Scottish client journalism

Via Taking Liberties, I see that Scotland's Sunday Post has been publishing some anti-smoking slop ahead of the country's 20th anniversary of its smoking ban. 

 

Last week a reporter from the Sunday Post contacted Forest to say she was working on a feature ‘marking the anniversary of Scotland’s smoke-free legislation and its long-term public health impact’.

‘As part of the piece,’ she wrote, ‘I’m reporting on expert claims that improved respiratory health following the smoking ban may have helped reduce the severity of respiratory outcomes during the Covid-19 pandemic.

‘I’d welcome a response from Forest to include balance in the article.’

 

This was a new one to me so I looked up the article. It is unbelievably thin. The "expert claims" amount to this and nothing more...

 

Doc­tor Rachel O’Don­nell, Asso­ciate Pro­fessor at the Uni­versity of Stirl­ing’s Insti­tute for Social Mar­ket­ing and Health (ISMH), said that Covid out­comes could have been worse without the smoking ban legis­la­tion.

She said: “It’s not an unreas­on­able leap to sug­gest that as a nation we might well have seen a dif­fer­ent scen­ario in terms of the res­pir­at­ory impacts of the Covid-19 pan­demic without the smoke-free legis­la­tion. I think we could have seen a dif­fer­ent pic­ture.”

 

It's not an unreasonable leap to suggest that The Sunday Post will publish any old bollocks and present it as news. This hunch from an activist-academic at the Insti­tute for Social Mar­ket­ing and Health - a slush fund/lobby group founded by the lunatic Gerard Hastings - was reported under the headline: 'Stub­bing out the cigar­ettes helped hos­pit­als cope with pan­demic'!

 

Forest sent them a few quotes, as requested, and pointed out the now-established fact that smokers were less likely than nonsmokers to get Covid during the pandemic. They didn't print any of it.

 

 

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