December 4, 2016

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Sports December 4, 2016

NFL Targets Kids In Outreach Campaign

Sports writer George Dohrmann discusses the NFL’s efforts to replenish its viewership and player pipeline with a campaign targeting children, which he compares to the efforts of the tobacco industry.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Let’s talk football for a few minutes. If you are like millions of other Americans, then football is a part of your weekend. Whether you’re catching a game or jumping on the computer to check on your fantasy team, you are the reason football remains the most watched sport in the country and the most profitable sports enterprise in the world. So you might not have noticed that the sport is actually facing some stress. There’s more attention to the health effects than ever before. The number of kids participating is dropping, and this season ratings have actually dropped.

But the NFL is not taking this lying down. The league is fighting back with a massive effort to replenish its fan base by focusing on drawing kids into the game and reassuring their parents it is safe. But according to our next guest, they’re doing that by sometimes using questionable tactics, including fuzzy facts. Our guest is Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter George Dohrmann. He wrote a lengthy piece about this for Huffington Post. It’s called “Hooked For Life.” And he’s going to tell us more about it. Joining us from Jefferson Public Radio in Ashland, Ore. George, thanks so much for joining us.

GEORGE DOHRMANN: Thank you for having me.

MARTIN: So just to set the stage here, you know – I talked a little bit about this in the introduction. What place does football hold in America compared to other forms of entertainment, other sports?

DOHRMANN: It just doesn’t compare. It is the most popular sport by, you know, a measure of 10. With the exception of when the Cubs are in the World Series, usually a throwaway NFL game will outdraw a World Series game. It just has such penetration. It is such a part of the American fabric. We call baseball America’s pastime, and it’s just not true. Football is America’s pastime.

MARTIN: And yet you say in your piece – and it’s been reported in a number of places – that Americans are starting to get a little skeptical about the sport, that the number of young people participating is actually on the decline, a number of high-profile public figures – I’m thinking Terry Bradshaw, for example, of the great, you know, Pittsburgh Steelers has said that he wouldn’t let his children play. Do you think that that is what is behind the fact that people are turning away from the sport even a little bit?

DOHRMANN: Yeah. It’s playing a big role. I mean, the participation in football is down, you know, 17, 20 percent over the last five years. These are the young kids that are playing. And even more important – young people 18 to 34 are not watching football as they used to. These are two bright, red flags that the NFL has known about for a few years now and then has started reacting to.

MARTIN: So what is the NFL doing in response?

DOHRMANN: Oh, my. So, you know, in the article, we compare it to, you know, the – sort of the tactics by Big Tobacco. What the NFL is doing is they’re doing everything. And what they’re doing is they are going after your kids. I mean, they’ve even talked publicly – executives there talked about trying to get to kids and really that, you know, 6 to 12 year olds – they have put together so many initiatives to try to get kids. They created a fantasy football league game which was essentially gambling for kids. They created all these digital properties, including a virtual world to get after kids. And they’ve infiltrated schools. They’ve put together sponsored education materials that are just a joke, and they’re getting those into classrooms.

MARTIN: What about that, though? I mean, American sports have always been marketed to kids – I mean, like baseball cards. So why is that so terrible?

DOHRMANN: You know, on the face of it, you know, marketing your product – and if you think of football as just a product, you know, that’s OK. That’s what corporations do. But I think most people would say, number one, this is not something that professional sports enterprise has ever done before. We have not seen things like the NFL is doing like that fantasy game that I talked about where, you know, there were cash prizes for kids if they picked the right team and it scored the most points each week. That’s not something that we’ve ever seen before from the NBA or Major League Baseball…

MARTIN: Wait a minute – so they actually – tell me about this game – that they actually created a kid’s version of fantasy football and that they actually gave kids cash?

DOHRMANN: Yes. It was a fantasy game marketed directly to kids between 6 and 12. They went on, and they would pick a team each week just like I do in my fantasy team, just like so many millions of Americans do. And if they happen to pick the best team that week, if they picked the right quarterback and it scored the most points and down the line with each position, they could win an X-Box. They could win a thousand dollars. If they were the best kid over the course of a season to do that, they could win $10,000. They could win tickets to a game. I don’t know how this isn’t gambling. And I think they drew a lot of criticism for this. And just recently changed the rules, but it went on for years and years where they were incentivizing football.

MARTIN: You also make the point that they’re focusing on parents, like these kind of clinics for parents to educate them about the steps that they’re taking to make the game safer. What’s so terrible about that?

DOHRMANN: So, you know, what they do is they have these clinics. They’re called mom’s clinics or they’re called family football clinics, and they bring people in to talk about the game. And what they really do is they bring them in to talk about how football is safer. And they tout a program called Heads Up Football that they claim is making football safer.

