Brill's Gags On Media's Secondhand-Smoke Stories

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 21, 1998 | by John Elvin

Well, here's another news story that probably won't make the cut in the elite media. It's headlined "Warning: Secondhand Smoke May Not Kill You," and comes courtesy of the often tedious but occasionally on-target new media-monitoring magazine, Brill's Content. The story analyzes a 93-page ruling by federal Judge William Osteen throwing out the Environmental Protection Agency's, or EPA's claims about secondhand tobacco smoke as a cause of cancer. Osteen found that the EPA had "publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun" and "adjusted established procedure and scientific norms to validate the agency's public conclusion...." In the wake of the ruling, editorialists and activists launched a frenzy of attacks on the judge's credibility.

The media, the activist-oriented Brill's found, "shouldn't have been shocked by the judge's criticisms" of EPA's findings as bad science. Most journalists, the magazine found, simply "took what they were given" on the subject by antitobacco activists. Stories just parroted findings that "Secondhand tobacco smoke causes lung cancer that kills an estimated 3,000 non-smokers a year," to cite a New York Times report on the EPA's study. To be fair to Brill's the publication didn't stray too far from the politically correct line in its article, submitting that the media almost could be forgiven for accepting the bogus EPA findings due to the tobacco firms' "reputation for dishonesty."