If you want some background you can get it HERE
By Charles Fulwood, former Director of Communications at NRDC
On the day that all of America sat transfixed by the stunning swiftness of the O.J. Simpson verdict, most news organizations ignored another court decision that will have a far greater impact on most people's lives, as well as their own operations. On October 2, 1995, the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit brought against CBS by apple growers claiming that a 1989 "60 Minutes" broadcast warning of potential health risks from the chemical Alar (which was sprayed on apples) was false.
This landmark ruling was a victory for the First Amendment, the public's right to know about potential health risks in their food, and the safety of future generations. A decision to the contrary would have had a "chilling effect on speech," as the court itself acknowledged, and could have had the effect of denying parents information they need to make their own judgments about what food is safe for their children to eat.
The dismissal's significance is all the greater because Alar has become the O.J. Simpson of environmental policy -- a larger than life symbol of everything that's wrong or right with the system, depending on one's perspective. In fact, the Court's decision unequivocally affirms that the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) study warning of Alar's dangers, Intolerable Risk: Pesticides in Our Children's Food, was grounded in sound science, and that "60 Minutes" engaged in responsible journalism. But having been proven that we were right from the start, will the media now dispose of the myths that became conventional wisdom due to a five-year long industry disinformation campaign?
That remains to be seen. Since Alar was withdrawn from the market and later banned by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the wake of the NRDC report, the "60 Minutes" broadcast, a Consumer Reports study of Alar residues in apples, and other reporting, industry has tried to rewrite Alar's scientific history. They systematically sought to make the case that Alar wasn't so dangerous after all in order to impeach the credibility of all environmentalists. They created and then repeated myth after myth about this carcinogen -- not only through an all-out frontal assault but consistently in passing references -- so that any time an environmental organization warned of the dangers of a pesticide, food additive or other product, they could label it "another Alar." And, to a large degree, they succeeded.
Why? Partly because NRDC and other environmental organizations found ourselves woefully unprepared for an unaccustomed role -- being on the defensive. And partly because we mistakenly assumed that the news media would take industry's self-serving arguments with the appropriate grain of salt, counterbalancing them with scientific facts from dispassionate and impartial sources, such as the EPA (under the hardly pro-environment Reagan and Bush administrations) and the National Academy of Sciences.
That didn't happen. The attacks against the banning of Alar were led by an organization called the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). It sounds like a pillar of credibility. But among its funding sources were annual $25,000 contributions from Uniroyal, Alar's manufacturer. Most of the other major chemical and pesticide makers, including Dow, DuPont, Monsanto and Union Carbide, also made large contributions. ACSH apparently performs the same role for the chemical industry that the Council for Tobacco Research does for the tobacco industry -- "a public relations operation," as the Journal of the American Medical Association reports a Brown & Williamson official characterizing the latter organization.
Unfortunately, the media, particularly television news, typically used ACSH's own description of itself -- a "consumer education and public health organization" -- with no reference to its financial backing or whose interests it was serving. Even print, which is usually more responsible, was vulnerable -- the Columbia Journalism Review documented more than a dozen outlets, including Associated Press, United Press International, Knight-Ridder, the Washington Post, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, that covered ACSH "without mentioning its industry funding. "That's an abdication of the media's responsibility to not only tell readers, viewers and listeners what newsmakers are saying but to give them relevant information necessary to form their own critical judgments about what to believe. Unfortunately, ACSH is but one example of this phenomenon, driven by industry increasingly adept in the creative use of deception and the public relations firms that design such strategies -- most prominently among them, Hill & Knowlton, Burson Marsteller, Edelman, The Jefferson Group, E. Bruce Harrison and Cerrell Associates. Recognizing that industry lacks credibility on environmental issues, the industry/PR modus operandi is to create front groups to advocate its interests -- sometimes well-cloaked, other times thinly-veiled, and always with Orwellian names. Sometimes, these organizations are pseudo-scientific like ACSH and other times pseudo-grassroots -- "astroturf" is the more accurate term. Among the many examples:
As Ron Arnold, a leader in the industry-backed, astroturf "Wise Use" movement told a Canadian timber company, "Give them [the grassroots front groups] the money. You stop defending yourselves, let them do it, and you get the hell out of the way. Because citizens' groups have credibility and industries don't."
