TV defenders invoked even tobacco deaths to minimize their programs’ violence

Evidence

Even the death toll caused by the tobacco industry is recruited in the service of comparative exoneration: “Exploring the effects of violence on my program is a sliver as compared with manifestations of violence in the total society. My program is fitted between cigarette advertisements, which are murder weapons and other commercials which ask, ‘Madam, are you attractive in bed?’” (Baldwin & Lewis, 1972). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 837