Shafer Smokes The Media Over Nicotine Coverage

Experienced bloggers and readers know that the two mainstream media critics worth bookmarking are Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post and Jack Shafer at Slate. Shafer demonstrates his brilliance in tonight’s critique of this week’s bad science coverage regarding a Massachussetts study that reported a 10% rise in nicotine levels in cigarettes. All of the major newspapers covered the story, and the New York Times even dedicated an editorial to berating the tobacco industry for its heartlessness, but Shafer reports that lazy reporting and bad sourcing created a hysteria over nothing at all:

Journalists give tobacco companies the same benefit of the doubt they do alleged baby-rapists, which is to say none. And who can blame them? For a century, the tobacco industry has lied and obfuscated about their products at every turn.
Yet serial liars aren’t automatically guilty of every charge leveled against them. Even the tobacco company baddies, who took a wicked beating this week in the press, deserve a fair hearing before we hang them.
The news hook this week was a Commonwealth of Massachusetts report about nicotine yields in cigarettes increasing by 10 percent since 1998. The Boston Globe’s headline reports “Cigarettes pack more nicotine,” and the story’s lede alleges that the boost makes “it tougher for smokers to quit.” The story quotes Massachusetts officials, anti-smoking advocates from public health and law, but no critics of the report. The tobacco companies declined, across the board, to talk to the press.

The media jumped all over the Massachussetts report, in all instances framing the reported increase in nicotine as an attempt to make cigarettes more addictive. Would a 10% increase in nicotine actually result in a higher addiction potential? The newspapers never bothered to find out, nor did they ask themselves the obvious question as a reality check: would anyone argue that a 10% reduction in nicotine levels would make cigarettes less addictive?
Shafer performs the research that the newspapers skipped. He took the paper to a highly-regarded medical researcher at Lancet and investigated the research methodology used by Massachussetts. He found that shoddy research and reporting had made the allegations unprovable and a poor selection for reporting. It’s a complicated story and almost impossible to excerpt, so be sure to read the whole article — and to watch for Shafer’s work at Slate whenever possible.