Corporate News and Events

Anti-Tobacco Groups Protest Award to Time, Inc for Anti-Smoking Achievements

Milwaukee, February 24, 2005: A planned honor on Monday, February 28 at the Cipriani restaurant in New York City for Time, Inc. by the American Legacy Foundation - the largest recipient of the monies coming from the Master Settlement Agreement between the tobacco companies and the States - has some anti-tobacco entities fuming.

Representatives of Time Warner shareholders have protested parent company Time, Inc.’s honor by the American Legacy Foundation for “making progress in tobacco-free publications” because of the continued portrayal of smoking in youth-oriented films, which have been shown to influence teenagers to smoke. A local priest who has been challenging Time Warner’s promotion of tobacco is one of the most critical.

Rev. Michael Crosby, whose group, the Midwest Capuchin Franciscans, filed a shareholder resolution in 1995 challenging tobacco ads in Time, Inc.’s magazines and, this year, raised the issue about Warner Bros. portrayal of smoking in its youth-oriented movies, is protesting the award: “Time Warner may have ‘made progress’ by reducing the number of ads in its youth-oriented and/or youth-friendly magazines, but it’s making bundles of money by delivering kids to the tobacco companies through its movies. Giving it such an award is unconscionable,” he declared from his Milwaukee office.

A study by Dartmouth Medical School researchers in The Lancet (2003) followed more than 2,500 adolescents for two years. Controlling for all other factors, the study found that those teens who saw the most smoking in movies over that period were three times more likely to start smoking than those who saw the least. An accompanying “Commentary” to the study estimated that on-screen smoking now recruits 390,000 new teen smokers each year.

Crosby noted that a recent survey of Warner Bros. live action films between 1999 and 2003 found that 56% of its PG-rated movies, 68% of its PG-13 movies, and 83% of its R-rated movies included smoking. He also noted that Time Warner is listed as “first” on the American Legacy Foundation’s website naming its corporate “partners.”

In 2004, Crosby’s group filed a shareholder resolution asking the company to include social criteria in determining executive compensation. It did so because the company’s executives had not shown they were serious about reducing the amount of smoking in movies oriented to teenagers Crosby said..

A Catholic-sponsored healthcare institution, Trinity Health of Novi, MI co-filed a separate resolution in 2004 asking Time Warner to detail the health risks associated with teens that would be led to smoke as a result of watching Warner Bros. movies. Trinity Health joined religious groups and the As You Sow Foundation in filing similar resolutions with Disney, General Electric/Universal and Viacom/Paramount.

Catherine Rowan, corporate responsibility consultant for Trinity Health, said that Time Warner and the other movie companies argued that the resolutions should be considered “ordinary business” and, therefore, disallowed from the companies’ proxy materials for their 2005 annual meetings
“The data now shows that more kids are led to smoke from watching it in movies than all the tobacco advertising in the non-movie media, such as Time Warner’s magazines,” said Rowan. “Honoring Time Inc. for reducing the number of smoking ads in one medium, while it continues to portray smoking in youth-rated movies, is beyond my comprehension.”

Rowan cited the fact that 46% of teens take up smoking as a result of tobacco company advertising, including those in magazines owned by Time Warner, while 52% of all teens begin by watching smoking in teen-oriented movies.

“Smoking in movies promotes initiation of smoking in adolescents, and this is having a major effect on health.” Rowan noted. “Time Warner should be honest about its influence on young people to take up smoking and refuse this ‘honor’ from the Legacy Foundation.”

For a medical and historical viewpoint critical of the American Legacy Foundation’s honor to Time, Inc., contact:

• Alan Blum, MD, Director for the Study of Tobacco and Society, University of Alabama: 205-348-2886.
• Michael Siegal, MD, MPH, Associate Professor, Boston University School of Public Health: 508-654-3017 or 617-638-5157.