Philippe Boucher's Rendez Vous Stan Shatenstein
Rendez-vous with Stan Shatenstein
Editor of Tobacco News Online
By Philippe Boucher
Rendez-vous with Stan Shatenstein
Thank you Stan for accepting our ´ rendez-vous ª.
May I ask you to introduce yourself?
I am the editor of Tobacco News Online, a daily digest of news dealing with all tobacco- and smoking-related issues and questions. The primary focus is on Canadian news, as the majority of my readers are in this country.
I place high priority on medical and scientific reports, as well, and also cover the top international stories, with the invaluable assistance of TBBS webmaster Gene Borio.
I've been interested in tobacco control for a long time, but became formally involved in the field in 1995.
I have had some working experience in the social services, but my primary professional background is as a journalist.
I've written on a wide range of subjects over the past 20+ years. For a long time, I was a film critic.
I've also covered many sporting events, including two editions of the Tour de France bike race and a number of international marathons.
In '95, I was hired by the Quebec Health Ministry as part of the effort that would eventually lead to the passage of Bill 444 in 1998. My assignment was to survey a number of European countries and US states, to find out what sort of tobacco-control legislation existed in those jurisdictions.
That first report led to employment at the MontrÈal Regional Health Board, where I worked on a variety of tobacco dossiers, including the development and publication of "la revue de presse", a French-language daily news summary.
After the passage of Bill 444, my contract at the Regional Health Board ended and I began publishing TNO.
I am solely responsible for the editorial content of TNO, but this e-journal owes its existence to the generous support of the Non-Smokers'
Rights Association (NSRA) and its Smoking and Health Action Foundation (SHAF)
First question: How many stories did you share with the TNO's readers in 1999?
6134. No, I jest. I have no real clue. I would imagine that it's in the range of 6000 headlines, but a significantly lower number of distinct stories.
When a subject is particularly newsworthy, I include a variety of alternate titles and links, so that readers can sense the breadth of the story's appeal.
Also, there might be a local angle in one report that is missing in others.
The basic goal is to avoid redundancy while still offering an idea of the relative weight assigned to a subject by the media.
The news outlets may be wrong in their emphasis, by my standards or yours, but I think it is helpful to have readers see what makes waves and what doesn't.
2. There is a saying ´ too much information kills information ª. Sometimes looking at all that is produced I feel overwhelmed and at the same time I am frustrated because I think many important stories are not told. What is your assessment?
One of my goals as an editor is to be reasonably selective, but I am serving readers with many different needs. When I look at the print edition of a newspaper, I scan the front section and editorial pages quite thoroughly, but I comfortably ignore the stock market listings and fashion files.
There is indeed a vast amount of information out there, and it is in desperate need of better organization and management in the tobacco-control community.
All the same, the reader has to be able to take a deep breath and know when to toss a newspaper into the recycling bin and, similarly, when to hit the delete key on incoming e-mail.
As for important stories not being told, this brings us back to the old news maxim "if it bleeds, it leads".
I'm hardly the first to point out that tobacco does its damage relatively quietly, one victim at a time, one family at a time. The analogy to jumbo jets crashing is just that - an analogy. It's useful but, in reality, a single jumbo jet crash that kills 300 people makes the front pages for days.
The "excess mortality" deaths of 300, 3000, or 30,000 tobacco users go relatively unnoticed, except by the smokers' grieving relatives.
Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil. This is the banality of death.
The important stories can and must be told, but it will continue to take great thoughtfulness and diligence in order to create news and to not simply react to stories that have already made headlines.
3. The beginning of a new year is the right time for wishes. What are your wishes for tobacco control information on line for the new year?
It might take until the 'real' start of the millennium, in 2001, for my wish to come true. There is a crying need for a site that would allow for more highly-automated downloading, searching and indexing of tobacco- and smoking-related information.
Following in the footsteps of Jack Cannon and a few others, Gene Borio has done yeoman's work in making a maximum number of stories available online to the greatest number of readers.
However, there really are not the resources available to Gene, myself and a few others that would allow for the development of a broader set of tools.
There will always be a need for sharp-eyed editors to handle and prioritize the news, but there must be more of a collective effort on newsgathering and dissemination.
Too many parts of the world are lacking in resources, while seemingly abundant monies languish or are misdirected in wealthier countries. The Web is a tool, not a panacea, but it can be used in particularly effective fashion to get information to those who need it, and in timely fashion.
