Pulitzer Center Update September 5, 2025
Public Health at Stake When the State Makes Cigarettes
Project
Smoking for the State
How conflicts of interest shape tobacco policies
‘Smoking for the State’ Investigation Goes Beyond Cigarettes
Smoking is one of the deadliest public health crises in history. Tobacco kills more than 7 million people a year, mostly in low- and middle-income countries. In much of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, cigarette sales are growing.
And most of the world’s cigarettes are made by companies that are partly or wholly government-owned. China’s state-owned tobacco monopoly is the world’s largest cigarette maker. Japan’s finance ministry owns 38% of Japan Tobacco International, which produces Winston and Camel cigarettes outside the U.S.
The Pulitzer Center-supported investigation Smoking for the State focused on the conflict of interest that governments have when they both set health policy and sell cigarettes.
The project required months of reporting by The Examination and our partners about governments hostile to press freedom. The series describes how China Tobacco undermines anti-smoking efforts by the Chinese health ministry. In Laos, the investigation revealed how the state tobacco company was transformed into a public-private venture that secretly paid millions to a former leader’s family member while ensuring the country maintained some of the world's lowest cigarette taxes. And reporters tracked a byzantine network of offshore companies to show how Egypt broke up its cigarette monopoly in a way that benefited politically connected insiders and the U.S.-based company Philip Morris International.
Our final installment in Smoking for the State addresses the public health questions raised by government ownership of tobacco companies.
The Examination was a finalist for a 2025 Online Journalism Award for its work on the tobacco industry in the Global South. Pulitzer Center funding made this investigation possible: by sending a photographer to tobacco fields in China’s Yunnan province, getting a reporter to the streets of Cairo, and paying a translator to review obscure documents in the Lao language. It enabled the kind of international reporting and creative storytelling hardly any media organization can do on its own.
Best,
Impact
The Online News Association (ONA) announced finalists and a partial list of winners for the 2025 Online Journalism Awards. Six Pulitzer Center-supported projects were recognized, including Breaking the Nets, which uses multimedia to tell the stories of fisherwomen in India.
Award winners for 17 of the 24 categories were announced on August 28. The remaining categories will be announced in person at the 2025 ONA Conference in New Orleans on September 12.
Photo of the Week
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Project
Breaking the Nets
In India, the role of women in fishing remains largely unacknowledged.
