An article on the front page of today's New York Times reports on the killing of a protester at the G-8 summit. "The killing in Genoa, a medieval seaport converted into a 21st-century citadel, is the first death during an anti-globalization demonstration since the movement tempestuously surfaced at a World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999," the Times reports. That's written clumsily enough to make it sound like someone died at the protests in Seattle in 1999. In fact, as a letter from Seattle Mayor Paul Schell noted at the end of the 1999 WTO meeting, "No one was killed. No one was seriously injured." The letter is available online at http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/wto/sm_120699.htm.
Blowing Smoke: A dispatch from Prague in the business section of today's New York Times reports "anti-smoking groups and government officials are indignant that Philip Morris commissioned a report for the Czech government arguing that smokers saved the state millions of dollars by dying prematurely." Judging by the tone of the article, it seems the Times is indignant, too: "The Czech government and press and anti-smoking groups worldwide reacted in outrage," the Times reports, quoting critics who called the report "first-class cynicism and hyena-ism," and "ethically unacceptable." Moreover, the Times asserts that "The report is certain to bolster the cause of anti-smoking campaigners in the United States." It quotes one such anti-smoking campaigner as saying, "A company that goes out of its way to rationalize as a good thing the fact that its products kill people doesn't deserve a seat at the table."
Well, the Times doesn't mention it in its own article, but by these silly standards, the New York Times itself is guilty of "hyena-ism" and "doesn't deserve a seat at the table." After all, the New York Times magazine on Sunday, April 7, 1996, ran an article titled"A Peace Plan for the Cigarette Wars," which called a "half-truth" the notion that "Smokers impose a heavy tax burden on the rest of us through Medicaid and other public expenditures to treat their smoking-related diseases." The Times magazine article noted, "Although the typical smoker, absorbing, say, 200 hits a day of an abrasive, toxic agent for years, naturally runs up a higher lifetime medical bill than the nonsmoker, that lifetime is on average eight years shorter. This means that smokers are not around long enough to collect many of the benefits -- Social Security and Medicare, as well as private pension and health-care payments -- that other Americans do."
The 1996 Times article continued: "Not surprisingly, this dubious blessing smokers bestow on their countrymen is rarely cited by either the industry or its critics. The latter, furthermore, almost never mention the offsetting value of the Federal, state and local cigarette taxes paid by smokers. In Massachusetts, according to the Tobacco Institute, smokers paid $237 million in 1994 under the state's 51-cents-a-pack tax, well above the $200 million in public health-care costs that Attorney General Harshbarger is suing the cigarette makers to recover. The most highly regarded study on the subject, conducted for the Rand Corporation and published in 1991 by Harvard University Press, found that smokers' true net cost to society was 15 cents a pack. The figure was later raised to 33 cents in 1995 dollars in studies by the Congressional Research Service and independent scholars, far less than the national average of 52 cents a pack that smokers were then paying in taxes."
In other words, the Times reports on this controversy in Prague about the Philip Morris stuff without noting that the cost-benefit analysis was roughly accurate and reported uncontroversially in the New York Times five years ago. Talk about hyena-ism!
Note: Smartertimes.com is traveling today and operating off the New York Times online edition.