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Smoking Role Models

Of course, you already know that smoking is bad for you. More than any other age group, kids are encouraged to smoke when they see role-models smoking. You may not have realized just home much smoking kids see on TV. They actually view a good deal of that smoking from role models who smoke in music videos.

A study done by two researchers at Wake Forest University that looked at over 500 different random music videos found that at least ten percent of the videos on any channel showed people smoking. Some channels weighed in at twenty percent, and some at almost thirty percent. That's three out of every ten videos!

Also, the more role-model-y the figure, the more likely she or he is to be smoking. Lead singers were twice as likely to have cigarettes as background musicians. This may also seem a bit surprising to you, but rap videos were three times as likely as country videos to show people smoking.

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