Why must the media take every mention of Peter Jennings’ death and make it a diatribe against smoking?

Jennings was one of the few mainstream media personalities Base10 liked. I am sad to see him go and I wish other newsmen had the sort of wit and style he possessed.

In case you haven't heard it from sources too innumerable to cite, Peter Jennings died of lung cancer. He was sixty-seven. He was a long-time smoker but had quit more than twenty years before. Supposedly he started smoking again briefly after 9/11.

Every single thing I've read about Jennings’ death has taken the opportunity to rail against smoking pointing out statistics on lung cancer and suggesting its inevitability once one touches a cigarette to one's lips. Guys, get a clue. If you're going to take every opportunity to describe the high risks of ever smoking, what's the point of quitting?

Base10 is a former smoker. I quit about four and a half years ago. In my life I've been shot at, graduated law school, passed the bar, completed a Masters degree in Harvard and completed twenty years on the police force. But nothing was more difficult for me than quitting cigarettes. Even now, four years later, I still often feel an overwhelming desire to light up. If I stay off the smokes and live to be Peter Jennings’ age when he passed away, I will have been smoke free for thirty years. If I'm still likely to get lung cancer, why should I bother to quit?

The answer here lies in ignorant reporting. First, the biggest risk from smoking is heart disease not lung cancer. While lung cancer is associated with smoking, its incidence among smokers is still quite small. When a reporter quotes a study that says you are 2000 times more likely to get lung cancer as a smoker than as a non-smoker what he is really saying is that an infinitesimal risk becomes slightly less infinitesimal when you're a non-smoker. In other words, while your risk is 2000 times larger than a non-smoker's risk, it's still a really small risk, too. They say in Peter Jennings case, after cessation of smoking for twenty years, his risk was 400 times greater than a non-smoker, about on par with someone who has a family member with lung cancer.
This still sounds like a five-for-one improvement. Again, 400 times a really small number is still a really small number. The statistical name for this tendency to give more weight to low-risk events than is warranted is called "low base-rate fallacy" and you see a lot of it in medical reporting.

The point I'm trying to make here is that more accurate reporting would encourage more people to quit. Most of the stories I've read make me think there's no reason not to go back.

- posted by Base10 @ 1:03 PM