Gay: News Headlines Often Don’t Reflect Content

By George Gay

I’ve been reading a book in which the author, in passing, casts doubt on the theory, invoked by some physicists trying to explain the complexities and contradictions thrown up by quantum physics, that there are an infinite number of universes in which an infinite number of possibilities are played out.

Although I don’t have a clue about quantum physics, I tend to agree with the author, but I am nevertheless holding the door open just in case the infinite universes theory can account for the following heading, appearing on spanishnewstoday.com: “Spanish in favor of banning smoking on bar terraces.” I am fond of odd headings, and the following one, apparently from rnz.co.nz, is interesting: “‘Young vapers consuming more nicotine than a pack-a-day cigarette habit,’ group says.”

Here, “a pack-a-day cigarette habit” is being compared with “young vapers” in respect of the nicotine they consume, but this cannot be right. A habit does not consume nicotine or anything else for that matter. “Habit” is an abstract noun. It is a construct of the imagination and cannot consume a material compound such as nicotine. A habit has no brain, no blood, no anima.

Even if you were able to add a battery to a habit, it wouldn’t keep banging on those meaningless cymbals, and going and going! What the heading wants to say is quite simple to state: Young vapers consume more nicotine than is consumed by pack-a-day cigarette smokers. The new heading has the advantage, too, of getting around the plural/singular problem of the original, where it seems that plural vapers are being compared with the smoking habit of a single person, leading to the observation: well, of course they would.

The confusion let loose by the heading is explained away in the first sentence of the story where the comparison is rightly made between some young vapers and some smokers. But the first sentence also throws up a further problem with the heading. The comparison is not with someone with a pack-a-day cigarette habit but with someone with a pack-and-a-half-a-day cigarette habit. Obviously, the headline writer didn’t want the longer reference, complete with five hyphens, so she or he merely changed the story.

There are times when numbers in headings have to be manipulated somewhat because they are unwieldy, but this is not the case here. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to figure how many cigarettes are in a pack, add half as many again and include the resulting number in the heading for an accurate tally. If there are 20 cigarettes in a pack in New Zealand, the heading could have read, “Some young vapers consume more nicotine than is consumed by 30-a-day cigarette smokers.”

Headings are there partly to draw the reader in, but they should bear a passing resemblance to the story and what it says.

But this, from brisbanetimes.com.au, is probably my most recent favorite heading: “Smoking laws set to get tougher in Queensland amid vaping concerns.” Here, it’s hard to get the connection. It’s like reading a heading that says, “Driving laws set to get tougher in Queensland amid flying concerns.” If you have concerns about flying, surely, the best approach is to address the laws around that mode of transport, not those regulating driving. And similarly, if you have concerns around vaping, you are best off addressing the laws around that habit, not those controlling the habit of smoking.

I’m fascinated, too, with the use of the passive voice giving rise to a lack of agency behind the possible new laws, which are “set to get tougher.” It seems that nobody is making them tougher; they are simply set to get tougher as the result of some natural law, or perhaps because in their universe, that’s the way things happen.

But the worst aspect of the heading, in my view, is the reference to vaping because, outside of the heading, vaping is not mentioned in the nearly 500-word story. In fact, there are only three mentions of e-cigarettes, the first nearly two-thirds of the way through the piece. And astonishingly, whereas the heading references both smoking and vaping, the story starts off with “Drinking could be banned ….”

This is a story about an idea put out by Queensland Health (QH) for public discussion—an idea that seems to favor complexity over simplicity. The first sentence has it “Drinking could be banned in the dedicated outdoor smoking areas [DOSAs] of pubs, clubs and casinos in an attempt to compel more Queenslanders to quit cigarettes.” It seems to be an attempt by QH to promote drinking as being an OK habit but to cast people who smoke while drinking as being somehow beyond the pale.

The second sentence says DOSAs could be moved farther away from other patrons and young people banned from mingling with adult smokers. This is a strange concept given that it seems to suggest that DOSAs are patrons and given that the plan seems to be to move DOSAs away from actual patrons as if patrons were fixed objects. But the worst aspect of it is the idea that young people should not mingle with adult smokers.

My bet would be that the risk posed to young people of being close to smokers is very low compared with the risk of their being close to drinkers, especially drunks, and each drinker is a potential drunk. Not convinced? Well, let me ask a question. Given that you had no choice but to leave a young person in the care of somebody who you didn’t know well, would you sooner leave the young person in the care of somebody who had been smoking or in the care of somebody who had been drinking?

