NEWS RELEASE
For More Information Contact: Elizabeth Ben-Ishai (202) 588-7746
For Immediate Release: September 22nd, 2005

Report Shows How Schools Promote Tobacco to Millions of Students

Sixty percent of movies advertised on the in-school TV program Channel One portray smoking, according to a new report by Commercial Alert, titled “Smoking Class: How Schools and Channel One Promote Tobacco to Students.”

Such cinema portrayals of tobacco are highly effective in luring young people into the ranks of tobacco users – even more so than conventional advertising. It is estimated that each year smoking in movies recruits 390,000 new young smokers in the United States. Since January 1, 2000, Channel One has advertised at least 67 commercial motion pictures.  Forty of these movies 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.

“Schools should never promote tobacco to students,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a nonprofit organization that protects children and communities from commercialism. “Channel One should be expelled from every school in the country.”

Tobacco is the number one cause of preventable deaths in the United States, causing 435,000 fatalities each year. Adolescents who see plenty of smoking on screen are nearly three times more likely to start smoking than those who see the least.  Yet school administrators and politicians have invited into schools a commercial medium that promotes tobacco use, and then have arranged for captive audiences of young people to watch it. 

Channel One’s airing of commercial messages promoting smoking contravenes the spirit and intention of many state laws that require schools to teach students a curriculum about the potential harms and legal ramifications of smoking.

Copies of the Smoking Class report are 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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