Youth appeal.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob

Self-appointed Web watchers are worried that virtual smoking and drinking might lead to the real thing.

"The Budweiser frogs are particularly troubling." Troubling is not the adjective I would have chosen. I could see cute, or maybe amusing. After seeing them a few hundred times, annoying springs to mind. But not troubling. I am trying to get inside the mind of someone who could say that with a straight face, but it's scary in there, and I'm not sure I want to go.

I am reading Alcohol & Tobacco on the Web: New Threats to Youth, a report issued in March by the Center for Media Education. The authors are Wendy Swallow Williams, a former Washington Post reporter who is now a journalism professor at American University; CME President Kathryn Montgomery, "a leading expert on television and media"; and Shelly Pasnik, the CME's director of children's policy, who also had a hand in Web of Deception: Threats to Children from Online Marketing. Williams et al. conclude that "[u]rgent action is needed to ensure that effective safeguards are put in place to protect young people from the harmful effects of online marketing of alcohol and tobacco."

Among other things, they recommend congressional hearings, an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, regulation by the Food and Drug Administration, inquiries by public health agencies, and efforts by the World Health Organization and "the international health community" to develop "effective global safeguards." They never spell out what they mean by "safeguards," but it's clear they have some sort of censorship in mind. "Self-regulation is likely to have little impact," they say, "unless there is effective government oversight and enforcement."

The rationale for censoring the Web goes like this: "The increasing presence of alcohol and tobacco marketing in these powerful new interactive media could pose great public health risks, especially for young people." Yet the authors never provide any evidence (and in fact there is precious little) that advertising and promotion, on the Web or anywhere else, increase consumption of alcohol and tobacco, as opposed to increasing consumption of particular brands. They simply assume that exposure to advertising will lead kids to drink and smoke, and they go a step further, attributing quasi-magical powers to the Web. "[I]nteractivity has a hypnotic and addictive quality that some analysts believe could be stronger than that of television," they warn. "Because of the unique nature of the interactive media, many of these new forms of advertising, of particular appeal to youth, appear to be inherently unfair and deceptive."

The report is about an inch thick, but the verbose and repetitive text occupies just 35 pages in 12-point type, including a five-page "Executive Summary." The rest is notes, lists, and (mainly) printouts of Web pages. On the face of it, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, both of which supported the study, did not get much for their money. Yet Alcohol & Tobacco on the Web generated a front-page story in The New York Times ("On Web, New Threats Seen to the Young") and received respectful coverage from other major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

It's not hard to see...