QH is fretting and obsessing about secondhand smoke. It says 946,000 Queenslanders, more than half of them nonsmokers, “spent time” in a DOSA during 2018. I suppose we are supposed to gasp in horror, and certainly there is one worrying aspect to this figure. Since 946,000 is about a fifth of the state’s population, and since one has to assume many more people went to drinking holes without going into a DOSA, you have to conclude that Queensland might have a drinking problem.

There is, however, one positive to come out of this. More than 473,000 nonsmoking drinkers in Queensland have the good sense to realize that they are not going to be permanently harmed by visiting a DOSA. Perhaps they have figured out that they are exposing themselves to far greater risk by sitting outside a drinking hole near a road. Around the world, more people die from the effects of outdoor air pollution than die from the effects of both primary and secondary tobacco smoke.

So why is QH attacking tobacco smoking but not pollution? I don’t know the answer, but it might have something to do with the fact that pollution is invisible to the naked eye, while smoke—along with vapor—is easy to spot. It is also the case, of course, that smoking—along with vaping—is a minority activity while polluting is a habit everybody seems to enjoy.

There is one hearteningly honest aspect to what QH is up to. The story states that QH’s aim is “to compel more Queenslanders to quit cigarettes.” QH, according to the story, is not beating about the bush as many anti-smoking organizations do by claiming to be attempting to “encourage” smokers to quit. It has a mission to compel. To compel smokers to quit, and, of course, to compel nonsmokers not to mix with smoker outcasts in the hallowed halls of the state’s drinking holes. What next, I wonder? Perhaps the aim will be to bludgeon smokers into quitting, perhaps even torturing them.

But this magazine is about vaping, so let me move onto the last piece of the story, where e-cigarettes get a walk-on part. QH is apparently considering a licensing system for the “suppliers, wholesalers and retailers of smoking products, including e-cigarettes” that would allow those licences to be revoked for “serious breaches.”

Note the way that e-cigarettes are deemed, without even mentioning it, to be smoking products. This is what occurs, I suppose, in another of those multiple universes, also much loved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—a magical place where smoke is considered, scientifically, to be the same as vapor.

E-cigarettes are described by QH as being not a vehicle for shifting smokers away from their habit but as one of a number of “new challenges which threaten to erode success in reducing the negative effects of smoking.” “E-cigarettes have emerged to broaden the smoking product market and are promoted as less harmful, contained in attractive packaging and supplied in an array of interesting flavors,” QH is quoted as saying.

Here, to my way of thinking, QH loses the plot completely. E-cigarettes didn’t passively emerge; they were developed by responsible people who realized that existing efforts to help people stop smoking were failing and that this new vaping device could be more effective.

Everything about QHs statements on e-cigarettes seems designed to denigrate the product. The fact that they are offered in interesting flavors and contained in attractive packaging is made to seem negative. Note to QH If you want people to quit smoking, you need to make your offer interesting and attractive. Making smokers appear to be outcasts fails horribly because outcasts, by definition, are not bound by societal norms.

Then, we have the great finale. “While evidence on the safety and efficacy of these products continues to develop, there is now sufficient data that e-cigarettes are not without harms to health and that they pose a significant risk for creating a new generation of Queenslanders for whom smoking and regular nicotine use is normal,” QH is quoted as saying.

The “evidence” that is continuing to emerge on e-cigarettes—again, apparently without agency—is not stated in the story because, I assume, it is hugely in favor of the efficacy of e-cigarettes. What we get instead is a statement about how there is sufficient data that e-cigarettes are not without harms. Again, this is all over the place. What QH is saying is that the use of e-cigarettes is not risk-free. Well of course it isn’t. Nothing is risk-free. But what QH is trying to imply, without presenting any evidence, is that the use of e-cigarettes is riskier than anyone could possibly know.

QH might be right, however, in saying e-cigarettes could eventually regularize the use of nicotine, but then people do use recreational drugs, and vaping has to be a whole lot better for you than smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol.

I’m sorry, but I cannot resist one last dig. The following sentence opened a recent neweurope.eu story: “The European Commission announced that the proposal for the revised tobacco excise directive will be made public at the beginning of 2022’s fourth quarter during a digital consultation session that was held on May 18, with the participation of commission officials and other interested parties such as retailers, associations, representatives of scientific and medical associations as well as representatives of the tobacco industry.”

What I like about this overlong sentence and the universe in which it works is that time is so fluid. Perhaps those quantum physicists would see it as existing or not in Schrodinger’s box. But to make it work on this planet of the known universe, you would have to rework it as something like, “The European Commission announced during a digital consultation session held on May 18 that the proposal for the revised tobacco excise directive would be made public at the beginning of 2022’s fourth quarter ….”