After a protracted legal battle, tobacco companies will begin running court-ordered ads next week about the health risks of smoking. The campaign of "corrective statements," mandated by a federal judge in 2006, includes a year of TV spots and roughly four months of full-page ads in 50 newspapers.
Why now? These ads have been the subject of litigation for nearly 20 years. They're the product of a lawsuit the Justice Department filed in 1999, which was decided in 2006, then appealed, before the ads themselves were finalized earlier this year. And though the spots will run widely, both TV and newspaper advertising have lost a lot of their reach since this all began.
The details: The "corrective statements" tobacco companies must make cover five topics:
The U.S. death toll of cigarettes and the diseases they cause
The addictiveness of nicotine
The fact that "light" and "low tar" cigarettes are not safer
That cigarettes are designed to be addictive
The adverse health effects of secondhand smoke
Beginning next week, print ads will run in the Sunday editions of 50 daily newspapers. The television spots must run for 52 weeks, in prime time, on the major networks.
