Corporate Junk Science in the Media

The prime mark of industry control over environmental policy is that its right to put chemicals into the environment without independent testing is unchallenged even today. This hegemony is so complete that only a small fringe of environmentalists question this industry prerogative. Mainstream environmentalists take producer sovereignty for granted and seek only marginal changes that are perceived to be within the realm of the politically feasible.

Following the furor over Silent Spring in the early 1960s, there was no slackening in the production and use of pesticides either here or abroad. Pesticide use doubled in this country over the next 30 years, from 540 million pounds in 1964 to well over a billion pounds in 1993; intensity of application per acre of farmland more than doubled, and pesticide use in households and home lawn care skyrocketed. Some poisons like DDT and PCBs were eventually banned, but others took their place, and dozens of chemicals that are carcinogens or with known damaging effects on neurological and immune systems remain in widespread use.

Atrazine, a suspected human carcinogen, is one of the most widely used pesticides in U.S. agriculture, and has contaminated ground water supplies over virtually the entire country. In Toxic Deception, Fagin and Lavelle describe how Ciba-Geigy has been able to keep atrazine in the market for 30 years, despite the accumulating evidence of its dangers, by manipulating science, the EPA, the political system, and the media. This is a major story of political-regulatory-scientific corruption, with serious public health consequences. But the mainstream media have not been interested, because as members of the corporate system the media's role has been to protect the powerful chemical industry's rights, to avoid and deflect fundamental criticism, and to normalize the ongoing arrangements. As in the case of the military budget, we sometimes get brief, usually back-page, pieces of information on damage and scandals, but a great deal of information is blacked out and serious and extended analyses and debates about the industry's abuses, modes of self-protection, social costs, and alternatives to poisoning, are off the agenda.

Industry's ongoing right to poison first has been dramatically illustrated in recent years by the introduction of Monsanto's recombinant bovine hormone drug rBGH and some two dozen genetically engineered food crops. As in the case of chemicals, this has been done almost entirely on the basis of industry assurances of safety, without testing or serious independent evaluation of potential downstream effects. As Peter Montague says, “Putting genetically-engineered plants and animals into the natural environment is nothing more than a crap shoot—one with potential consequences far greater than Monsanto's previous calamitous experiments, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and Agent Orange” (Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly, October, 29, 1998). Harvard geneticist Richard Lew- ontin says that, “I would be surprised if we don't get one rude shock after another” under a regime of engineered plants. It is already a concern of U.S. organic farmers that Monsanto's incorporation into its potato seed of a gene from the bacteria bacillus thuriengensis (Bt)—which kills Colorado potato beetles—will quickly bring forth resistant insects, thus harming organic farmers who use Bt sparingly. A recent study of the effects of growing genetically modified crops on a commercial scale in Britain, commissioned by the British government, concluded that there were insufficient safeguards to prevent the creation of hybrid, multi-resistant plants, and that such a development posed major dangers to British hedgerows, birds, and indigenous plants. (This report, which remains unpublished because of its “controversial” nature, is described in “Revealed: Risks of Genetic Food,” by Marie Woolf, The Independent, December 12, 1998.)

Monsanto and its comrades have invested vast sums in biological research, and they want a market payoff now. Long-term ecological and safety effects have never been a prime concern of the chemical industry, and Phil Angell, PR director of Monsanto, acknowledged recently that safety is not his company's business or responsibility: “Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job” (NYT, October 25, 1998). (Of course, when the FDA [or EPA] is too aggressive about safety, the industry works hard to weaken or capture the agency, to make it responsive to industry demands. If successful, as is often the case, the industry can produce and sell without much impediment based on possible safety threats, while claiming that the FDA [or EPA] is taking care of safety and the public interest.)

rBGH has not been accepted for use in Canada because, among other reasons, no long-term toxicology studies were ever required of its manufacturer, and Canada's science evaluators concluded that the only short-term toxicology study was improperly reported by both Monsanto and the FDA to have found that the growth hormone “was not and could not be absorbed into the bloodstream.” Thus, despite a $1-2 million bribe offer from Monsanto for an expedited approval, and support for the company by the top officials of the Canadian health regulatory body, Monsanto's effort there remains stymied (Richard Lloyd, “Health Canada scientists told to serve drug companies,” CCPA Monitor, December 1998-January 1999).

