Thank You For Smoking

From Thank You for Smoking (2005)

Categories:

Interest Groups and Lobbying–The Politics of Public Opinion

Run time: 3:31

Clip Description: Thank You for Smoking shows a meeting of tobacco lobbyists trying to determine how best to market and promote cigarettes.

American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip can be used to discuss the connection between lobbying and the political influence and financial contributions by tobacco companies

Possible Uses in Classroom: This clip help to discuss the importance of lobbying and how political influence shapes financial contributions toward companies.

Discussion Questions

The product at the center of this scene is legal, taxed, and kills a large share of the people who use it as directed. American law has mostly responded by regulating what the industry may say rather than what it may sell: cigarette ads came off television and radio in 1971, and since the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009 the FDA has regulated tobacco products directly. Why does the system reach for the speech restriction first, and is an advertising ban a public-health measure, a censorship problem, or unavoidably both?
Standard interest-group theory says the concentrated side usually beats the diffuse side: a few companies with billions at stake will out-organize millions of people with a little at stake each. Tobacco was the textbook concentrated interest, and it lost anyway — in courtrooms, in the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement with most of the states, and in ordinary public opinion. What beat it, and does that mechanism generalize to any industry you can name today, or was tobacco a special case?
The lobbyist in this film is charming and good at his job, and the film knows you will enjoy watching him. Does that make you more suspicious of lobbying or more impressed by it? Then test yourself: lobbying is also how unions, churches, disability groups, veterans and your own university talk to government. Name the specific feature that makes this lobbying objectionable to you, and check whether that same feature is present in the lobbying you approve of.

Assignment

Federal lobbying registrations and quarterly activity reports are public and searchable through the House and Senate disclosure databases. Pick an industry you have opinions about, pull one quarter of filings for its largest trade association, and list the specific bills and agencies it reported lobbying on. Then, in two pages, set that list against what the association says about itself on its public website. The hard part is honesty about what the filings cannot tell you: they record the subject and the spending, not what was said in the room or whether any of it worked. Say clearly where your account is evidence and where it is inference.

For AP Students

AP U.S. Government and Politics
Unit 5: Political Participation

Topics: the topics on interest groups and their influence on policy making; reaches 4.5 on measuring public opinion
Skill: Concept Application (1.E)

Tobacco lobbyists meet to work out how to keep promoting a product that kills the people who use it. It is the least flattering possible picture of organized interests, which makes it useful in both directions: students can name what the group is doing without any prompting, and then have to answer the harder question of why a system that permits it is not simply broken.

Discussion questions

Interest groups influence policy by supplying information, by mobilizing members, and by funding campaigns. Name which of the three this group is relying on, and say why that one suits it.
The free rider problem is that people benefit from a group’s work without joining it. Explain why a concentrated industry organizes more easily than a diffuse public such as consumers or taxpayers.
Lobbying is protected by the First Amendment right to petition. Name one reform that would limit what this group can do, and say honestly whether you think it would survive a constitutional challenge.

Short activity

Two sides of the same table (15 minutes). Half the class writes the tobacco group’s three-sentence pitch to a member of Congress. The other half writes a public health group’s three-sentence pitch on the same bill. Read one of each aloud, then ask which was easier to write. It is almost always the first, and the reason — a concentrated interest with a specific ask and a clear beneficiary — is the content of the lesson rather than an aside to it.

Clip hosted on Critical Commons.