Wednesday, December 21, 2005, 9:59 PM EST.
MPAA Misleads Parents, Press and Movie Ratings?
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Two health advocacy programs that track tobacco content in movies today denounced the Motion Picture Association of America for making false statements when attorneys general from 32 states last month called for anti-tobacco spots on DVDs.
The groups allege that MPAA spokeswomen misled the public by saying movie ratings include smoking in its descriptors, which inform parents of objectionable content such as drug use, nudity, profanity and violence. However, research from the two groups shows that, of 433 movies with smoking in the past four years, only one top box-office film included tobacco use in its rating description.
Since 2002, both programs—Thumbs Up! Thumbs Down!, a joint project of the American Lung Association of Sacramento-Emigrant Trails and Grassroots Solutions, Inc., and Smoke Free Movies of the University of California at San Francisco—have lobbied the MPAA to keep smoking out of youth-rated G/PG/PG- 13 movies by modernizing the ratings system to rate smoking movies "R."
"It's a proven fact: The more smoking that children and teenagers see on screen, the more likely they'll become smokers," said Kori Titus of Thumbs Up! Thumbs Down! whose Web site, www.scenesmoking.org, provides reviews of current and past movies and a plethora of information and research on the issue of tobacco use in film. "Parents need every possible tool to protect their kids from America's No. 1 killer. Instead, by making these false remarks in news stories, the MPAA is actually steering parents wrong."
The health groups say that current ratings leave parents with no advance warning or control over kids' exposure to on-screen tobacco imagery, which researchers have concluded recruits 390,000 new teen smokers a year in the United States alone.
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