NEWS RELEASE
For More Information Contact: Gary Ruskin (503) 235-8012
For Immediate Release: November 7th, 2005
New Study Shows Why Schools Should Stop Advertising Movies That Portray Smoking
A study released today in the journal Pediatrics reconfirms the importance of halting in-school advertising of films that portray smoking. The study suggests that “exposure to movie smoking is the primary independent risk factor for smoking initiation in US adolescents” aged 10-14 years.
“It is a national scandal that thousands of schools powerfully promote smoking by advertising films that portray smoking,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert. Schools should prevent smoking, not encourage it.”
In September, Commercial Alert released a report showing that sixty percent of movies advertised on the in-school TV program Channel One portray smoking. Channel One is a for-profit company that distributes a daily commercial television program to more than 30 percent of all American teenagers in nearly 11,500 middle and high schools across the United States.
“Channel One should be expelled from every school in the country,” Ruskin said.
Commercial Alerts report is available at http://www.commercialalert.org/smokingclass.pdf.
Commercial Alert is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy. For more information, see our website at: http://www.commercialalert.org.
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