Women's Magazines Cover Up Smoke Risks

May 16, 2002

By Dr. Elizabeth Whelan

Testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Oversight and Government Management, Restructuring and the District of Columbia, May 14 — Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chairman:

Good morning. I am Elizabeth Whelan, President of the American Council on Science and Health, a consumer education and advocacy group based in New York City. My background includes master's and doctoral degrees in epidemiology and public health from the Yale School of Medicine and Harvard School of Public Health. I appreciate this opportunity to address this critical issue related to women's magazines and their dubious record in reporting the dangers of smoking to American women.

Back in the early and mid-l970s, I began regularly contributing health-related consumer articles to popular women's magazines. Given that cigarette-smoking was then and is now the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, my health-oriented articles necessarily focused on the dangers posed by smoking.

I was astonished that my articles were regularly edited so that pejorative references to smoking were omitted — and sometimes they were simply spiked. In one of many instances, I was assigned a piece called "Protect Your Man from Cancer." Of course, I focused on the role of smoking in the causation of lung, bladder, pancreatic, oral, and other cancers — and the article was returned to me with full payment, noting that there were too many ads in the magazine that month to run such a piece.

With this personal experience of the difficulty of placing anti-smoking messages, I decided to take a close, quantitative look at the extent, or lack thereof, of coverage of issues related to cigarettes and health in women's magazines.

The first ACSH survey of popular magazines' coverage of smoking hazards was published in the early l980s. ACSH examined the health-related articles in eighteen magazines, dating back to 1965, and found that although the magazines covered a wide array of health topics, there was a near complete lack of coverage on smoking. Only one-third of the magazines surveyed reported the hazards of smoking both frequently and accurately. The majority either confused or obfuscated the facts, or failed to mention them altogether. Out of eighteen magazines, only five did not accept cigarette advertising, and the best coverage of smoking and health was present in those five magazines. At a time when information concerning the impact of smoking on health was already widespread in the medical literature, these results were disturbing.

Follow-up surveys throughout the 1980s and 1990s reinforced these earlier findings. Incredibly, while ignoring cigarette smoking as a health risk, magazines regularly warned women about remote or completely hypothetical dangers, purporting to reveal how to reduce your risk of cancer by keeping your alarm clock three to five feet from your bed to protect against emanating electromagnetic fields, or highlighting the health risks of lead wrappers on wine bottles.

Surveys of popular women's magazines from 1997-2000 showed that although the reporting was gradually improving, there was still little coverage of the health risks of smoking relative to smoking's enormous contribution to premature death and illness. In 1997, ACSH found that cigarette ads outweighed anti-smoking messages by six to one, and in 1998, the ratio had nearly doubled to eleven to one. In 2000, even with a surge in anti-tobacco ads, the ratio of cigarette ads to anti-smoking messages was ten to one. The total ratio of cigarette ad pages to full-fledged anti-smoking articles was thirty to one.

In the year 2000, articles about the health effects of tobacco in the magazines we surveyed still made up less than one percent of the 2,414 health-related articles published. These magazines are guilty of both omission and commission here: that is, not only do they not cover cigarette-related diseases, they also edit out smoking mentions where they would otherwise typically be. Examples are Glamour's list of "8 Simple Health Savers" including advice on taking calcium supplements and working out but no mention of stopping smoking, and Elle's "New Year's Resolutions" making no mention of smoking cessation.

ACSH last surveyed magazines in the year 2000. The year 2000 marked the beginning of anti-smoking ads placed by the American Legacy Foundation. In June 2000, Philip Morris announced that it would be pulling cigarette ads from forty-two magazines.

It will be interesting to see how these changes in cigarette advertising affect the editorial content of women's magazines. There is reason to believe that the reporting on the dangers of cigarette smoking will improve now that there are fewer ads. For example, the March 2002 issue of Self contained a two-page article on smoking cessation. We should keep in mind, however, that the presence of cigarette ads is just one reason, albeit a major one, that magazines have not covered cigarette hazards. Another reason is that the topic of cigarette-related disease is a "downer" — and these magazines seek to entertain.

While the coverage may improve — that is yet to be seen — we must recall the astonishing blackout on coverage demonstrated in our surveys from l965 to 2000. Women who are now in their mid-fifties — and are being diagnosed with lung cancer, emphysema, and more from smoking — are the same women who were reading magazines in the l960s and l970s, magazines which withheld and distorted the health risks of smoking while using their pages to promote cigarettes as glamorous, sexy, and. yes, safe.

Dr. Whelan, President of ACSH, holds doctoral and master's degrees in public health.

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