Neither CNN nor ABC will have hosts like Ryan Seacrest and Anderson Cooper firing up cigarettes during this year's New Years Eve broadcasts, watched by millions across the U.S. 

Wait, they did that last year? Of course not(1) but another class 1 carcinogen - determined when the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was still a legitimate epidemiology group and not the modern grift for ban-everything trial lawyers - was on the air last year.

That carcinogen is alcohol. 

It makes no sense that we fear cigarettes and the impact on young people if they even appear in movies but the next greatest lifestyle killer is promoted on CNN, basically being endorsed by news personalities like Anderson Cooper.

CNN has finally gotten with reality. Yet CNN did not get rid of alcohol in its hosts because of the health issue, they did it because Andy Cohen took drunken cheap shots at the rival show hosted by Ryan Seacrest. 

Whatever works. No one is advocating a ban on alcohol, any more than I'd advocate a ban on nicotine because cigarettes contain it and those kill, but it shouldn't be getting free publicity on a news network.

NOTE:
 
(1) A Republican president even banned TV cigarette advertising in 1971 (the last was a Virginia Slims commercial on the Johnny Carson show - officially The Tonight Show but no one in the public called it that) and while Carson himself had a box of cigarettes on his show until the end of his tenure in 1992, he had stopped smoking on air a decade earlier.