The data does not suggest that at all. It is not making the game safer at least in terms of head trauma. They say things at these clinics like you’re as likely to get a concussion riding a bike as you are playing football if you’re a kid. Well, that’s true if you include girls and only up until age 10. If you exclude girls, it’s football. After the age of 10 overall, it’s football.

So they do these little things where they sort of muddy the waters when it comes to what we know about football and about head trauma, and then they make an emotional play to moms. They bring in famous football moms, you know, whose husband played in the NFL, and they talk about all that football did for their family. They make an emotional sort of plea to these moms. And so it just feels like, you know, to me – and when I witnessed it, it feels a little bit dirty.

MARTIN: Well, because you are a good reporter, you presumably approached the NFL about your findings. What did they say?

DOHRMANN: You know, they didn’t really say much. They gave us a couple of statements that just said, you know, essentially we’re concerned about the health and safety of people, and, you know, we’re a responsible organization, I guess. I mean, that’s not their exact words, but that’s essentially what they conveyed, so they didn’t say much.

MARTIN: What should they be doing in your view? As you’ve pointed out, this is a multibillion dollar industry. They have an enormous foothold on American culture and millions of people legitimately love it, and they want to participate. So what should they do?

DOHRMANN: Well, I think they’re doing one thing that I – in the story I sort of applaud them for which is they’re emphasizing flag football more. They’re growing flag football nationally, incentivizing it by giving footballs and really reduced gear to recreation departments. So that’s a good thing because we know the reality is is that the NFL at some point is going to have to acknowledge that this game is not safe for young kids, and it is not a good idea for 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 year olds to be playing that kind of a contact sport. High school on that may be a different argument, but at some point here, the NFL is going to have to admit that, you know, maybe we shouldn’t be in the youth football business, and maybe we should encourage flag and non-contact football over, you know, collisions amongst 6 and 8 year olds.

MARTIN: That’s George Dohrmann. He’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He focuses on sports. His latest article “Hooked For Life” is on the Huffington Post’s Highline website now. He was kind enough to join us from Jefferson Public Radio in Ashland, Ore. George Dohrmann, thanks so much for speaking with us.

DOHRMANN: Thank you.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Business December 4, 2016

2016 Philanthropy Trends: Americans Donate Record $373 Billion

It’s not GoFundMe or Crowdrise but megadonors who are behind the rise in charitable giving. NPR’s Ailsa Chang hears from Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies about the downside to this.

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

It’s that time of year when mailboxes are full of letters from charities asking for money. And people are also giving so they can take that end-of-year charitable tax deduction. And according to the latest figures, Americans gave a record $373 billion to charities last year. We’re going to talk more about this with Chuck Collins. He’s with the Institute for Policy Studies, and he has a new report that takes a close look at who is doing the giving.

Thanks so much for joining us.

CHUCK COLLINS: Thanks, Ailsa. Great to be with you.

CHANG: So Americans are giving away nearly $400 billion to charity. That sounds phenomenal to me. What’s the problem with that?

COLLINS: Well, it is good news. And it’s up, like, 10 percent in the last two years. But what it does is it masks a little bit of a troubling trend, which is a lot of the growth in giving is coming from very wealthy donors and their foundations. And there’s a decline of low and middle-income givers over the last 10 years, almost a 25 percent steady decline. So put those two things together, and we’re seeing what we call a top-heavy philanthropy sector emerging.

CHANG: Why is top-heavy giving bad?

COLLINS: Well, you know, when I first did fundraising, there used to be a rule of thumb. They called it the 80-20 rule, which was that 80 percent of your donations would come from 20 percent of your donors. We are now kind of moving toward, like, a 98-2 percent, you know, where 98 percent of your money comes from 2 percent of your donors. So that means there’s more volatility and unpredictability for the independent sector. It means that they’re thinking about oh, how do we cater and maintain and get those big donors? And it could lead to the risk of mission drift, meaning those big donors have a lot of say and a lot of power with the nonprofit organizations. And they may be saying, well, this is what I’m interested in, and those organizations start to morph their missions.

CHANG: I’m just thinking about back to the days of the Vanderbilts and Carnegies and Rockefellers, sort of, you know, those very, very rich people donating. Was it different than it is now in terms of the causes that were supported, the buildings that were built in their names?

COLLINS: The first Gilded Age 100 years ago plus, we have benefited from that – the Rockefeller investments in public health, Carnegie’s libraries that are in a lot of our towns. Then we – you know, really over the last century, we’ve seen the rise of mass giving, a broader set of stakeholders helping lift up this vibrant independent sector we have. And that’s my concern, is we’re sort of going back in the – toward the Gilded Age again. And I think one really important thing to remember, though, is that philanthropy is not a substitute for an adequately funded tax system in a public sector. You and I have a stake in this because every time a billionaire gives money to a foundation, you and I are chipping in 40 to 50 cents in the form of lost tax revenue.

