part of being in the news business, a payback for the First Amendment. If other news companies bow to having their mouths zippered by business, without fighting to the Supreme Court, any worried manufacturer, from chemicals to baby rattles, will demand that every employee sign gag contracts. Farewell to vital consumer information that business prefers to keep quiet.

And this is his cue to refer to the glorious saga of The New York Times’s publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, when it said damn the lawyers, full speed ahead.

The Times publishing management overrode those lawyers and stood with the news staff. Management and news people recognized that the question was not how could we publish that treasury of confidential documents on the conduct of the Vietnam War, but how could we not.
It was a risk, but not as big as that taken by correspondents sent to battles, then and now, by the Times, or by CBS.

What lies behind this kind of crude and false moralism, which equates those who criticize tobacco companies with those who risk their lives in battle, is another kind of moral simplicity. One of the favorite incidents in the recent tobacco wars for the media moralists is the occasion when the heads of the major tobacco companies all stood up before a congressional committee and swore, one after the other, that nicotine was not addictive. The video footage was in the edited “60 Minutes” segment and was commended by Walter Goodman, also in The New York Times, as “the most pleasurable moments” of the show. This is cited again and again as evidence of these gentlemen’s corruption and mendacity, but of course the law, which the press thinks does not hound them enough, requires them to lie or face ruinous liabilities for knowingly purveying harmful substances. Yet Goodman and his like go on citing the incident as if it were immensely significant of the evil they love to denounce, here compounded by the evil of hypocrisy.

In Goodman’s view a journalist’s legal liability is simply an excuse for the tobacco executives, “rich and ruthless purveyors of a product that can kill,” to attack those in the press whose claim to propriety of the public good is unproblematical. The specter of the law simply means “that journalists, in deference to their employers and their own careers, will take fewer chances, pick softer subjects, treat them less forcefully and even hold back evidence from other reporters” as the producer of “60 Minutes,” Don Hewitt, did to him when he refused to show him a tape of the offending interview.

To their credit, Mr. Hewitt and Mr. [Mike] Wallace both acknowledged that they had weakened their program by bowing to their masters, and Mr. Wallace promised in his self-serving apologia at the end of Sunday’s program that, trust him, it would not happen again. One must cry Amen, but producers and reporters do not exert much influence in network boardrooms these days, and decisions on whether to take a risk are more likely to be made by risk-averse lawyers and higher-ups. . . . There is no reason for confidence that big-money pressures will not prevail from time to time, as overly cautious journalists, accustomed to following the lead of “60 Minutes,” fold even before being threatened.

Here is a man whose own “masters” are presumably to be tolerated only so long as they let him do whatever he thinks in the public interest; here is a man, in other words, who would have no masters, no constraints on journalists. In his ideal world, the journalists are the masters. Talk about “self-serving”!

The larger issue here includes the government’s attempts effectively to prevent the tobacco companies from doing any research, or even from saying honestly what they think. For if their research reveals harmful effects of cigarette smoke or non-commercial means of mitigating them, then they have either to make themselves criminally liable by suppressing it or to put themselves out of business. Either way, a government determined to ruin them without the necessity of passing any new laws may do so while the media looks on and cheers. Likewise, the press—in this case The Wall Street Journal—rushed to publish in December an internal memo written by someone at Philip Morris which stated that “Different people smoke for different reasons, but the primary reason is to deliver nicotine into their bodies.” You or I might think that a fairly unremarkable statement, but the Journal and the Food and Drug Administration licked their chops at what they saw as an implied admission that the company was in the drug delivery business and therefore subject to regulation by the agency.

Moreover, said The New York Times

the disclosure of the memorandum was welcomed by lawyers who have been suing Philip Morris and other tobacco companies on behalf of smokers or people who contend they were harmed by smokers around them. The lawyers said it would strengthen their cases by reinforcing earlier industry documents that reached similar conclusions.

Coyly, the article’s author, Barnaby J. Feder, notes that “Tobacco companies are leery of any statement implying that nicotine is even mildly addictive because it would only strengthen the Food and Drug Administration’s argument for controlling their products. But nicotine experts outside the tobacco companies say that a refusal to concede that nicotine is addictive is a litigation strategy, not a scientifically defensible stand.” Well, duh. But where does this “strategy” come from? It is simply the last resort of the companies confronted with determined government harassment in the attempt to meet a demand which the government hasn’t the nerve to outlaw in the way that it does the demand for other drugs. Forced to lie about what everybody knows regarding the harmful and addictive properties of tobacco, the executives then have hypocrisy added to their charge sheet.

Nor is their persecution a strictly nationalized affair. According to Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., of The Wall Street Journal, not only are six states suing the tobacco companies in order to recover the costs of treating smoking-related illnesses, but “the piranhas of the plaintiff’s bar have been schooling in unprecedented fashion” in order to get a piece of the potentially huge class-action payout to as many as ninety million Americans who have been told by their doctors to quit smoking:

In the past, juries have usually sided with the industry, holding smokers liable for the damage they inflict on themselves. The class-action lawyers seem intent on arguing that the industry, by failing to disclose everything it knew or believed about smoking, was putting one over on its customers. The corollary is that acquiring an addiction is tantamount to relieving oneself of personal responsibility. . . . As for the recent flutter of leaked memos, they prove only that the cigarette industry isn’t as dumb as nobody thought it was. If the tobacco industry dissembles and nobody is fooled, is there liability?

It’s all a ludicrous game, and Jenkins is too generous to the Puritans when he says that it is characterized by “almost an equal disingenuousness” on both sides. But their hounding of the tobacco merchants probably affords us almost as much entertainment as the saga of Elvis’s superpachydermatous eating habits did jaded, Christmas-time Britain—where at least they don’t pretend their sport is morally elevating.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 14 Number 6, on page 60
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https://newcriterion.com/issues/1996/2/smoke-gets-in-your-eyes

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