Despite the Canadian setback, and the fact that European authorities and many scientists have grave doubts about the effects of genetic engineering on human health and ecology, it has moved ahead in the U.S. With no serious regulatory impediment or public debate within the media. One exception was a critical article by Michael Pollan On “Playing God in the Garden” (NYT Magazine, October 25, 1998), but this article stood alone. The Canadian dispute, which included the dramatic bribe effort by Monsanto, and the recent disclosure of a highly critical British government-sponsored report on the risks of genetically engineered food, were both ignored by the mainstream U.S. media.

Another manifestation of industry control has been the media's selective treatment of books on the environment. Those that seriously challenge the industry tend to be ignored; those compatible with the industry's agenda and that attack the industry's enemies get more generous treatment. The New York Times, for example, has never reviewed Samuel Epstein's Politics of Cancer (1978), Marc Lappe's Chemical Deception (1991), Jennifer Curtis and Tim Profeta's After Silent Spring (1993), Fagin and Lavelle's Toxic Deception (1995), or the eloquent personal-scientific memoir by Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream (1996). Theo Colbourn, John Peterson Myers and Dianne Dumanoski's Our Stolen Future (1996) was given a hostile and dishonest review in the Times by Gina Kolata.

Joe Thornton's Science for Sale (1990), published by Greenpeace, which described Monsanto's abuse of science in its dioxin studies, was neither reviewed nor mentioned by the New York Times, Washington Post, or Los Angeles Times. On the other hand, Marcia Angell's Science on Trial (1996), which gives the industry perspective on junk science, was reviewed twice in the New York Times (as well as in the Washington Post and widely elsewhere). Gregg Easterbrook's A Moment on the Earth (1995), which celebrated the successes of environmentalism, chided environmentalists as negativists, and suggested that things were under good control—a book described by scientist Peter Raven as offering “a Panglossian world view, in which he offers us a sugar-coated invitation to inaction”—was greeted warmly in all the mainstream media. It was also welcomed by the chemical industry as it met their crucial demand of reassurance, along with minimal criticism of industry or the regulatory system.

Normalizing the Damage

Sandra Steingraber, in Living Downstream, lays great stress on the fact that while cancer rates have increased steadily in parallel with the chemicalization of the environment, and hundreds of micro-studies have shown the linkage in particular cases, the connection “has not been pursued in any systematic, exhaustive way. The environment...keeps falling off the cancer screen.” She illustrates this, among many other ways, by the fact that when an Illinois State Cancer Registry was established in 1984 to monitor health effects of hazardous substances, the cancer registry was funded, but not the registry of hazardous substances (which industry strenuously opposed). She notes how regularly public authorities and public educational campaigns stress “life style” causes of cancer, not environmental facts related to industry products and wastes. She hints at what I believe is obvious: that the chemical industry, wanting environmental causes played down, has succeeded in getting governments and mainstream educators to do the same.

So do the mainstream media, which have had hundreds of opportunities to open the Pandora's box—but with each report suggesting chemical damage, the media at best give the local facts, with “balance”; at worst, they ignore or misread such reports. They don't allow them to provoke a larger investigation. Thus a typical news report tells us that the EPA has decided to permit the continued use of alachlor “despite its potential for causing cancer and contamination of the drinking water supplies in farm communities,” because of the “substantial benefits” that “outweigh the risks.” Environmentalists are angry at the decision, whereas Monsanto says that this reflects “good science”; and this superficial account and balanced debate was given a short article on page 25 of the Washington Post (December 16, 1987). A Greenpeace campaign against the use of vinyl in toys, including rattles and early teethers, based on the evidence that the compound causes liver and kidney tumors, gets balanced back- page attention, and sits alone without editorial comment (NYT, November 13 and 18, 1998).

