The Persistence of Old School Shilling
I want you to watch a bizarre interview that Dali gave to Mike Wallace. The most absurd part is Mike Wallace prefacing the interview with a straight faced and impassioned endorsement of a brand of cigarettes.
The cigarettes are said to filter out more tar and nicotine than any other cigarette on the market. The video is from 1958, long before Nixon would sign into law the The Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act that banned electronic advertising of cigarettes. Broadcasters were very much on the side of tobacco.
If you have a lot of time to kill, the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library is worth a look. There is copious documentation showing that the tobacco companies knew that their product was addictive and carcinogenic during much of the period when they were insisting to the public that they were neither. I don’t know if Mike Wallace was in on it.