It's bad enough when the media report on these front groups as if they're real, but what's even worse is when the press blindly accepts their arguments. This happened with Alar, as the media reiterated ACSH's contention that the pesticide is not harmful to humans, that animal tests cannot prove a product's carcinogenicity, and that NRDC was crying wolf. Once these initial stories entered into electronic databases such as Nexis, Datatimes and Dow Jones that journalists routinely use for research, they were repeated uncritically and uncontextually in subsequent stories. This further stacked the database deck for reporters too lazy to find the most credible sources. We even had the bizarre phenomenon of journalists who reiterated ACSH's critiques of Intolerable Risk without having read the original report.
Independent scientific evidence clearly shows that ACSH's "studies" were merely propaganda cloaked as science and that NRDC got it right the first time:
A 1993 report by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that existing federal pesticide laws do not adequately protect infants and young children from dietary exposure to pesticides. The chair of the committee that issued this report, Dr. Philip Landrigan, said that "NRDC was absolutely on the right track when they excoriated the regulatory agencies for having allowed a toxic material such as Alar to stay on the market for 25 years without proper toxicity testing."
In a 1992 decision removing NRDC as a defendant in the apple growers' lawsuit, U.S. Judge William Fremming Neilsen ruled that Intolerable Risk, "is not a polemical tract preying on raw emotions and irrational fears. . . . There are no theatrics, no histrionic expressions of outrage and no visual or auditory hyperbole . . . "As it relates to apples," Neilsen found, "Risk is in large measure premised on Uniroyal's own market-basket and carcinogenicity studies conducted in response to an EPA directive in 1984."
The judge also recounted NRDC's focus on the extra danger to young children from hazardous substances in their food, and government's initial failure to make this distinction. "Assuming the accuracy of these postulations, the government is in grievous error when allowable exposures are calculated based on probable life-time contact without regard for the age at which exposure occurs," he wrote.
This point was reaffirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals, which wrote in the October 2 decision that, "The growers have provided no affirmative evidence that daminozide does not pose a risk to children. The fact that there have been no studies conducted specifically on the cancer risks to children from daminozide does nothing to disprove the conclusion that, if children consume more of a carcinogenic substance than do adults, they are at higher risk for contracting cancer."
The Court of Appeals also rejected ACSH's point about animal studies, calling them "a legitimate means for assessing cancer risks to humans."
That they are an imperfect means, even environmentalists would agree. But because one cannot use humans as laboratory animals, they're all we've got. And even where there is a degree of uncertainty, does ACSH argue that we should err on the side of profit, not our children's health? That's what the crux of this debate -- cleverly hidden by industry and completely missed by much news media coverage -- is all about.
That's a debate we should have, openly and on the merits, with each side's financial and political interests laid squarely on the table, and reported fully and objectively by the news media. But that's a debate industry does not want to have, because then it would lose in the court of public opinion, just as it has consistently lost in the court of legal opinion.
Unfortunately, having an informed debate on these issues may not be possible in the future, because the same forces that created the myths about Alar are working with supportive members of Congress to cut federal funding of scientific research. For example, one proposal considered by the 104th Congress, H.R. 3322, specifically prohibited all research on climate change and new environmental technologies. In addition to that mandate, H.R. 3322 would have cut EPA's research budget by 20 percent. That bill passed the House in May 1996, but died in the Senate. If enacted into law, that legislation would have forced policy-makers to increasingly rely on industry-funded research of the type ACSH conducts, which would inevitably be of dubious credibility. Combine this with the 104th Congress' attempt to undermine enforcement of health and environmental laws, and rather than debating serious policy issues and moral choices, we may be reduced to after-the-fact epidemiological surveys and body counts. Many of those who promoted science cuts in the last Congress have returned in the 105th Congress and can be expected to pursue similar legislation.
To help avert this wretched prospect, the media can start by throwing out the Alar myths and starting fresh in its environmental coverage. No one is suggesting they take the word of environmentalists at face value any more than industry's. All we ask is that they do their homework about what the science says, who is funding it, and what agendas are being served. Then, perhaps Alar can move from being the O.J. Simpson of environmental policy to its Nelson Mandela -- an icon of hope, to which future generations will owe an enormous debt.
Natural Resources Defense Council
last revised 2.5.97