The International Joint Commission (IJC), a joint U.S. and Canadian venture dating back to 1978, was given the formidable task of trying to halt the flow of toxic chemicals into the Great Lakes. It reports each year that it has failed to stem the tide, that the toxic flow continues to increase and is seriously damaging to human health. From 1992 onward the annual reports of the IJC have called for an ending of the use of chlorine in manufacturing as the crucial requirement for meeting their assigned task. They find, not surprisingly, that industry is not interested in curtailing the use of chlorine. But the national media also treat the IJC's annual reports with extreme brevity and no followup. The IJC's U.S. co-chair, Gordon Durnil, has remarked that “we have a societal problem about how to deal with this, but 90 percent of the population doesn't even know there's anything to worry about.”

Normalizing Regulatory Failure

In accord with industry domination of the agenda, the media portray the EPA as a powerhouse organization, possibly too aggressive and adversarial in its pursuit of the public interest. The reality—a seriously underfunded organization, unable to do its job properly, sometimes captured and often driven to industry-friendly compromises—can only be grasped, if at all, by a very close, often between-the-lines study of media reporting. The media do not feature the fact that, contrary to the stated aim of the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, the EPA has not been able to cope with the toxic chemical flood, and an estimated 70-75 percent of the chemicals in wide use have still not been tested for toxicity.

Neither does the media focus on other evidence that the system of leaving industry to test for safety has failed. For example, in the course of a struggle with Monsanto over the company's right to introduce Santogard between 1986 and 1990, the EPA discovered that some years back Monsanto had found negative effects of Santogard in a study that the company had failed to submit to the EPA, contrary to law. Monsanto was fined $196,000, although by law the fine should have been $19.7 million. The company was then allowed to search for other delinquent toxicity studies, and turned up 164, for which it was fined another nominal $648,000. Realizing that the other chemical companies were also probably failing to submit studies the EPA arranged an “amnesty” with the industry, promising only nominal fines for the next three years in exchange for the industry coughing up previously hidden studies. Under this amnesty the industry produced some 11,000 documents. Although the nominal fines, and the demonstration of a massive industry failure to provide evidence of chemical effects as required by law, showed gross inadequacies in the ongoing methods of evaluating chemical risks, the media did not find this story of even passing interest.

Equally sensational, and even more revealing of EPA's regulatory weakness and frequent connivance with industry, was the sequence of events involving dioxin regulation between 1986 and 1993. The paper and pulp industry produces dioxin and became worried over the regulatory threat in the 1980s. In their book No Margin of Safety, published by Greenpeace in August 1987, Paul Merrell and Carol Van Strum showed how the EPA had colluded with the paper industry to keep information out of the public domain, to characterize any they were compelled to release as “preliminary,” and to fix dioxin standards at politically acceptable levels. Following publication of the book, a paper industry official leaked 300 pages of documents to Greenpeace, which fully confirmed the claims in No Margin of Safety, demonstrating joint EPA-industry planning to lower the risk assessment of dioxin and to assuage public fears by reassurances of safety and labeling study results only “preliminary.”

This sensational inside material was first offered as an exclusive to the New York Times, where an article based on it was killed. The Times article which eventually appeared (September 24, 1987) merely noted that “industry executives were concerned about public responses when the contamination of paper products became known.” Not only was the evidence of industry-EPA collusion suppressed, the article also stated that the EPA had “found less contamination than officials had expected,” which, given the suppressed internal documents' proof of the EPA's agreement to help soften the public impact of the findings, represents exceptionally dishonest journalism. The Washington Post, following an article that reported the EPA's finding that dioxin levels were “seen as no threat to health” (September 25, 1987), did finally devote a piece to the industry's PR campaign and attempt to influence the EPA, and contained hints that this campaign was successful (Michael Weiskopf, October 25, 1987). But the article was put on page 23 and had no follow-up.

