The Times takes its inequality campaign to the campaign for increased regulation of tobacco. From a front-page news article that runs under the headline "Tobacco Firms' Tactics Limit Poorer Nations' Smoking Laws": "tobacco opponents say the strategy is intimidating low- and middle-income countries from tackling one of the gravest health threats facing them: smoking."
What "poorer nations" is the Times talking about?
From the article:
Dr. Margaret Chan, director general of the W.H.O., said in a speech last year that legal actions against Uruguay, Norway and Australia were "deliberately designed to instill fear" in countries trying to reduce smoking.
Norway and Australia aren't exactly low-income or poor countries. The Times summons up a few others — Namibia, Gabon, Togo, and Uganda. It reports:
Uruguay has acknowledged that it would have had to drop its tobacco control law and settle with Philip Morris International if the foundation of the departing mayor of New York, Michael R. Bloomberg, had not paid to defend the law. (The company's net revenue last year was $77 billion, substantially more than Uruguay's gross domestic product.)
In fact Yahoo! Finance lists the trailing twelve months revenue for Philip Morris International as $31.32 billion, and the CIA World Factbook lists Uruguay's 2012 GDP as either $54.67 billion or $49.4 billion, so the Times claim that PMI's revenue was "substantially more" than the GDP of Uruguay appears to be incorrect. Here is the PMI 2012 earnings press release reporting net revenues of $31.4 billion. (The difference between $31 billion and $77 billion may have to do with accounting for excise taxes.)
But the relevant comparison isn't really to PMI's worldwide revenues but rather to whatever business the company does in Uruguay, which is what the company would probably be thinking of when it makes decisions on legal spending related to that market. Uruguay, and even the poorest sovereign, has taxing power, an army, along with the power of the anti-tobacco World Health Organization and its allied billionaires such as Michael Bloomberg. Depicting the tobacco companies as the big, well-funded bullies throwing their weight around in this situation may fit into the Times' (and its readers) preconceived notions about evil big business. But it stretches the limits of accurate journalism to depict this, as the Times does, as a situation in which the poor countries are the underdogs against the powerful tobacco companies.