Obscenity in ESPN: The Magazine

There’s obscenity in the current issue of ESPN: The Magazine – The Body Issue.  No, not the naked bodies of athletes, all positioned discreetly to make sure we don’t see something we shouldn’t.  Rather it’s the full page tobacco advertisements.  There opposite the full-page photo of an unclothed (except for skates) Hilary Knight of the U.S. Women’s Hockey Team, is an equally full-page advertisement extolling the virtues of Camel cigarettes.  Same on the preceding pages with U.S. snowboarding gold medalist Jamie Anderson, and Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch.

Kind of ironic how The Magazine celebrates the human body of athletes on one side while promoting the single-most preventable cause of death on the other. 

It has been just over 50 years since the Surgeon General of the United States published, “Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee of the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service” and began a widespread public debate over the dangers of tobacco use and how to reduce them.  This year the Surgeon General published a report entitled, “The Health Consequences of Smoking — 50 Years of Progress.”  One of its major conclusions is that since the first Surgeon General’s report on the topic a half century ago, there have been 20 million premature deaths attributed to smoking.  Yet ESPN: The Magazine, which should be about the beneficial aspects of athletics, thinks nothing of glorifying smoking for the sake of profit.   

Now that’s obscene.