GlobaLink does this admirably well, at times, but there are many gaps to be filled.
4. It is also the right time for looking back at the year past. What are for you the main 1999 events/stories in tobacco control?
This is a difficult question, mainly because I don't see tobacco control as a calendar-driven realm. A tough piece of legislation on secondhand smoke will be adopted in one country; a lawsuit will be launched in another; an initiative will be announced by an international agency.
It is the slow accretion of detail that constitutes history in the making.
In Canada, for example, a lawsuit was recently launched against the RJReynolds family of companies for their alleged direct involvement in smuggling schemes that saw tobacco products exported tax-free to the US for re-import to Canada.
The lawsuit was filed under US civil racketeering (RICO) statutes. This is an important development but it would prove even more significant if criminal charges were to follow in Canada.
At the same time, the extensive media coverage of last month's story will help along the process of denormalization of the industry. Will that, in the long run, prove more important than the lawsuit itself?
Similarly, there was excellent coverage, in this country and elsewhere, of a trip to the Guildford depository by a team led by Cynthia Callard of Physicians for a Smoke-free Canada, and to the subsequent posting of the uncovered documents on the PSC website.
For the most part, the documents were not earth-shattering in their revelations, but they garnered extremely useful media attention. One memo, in particular, however, was cited in many news stories leading up to and following the launch of the federal lawsuit.
So, in many cases, there is both short-term and longer-term impact to stories. Globally, plans for international conventions on advertising and packaging hold very high promise, but they could fall victim to industry pressures or to the weaknesses inherent in committee processes.
That might well prove to be the big story of the next few years.
5. Let us be more selective: if you had to pick two moments, the best and the worst.
My first thought for a best moment is the Engle verdict, in Florida, which could have broad repercussions. Followed as it was by the Gourlain decision in France, there is again the sense that litigation might prove an effective tool for changing societal norms on tobacco use. The caveat, however, is that there have been promising verdicts before that have been overturned or that have not led to significant follow-up cases.
The discussion over the attendant lawyers' fees in US cases is a fairly low point, distracting as it does from the central issues. There is a good argument to be made that there are better ways of effecting change but, in the absence of governmental will, the courts remain a viable venue in which to attack the tobacco industry.
>From a media viewpoint, a real low is the continuing use of discredited, industry-friendly "facts and data" in a number of outlets.
The Sunday Telegraph/IARC nonsense continues to get broad play, as does the work of Kip Viscusi, who perpetually offers the Swiftian approach to the economics of tobacco.
In essence, he is saying that if you can kill off everybody who's about to cash a first pension cheque, you can save society a bundle of money. Absurd and grotesque.
Whenever I see Viscusi's work quoted approvingly - and it happens with depressing regularity - I send my readers to Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal".
In that short pamphlet, Swift argued that, in times of famine, you could just eat your children. You make up for the food shortage and there are fewer mouths to feed. Swift was writing satire. Sadly, Viscusi is not.
Do you have anything else you would like to add?
There may be more serious issues in tobacco control than the writings of Viscusi, but I mention them because they are emblematic of an overarching and highly-serious problem.
If you repeat a lie often enough, it begins to sound credible.
Again, not a stunning revelation, but a very important concept in tobacco control. I mentioned at the beginning that I used to work as a film critic. I rate Casablanca as the best film of all time, for its marriage of great storytelling with serious themes, while avoiding all hints of cinematic pedantry.
Of course, Casablanca is also a non-stop smoke-a-thon. There's nothing to be done about it. We can't convince movie theatre owners and TV programmers to create cognitive dissonance by running pictures of Humphrey Bogart's cancer-ridden skull before the movie begins.
The power of Casablanca's images, and of Viscusi's repeated misinformation, explains why the "newsworthy" retirements of the Marlboro Man and of Joe Camel are really such modest successes. The widespread use of tobacco products is a phenomenon less than a century old, but the 20th Century has been a time of true globalization of imagery - in photography, cinema and television - and of widespread literacy.
The ability of tobacco control advocates to create images more seductive than those burnished in our collective memory is the great challenge of the new century.
Tobacco is a leaf plant, and cannot be uninvented or eradicated. Prohibition is a futile and ludicrous concept. The control of tobacco - of its content, packaging, use and sale - remains the overriding goal. The devil resides forever in the details.
Thank you Stan for taking the time to be with us today. Prepared by Philippe Boucher mailto:IslandErsk@aol.com
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