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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: Smoke Screens By Jim Naureckas Over the past few years, mainstream media coverage of the dangers of cigarette smoking has dramatically increased. But the tobacco industry is fighting back. One of the industry's most visible counterattacks was a series of full-page ads from Philip Morris, which ran in 40 newspapers across the country, reprinting an article from Forbes MediaCritic (Summer/94) that questioned the idea that secondhand smoke causes cancer in non-smokers. The Philip Morris ads presented Forbes MediaCritic's report--written by Jacob Sullum, then managing editor of Reason magazine, now at National Review--as an objective antidote to the media's biased reporting on secondhand smoke. Sullum's article argued that news accounts of the Environmental Protection Agency's 1993 report on secondhand smoke were "one-sided, credulous and superficial," and that journalists "missed an important story about the corruption of science by the political crusade against smoking." In the report, the EPA looked at 30 epidemiological studies of non-smoking women who lived with smoking men. All but six of these studies showed increased lung cancer among these women; in nine the increase was "statistically significant," meaning that the result is highly unlikely to result by chance. Where's the "corruption of science" that the press supposedly missed? Sullum made a variety of claims that depend on the reader not being too familiar with statistics. He says, for example, that the results of the studies were "weak, inconsistent and inconclusive," when the odds of getting 24 positive results out of 30 studies purely by chance are less than one in 1,000. The chance of getting nine significant results by chance is less than 1 in 10,000. To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1245 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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