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From: dsi@unccvax.UUCP (Dataspan Inc)
Newsgroups: net.med,net.legal
Subject: Re: AMA anti-smoking drive
Message-ID: <395@unccvax.unccvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 16-Dec-85 08:50:28 EST
Article-I.D.: unccvax.395
Posted: Mon Dec 16 08:50:28 1985
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> While we're on the subject, how about if all cigarette advertisement
> (and chewing tobacco advertisement!) were simply made illegal?  If
> people want to smoke, that's their business;  but if the tobacco
> industry want other people to smoke, that's everyone's business.
> 
> My contention is that advertising is behavior modification, not
> statement of views, and therefore is not protected under the bill of
> rights.  In support for this, note that TV cigarette ads were
> banned.  Why not just make it all tobacco ads?

     For the record (and I do not smoke, incidentally, nor use tobacco
products) TV advertising was not "banned" because it was behaviour
modification.  It was a compromise arrived at by the television broadcasters
and the FCC.  The anti-tobacco lobbies were arriving at the great Judgement
Day in a hurry in an attempt to apply the Fairness Doctrine (y'know, equal
time for opposing viewpoints when broadcasts of a controversial issue occur)
to sales of anti-cigarette commercials.  They were willing to *pay* for 
the spots, they just wanted equal avails for the cigarette advertising
carried at the time.  

     I object to the banning of tobacco advertising on TV because it treats
the Fifth Estate as a second-class citizen with respect to the First
Amendment.  Fortunately, Chuck Ferris and his gang are rapidly changing
(his words) the FCC from the Federal Cannot Commission to the FNPC - 
the Federal No Problem Commission.  When the rest of the tobacco ads go,
then go the beer and wine ads, and then everything else which could possibly
get trashed as a bad influence will.  If one is going to ban "advertising",
please ban it across the board, but don't single out broadcasters for
a problem they didn't create or are primarily responsible for.

     Someday (hopefully, within my lifetime) the bloody Fairness Doctrine
will go away, and we broadcasters will be treated like responsible members
of society.  The Charlotte Obscurer can publish all the pro-life or pro-choice
or pro-tobacco or anti-tobacco stuff it wants, but when my TV station broadcasts
"Cagney and Lacey" or shows a young person smoking a cigarette in a movie,
we've had it.

     Frankly, I wish the landscape weren't cluttered with cigarette ads
on billboards.....


Yours for a free Fifth Estate

David Anthony
DataSpan, Inc/Long Pine Broadcasting, Inc