Article. Assignment 2

ADS TURN TV INTO AN 'EWW'TUBE

March 17, 2008 -- IT'S enough to make me take up smoking again.
You see the ads every morning on NY1, airing as regularly as a cigarette addict needs a fix.
The anti-tobacco ads put out by the city Health Department are as grotesque as open-heart surgery performed without anesthesia.
There's video of a beating, diseased heart. It's followed by an image of discolored lungs. There's a mouth eaten away by disease. And a throat with a purplish tumor growing from it.
I get it. Smoking is bad.
But this is sick.
For the last few months, Health Commissioner and chief nanny Dr. Thomas Frieden has ratcheted up an anti-smoking blitz to the point of nausea.
One morning, as one of the commercials came on, my gaze fell on the 9-year-old with whom I share my world. She tried to hide under the sofa.
I can explain to my kid why people simply should not smoke. But this campaign goes too far.
A check of parents assures me I'm not alone.
Anne Townsend, a Brooklyn mother, clicked on the tube to catch up on Spitzer.
As she watched, horrified, her girls, 3 and 7, mutely stared at the set, terrified.
"I had to explain to them that I think smoking is terrible," said Townsend. "And yet I don't want them to think that their friends are going to have these horrible things happen to them."
Beth, mother of kids, 4 and 8 years old, said, "I think it's horrifying!
"No one thinks everyone should go out and smoke, but the message is lost.
"To a child, it's the picture of a monster."
Sarah Perl, assistant commissioner of tobacco control, told me that since Feb. 25 the ads have logged just seven complaints, while hot-line calls from smokers who aim to quit have jumped 400 percent.
These ads are set to run through the end of the month.
A news broadcast would not post pictures of medical atrocities without warning. But these X-rated ads run without a rating.
The Health Department needs to toss them out with the Marlboro Man.

URL :
http://www.nypost.com/seven/03172008/news/columnists/ads_turn_tv_into_an_ewwtube_102351.htm

I think it's really bizzare that what the world has come to nowadays. Back in the day people know that smoking is bad because of what the parents told us about the dangerous of smoking but now we are living in different generation (generation Y) where everything is more complicated and more harder. Now most children and most people are not aware of how dangerous smoking do to the body, so it comes to the point where people need to be warned to the extreme by those advertisement of how smoke can do to our body.