'Bad day for Big Tobacco' gloated the not very prolific tweeter Deborah Arnott (12 tweets since May 2013) on Wednesday.
Deborah's tweet refers to a decision by the Advertising Standards Authority to uphold a complaint by Cancer Research UK, the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies and ASH about a JTI advertisement that appeared in April 2013.
You can judge for yourself whether the complaint – and the ASA's adjudication – had merit (JTI to appeal ASA ruling on 'misleading' plain packs ad) but I note Deborah didn't see fit to tweet about another ASA adjudication that went in favour of tobacco control.
I've written about it at length already (here, here and here) so I won't repeat the gory details, but I was struck by how quiet groups such as ASH, Smokefree South West and Tobacco Free Futures were on the subject.
Yes there was the odd tweet here and there but they quickly piped down once we pointed out that in reaching its verdict the ASA Council had ignored no fewer than three recommendations by its own executive upholding our complaint.
Given the complexity of the case my worry was that journalists and bloggers would either ignore the story or publish the ASA's adjudication without further comment. Alternatively, they might confuse some of the facts.
Initially that was the case. According to Marketing Week, for example (Pro-smoking group fails to stub out NHS smoke free ad):
The ASA took expert advice alongside reviewing the studies submitted by the Department of Health and found the average number of mutations per cigarette smoked was significantly higher than the 15 suggested in the ad.
Actually, that's not true. The ASA did take "expert advice" but we don't know what he found because his report has never been published nor was it shared with us.
What we do know is that following this independent "expert advice" the ASA executive still recommended that our complaint be upheld.
What Marketing Week is referring to (I think) is "expert advice" given to the Department of Health, but if you read the ASA Council's adjudication it's easy to see how they got confused.
At least they included a quote from Forest. The Drum didn't even do that. They simply regurgitated the ASA/DH propaganda:
Department of Health ‘cancer growth’ ad found to be truthful by the ASA
Well, we weren't prepared to accept that so I got in touch and, to be fair, The Drum responded extremely graciously with this follow-up report:
Forest vows to appeal ASA “inexplicable” decision on Department of Health ruling
The tide was turning. The ASA was no longer in control of the story.
According to Marketing magazine (Forest slams ASA decision on DoH smoking ad claims):
Smoking rights campaign group Forest has clashed with the Advertising Standards Authority and the Department of Health over claims in a television ad that smoking can cause "mutations" in the body.
Again, not strictly true: our complaint concerned the specific unsubstantiated claim that 'Every 15 cigarettes you smoke will cause a mutation'. But at least we were being heard:
Simon Clark, director of Forest, said: "The Department of Health did everything it could to derail our complaint and were given every opportunity to do so.
"Despite this, the ASA executive upheld our complaint three times. That speaks volumes."
Chris Snowdon and Dick Puddlecote are keen observers of the abuse of science in relation to tobacco control. Now they were getting involved.
Angela Harbutt – who played a key role in Forest's complaint – had her say on Liberal Vision and others pitched in on other forums.
On The Free Society, for example, Brian Monteith wrote:
It’s official! If you want to tell lies in an advert it’s okay if you are the government. The state can get away with it; for other advertisers the costs might be painful.
Brian's piece was a devastating summary of Forest's correspondence with the ASA and I challenge anyone to read it and not be amazed. Significantly he concluded:
So there we have it – the long and winding road of how, after three draft recommendations upholding the Forest complaint the ASA Council sides with the government.
Note how the DH delays the process, how it requires an “expert” for something they were already pumping out in an advert and presumably were confident about stating – or do they just make it up as they go along? Note how meetings are required with the DH (confidential of course) and how the ASA then had to get its own expert to consider the DoH defence – but still rejected that defence – only for the Council to repudiate its own officials.
Is there any point to complaining against the government lies? Somehow I don’t think we have heard the last of this sorry episode.
The following day (Friday) The Free Society published another excoriating yet considered piece by Chris Oakley who revealed a "serious abuse of science by Department of Health spin doctors".
According to Chris:
The scary sounding mutations the DH attempted to use to intimidate smokers are actually quite routine events. DNA is damaged (mutated) by all kind of things on a very regular basis and the body is extremely good at repairing that damage. The theory behind the headlines is that cancer can occur when the body loses the DNA damage/repair battle and, in the case of smoking, the carcinogens in tobacco smoke increase the amount of damage until eventually the body’s resilience is overcome.
The word ‘eventually’ is important because it appears to take many years for the minority of smokers who do develop lung cancer to contract the disease, which is rare in the under sixties, and recent epidemiological evidence suggests that smokers who quit before they are 40 have similar life expectancy to never smokers.
Of course, relatively few people will have read these articles and posts so the ASA and DH may have thought they'd got away with it.
On Friday afternoon however Britain's leading political blogger published a post that exposed the story to the entire Westminster village (and beyond):
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), chaired by renowned part-time floods expert Chris Smith, has bizarrely overturned a ruling by its executive criticising a “misleading” Department for Heath anti-smoking advert.
During an 18 month investigation, the ASA’s executive on three separate occasions upheld a complaint by smokers’ rights group Forest, which had accused a recent Department of Health ad campaign of being “misleading” and “omitting material information”. Yet this week the ASA council announced it was overruling its executive’s decision, instead suddenly finding that the Department of Health ad wasn’t misleading after all. Forest say the decision is “inexplicable”, accusing the Department of Health of “doing everything it could to derail our complaint”.
The item, on the Guido Fawkes blog, included a link to the Marketing report (Forest slams ASA decision on DoH smoking ad claims).
It also included a link to Brian Monteith's Free Society article (Why do governments lie? Because they can!) which Guido described as "A full timeline of how the ASA stonewalled the investigation before mysteriously contradicting itself".
See: Another Politically Correct ASA Ruling: Chris Smith’s Council Vetoes Criticism of Anti-Smoking Ad (Guido Fawkes)
So, a "bad day for Big Tobacco" became a bad week for the Advertising Standards Authority and the Department of Health.
And it isn't over yet.