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Anti-smoking zealots: restrict depiction of tobacco consumption in movies
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In their continuing effort to eliminate tobacco use, anti-smoking advocates are now lobbying for restrictions on tobacco consumption in “all film media.”
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), any film depicting tobacco consumption should automatically receive the “R” rating and movie studios should “certify that they received no payoffs from tobacco companies to display tobacco products or their use, stop displaying tobacco brands onscreen [and] require strong anti-tobacco advertisements before all movies that have tobacco imagery.”
So what end could possibly justify such blatant violations of personal and creative freedom? Why our children’s health, of course. The American Medical Association Alliance, who recently began a campaign to irritate the movie studios into compliance with these draconian rules, claims that there is […] “a growing body of research showing that youth see and are influenced by these [tobacco] images. In fact, studies show that one-third to half of all new smoking by teens can be attributed to smoking in movies.”
Sure they do.
What all of these convenient studies ignore, however, is just how sophisticated and attentive children are, even during those confusing teenage years. As University of Minnesota Marketing Professor Deborah Roedder John points out, when it comes to advertising “[o]lder children are discriminating consumers […][b]y virtue of their growing sophistication, older children and adolescents find entertainment in analyzing the creativity strategy of many commercials and constructing theories for why certain elements are persuasive.”
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, children are quite capable of deciphering the marketing ploys aimed at them. Do they suddenly loose that ability when they see cigarette advertising?
It also seems odd that anti-smoking zealots place so much emphasis on the effects of tobacco advertising. Since more than 20 percent of Americans regularly smoke tobacco, it’s unlikely that children are only exposed to it when they watch a movie. What reason is there, then, to suggest that advertising has such an overwhelming impact on young people?
The truth of the matter is “it’s for the children” is simply a poor excuse to coerce everyone into complying with heavy-handed social standards. The WHO admitted as much when they claimed that “smoking in movies misleads youths into thinking that tobacco use is normal, acceptable, socially beneficial and more common that [sic] it really is […]” That’s what this is really about. Smoking is bad, very bad, and we can’t have children believing that responsible adults are free to choose whether or not to smoke.
Fortunately, for the time being, smoking is normal and acceptable because personal choice is normal and acceptable.The tobacco nannies don’t like that idea because with it comes personal responsibility. If the public accepts the hard truth that parents, and not advertisments, are primarily responsible for their children’s behavior it will be hard to fool them into believing that cigarettes should be taken out of movies.
In reality, the way a child is brought up is the heart of the issue. Their upbringing determines the things they place value on; thus affecting their media consumption habits, friendship network, and in turn their purchasing wants. No matter how many times children see movie stars smoking on screen, nothing will replace the role of parents.
