Response to "In Fact"

This post is in response to the 355th Edition of In Fact, distributed in my independent media class last week.

George Seldes' arguably most influential battle as expressed in In Fact is his fight against the cigarette industry, which largely ignored science and advertised tobacco smoking as a healthy habit to partake in. Mainstream media largely ignored the issue because they published numerous cigarette ads in their publications.

Reading about the "Stop Cancer" drive suppressing the facts about cigarettes was just mind-blowing in retrospect. One would think that if anyone were to fight against something that causes cancer, it would be Walter Winchell and his campaign. Evidently that just is not the case. Seldes points out that Winchell is not sponsored by tobacco companies, but that because media outlets are largely sponsored by tobacco companies, it is possible that, regardless of what Winchell believes, the media will still instead choose to ignore facts.

I particularly like the layout of the pamphlet. The main story is on the right two-thirds of the page at all times, with side stories on the left (this is inverted on the reverse sides, which also makes sense). Within the main story there are multiple subheadings which clearly point out which aspect of the issue is being commented on in that section. This allows the article, which covers a wide array of different topics related to the cigarette industry, to read well and not seem disjointed.

Another aspect I liked was how Seldes called out specific publications and addressed specific issues with how they discussed tobacco, pointing out how substantial of a monetary contribution the tobacco industry makes to said publication and then what the publication said that simply is not true. The one that shocked me the most was Fortune, who reported that the "'evil' of smoking does not add up to much more than a zero".