CHANG: I get that we lose tax revenue if the mega-rich move chunks of their money into charities. But isn’t the tradeoff then that causes or arts, organizations are being funded in places where the government isn’t willing to fund?

COLLINS: Taxes and philanthropy pay for different things. Like, I was recently in New Haven, and there’s, you know, this huge nonprofit tax-exempt building boom around Yale. You know, they’re – you know, they’re running out of projects to put wealthy people’s names on. You walk three blocks away and look at the public infrastructure in New Haven around the Yale campus, and you’ll see, you know, deteriorating streets and public infrastructure. So charity does a good job building hospitals, educational institutions, but it’s not a substitute – you know, no foundation is funding to address the the water infrastructure problem in Flint. Only federal and state taxpayer-funded projects can really address some of those deeper needs.

CHANG: So what would you do? How would you discourage wealthy people from siphoning off their assets into charities and instead reroute it into our tax system?

COLLINS: One possible reform is we create an annual cap on the amount of money that can be given while taking a charitable deduction. People can give all they want, but the question is should we as taxpayers subsidize that up to a certain amount? So we could cap the deduction at, say, $200,000 a year, which is something that Donald Trump has said he wants to explore. So that would actually create an incentive to give to charity, but also to not avoid paying taxes.

CHANG: Chuck Collins is with the Institute for Policy Studies. Thanks so much for joining us.

COLLINS: Thanks, Ailsa.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Health December 4, 2016

Study: Older Smokers Can Still Significantly Lower Risk Of Death If They Quit

Researcher Sara Nash tells NPR’s Ailsa Chang why it’s never to late to quit smoking. She’s one of the authors of a new NIH-AARP study.

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

People who have smoked most of their lives may think it’s too late to quit, but a new NIH-AARP study finds that even smokers over 60 can lengthen their lives if they kick the habit. Dr. Sarah Nash, the main author of the study, joins us today from Alaska Public Media in Anchorage. Thank you so much for speaking with us.

SARAH NASH: Thank you for having me.

CHANG: So how old were the smokers you studied, and when did they quit?

NASH: We looked at people who are aged over 70 years, and we looked at current smokers and people who had quit throughout the life course. So we had never-smokers. We had people who had quit in their 30s, 40s, all the way up to the 60s.

CHANG: And for the people who quit smoking in their 60s, how did you measure the benefit to their health? Was it just in terms of extra years that they lived?

NASH: So what we did is we compared the risk of dying among people who had quit in each decade of life and people who had never smoked to the risk of death in people who are still smoking in the 70s. So we basically compared the mortality among those groups.

CHANG: Right.

NASH: And what we found was that people who quit during the 60s had a lower risk of death than people who continued to smoke into their 70s.

CHANG: What about benefits of quitting on things like preventing smoke-related diseases, like heart disease or lung cancer?

NASH: Well, we know that there’s definitely a benefit to those diseases from smoking, so what we were looking at was deaths from those diseases. So we actually looked at mortality from a whole bunch of different causes. We looked at death from lung cancer, death from other smoking-related cancers, death from respiratory infection, death from heart disease and death from stroke.

CHANG: And found that the mortality rates were lower for people who quit in their 60s compared to those who quit in their 70s or 80s.

NASH: Exactly.

CHANG: But I would assume the earlier you quit smoking, the better for your health, right? Like, what did you find on that point?

NASH: That’s exactly what we found. So we found that the risk of death, obviously, was lower in people who had quit earlier in life. But what was really surprising to us was that even the people, as you say, who had quit during the 60s – it was 23 percent less likely to die during the study than those who continued to smoke. So that’s a fairly substantial reduction in mortality risk.

CHANG: I feel like I meet a lot of smokers who – you know, who have counter examples to a study like this in their head. Like, well, I knew Joe so and so, and he never quit smoking, and he lived till he was 93 years old. How do you control for things like genetics?

NASH: So I think we all know some of those people are, right? But I think the important thing is that we’re looking at – rather than just taking an anecdote in one person, we’re looking at this – we looked at this in 160,000 people.

CHANG: Did you factor in how much, how often the subjects smoked?

NASH: Yes, we did. What we do is we calculate what we call pack years? It’s the cumulative exposure over the life course, and that was one of the factors that we adjusted for in our analysis.

CHANG: Did anything surprise you about these findings in the study?

NASH: So we know the risk of mortality is lower among those who quit smoking, so that in itself wasn’t surprising.

CHANG: Right.

NASH: But the magnitude of the observed benefit of quitting in one’s 60s – that that was remarkable, I think.

CHANG: Dr. Sarah Nash was co-author of a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Thank you so much for joining us, Sarah.

NASH: Thank you for having me.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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