Equally enlightening has been the media's treatment of evidence of industry falsification of data. The EPA's fixing of tolerances on dioxin had been founded in part on Monsanto and BASF studies of the effects of accidents involving dioxin. These studies, which claimed no serious human damage, were both eventually shown to have been based on data manipulation; when corrected for the tricks used (mainly inappropriate inclusions and exclusions of workers), there were very significant negative health results. Monsanto's falsifications and their implications for dioxin regulation were brought to the attention of EPA officials—as well as environmentalists and veterans groups that had been adversely affected by the industry's junk science—by EPA chemist Cate Jenkins in 1991. EPA began a criminal investigation of Monsanto's fraud, which was quietly dropped, following Monsanto pressure and private exchanges and assurances between the company and EPA officials. On the other hand, Cate Jenkins, the whistleblower, was subjected to harassment and a series of internal legal proceedings (all of which failed).

Neither the New York Times nor Washington Post ever mentioned the Monsanto/BASF frauds, the abortive EPA criminal investigation of Monsanto, Cate Jenkins, and her memos on the dioxin frauds and regulation, or her persecution as a whistleblower. What makes this blackout especially important is the fact that both the Post and Times lined up with the paper industry during this period in claiming that “good science” was showing the old dioxin nemesis to have been inflated. So just as Monsanto and BASF doctored evidence, so the major papers doctored the news, suppressed negative evidence on both “good science” and EPA industry collusion (with a partial exception in the Post's treatment of the collusion scandal of 1986-1987), and scoffed at the dioxin “scare.”

The National Research Council's 1993 report on Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children made it clear that in establishing pesticide “tolerances” the EPA and FDA had used adults as a standard, failing to take into account the fact that children were far more vulnerable. Once again, the pro-industry bias in regulatory standards manifested in this case went unrecognized by the mainstream media. More recently, Monsanto successfully petitioned the EPA to increase allowable residue levels for the chemical glyphosate, the active ingredient in its genetically reengineered soybean, Roundup Ready, from 6 to 20 parts per million. As Marc Lappe and Britt Baily note, what was “safe” in 1987 “was considered ‘safe' eight years later at three times the original tolerance” (Against the Grain: Biotechnology and the Corporate Takeover of Your Food). This is not discussed in the mainstream media.

Normalizing the Right Not-To-Know

For decades the chemical industry has fought against disclosure of the effects of its products, on the grounds of “proprietary information” and the free speech right to be silent. Although full disclosure would seem especially urgent where products can harm and potential victims need to know as much as possible for dealing with damage, the industry has been remarkably successful in preserving its right to silence and the public's right not-to-know. Worker knowledge of the effects of workplace chemicals came only by decades of struggle, and it wasn't till 1986, after Bhopal (and a leakage of the Bhopal death chemical in West Virginia), that Congress finally passed an Emergency Planning and Community Right-To-Know Act. The act was passed over furious industry opposition and by one vote.

Under the Act, the larger chemical-producing firms were obliged to make public information on their releases into the environment of some 654 named chemicals. The mainstream media did not find the industry's resistance to informing the public, or the passage of the act and the act itself, or its effects, of great interest. Steingraber cites industry admissions that this enforced disclosure compelled industry members to pay attention to the chemicals they were pouring into the environment, a point that would seem of enormous significance to public health. The Toxic Release Inventory showed startling figures—several billion pounds of toxic chemicals each year—even with the limited coverage of chemicals and companies, self-reporting, and many refusals to comply. But you will look in vain in the mainstream media for detailed reports of these releases, calls for better data, discussions of the health consequences of these releases, or indignation at a system permitting such large-scale emissions of poisons.

From 1993 onward, business has been getting states to pass “Audit Privilege Laws,” which give companies the right to make their own environmental audits, to report this fact to state authorities along with promises to correct noted deficiencies, and then to be free of any requirement to disclose environmental information to the public or in court proceedings. EPA official Steven Herman states that such laws are “anti-law enforcement, impede public right-to-know, and can penalize employees who report illegal activities to law enforcement authorities. They interfere with government's ability to protect public health and safety. They prevent the public from obtaining potentially critical information about environmental hazards...” (National Environmental Enforcement Journal, February 1998). But 24 states have passed such laws, and once again the mainstream media have been exceedingly quiet about this regressive process, with a few back-page articles, but without featuring this development or giving it critical editorial attention.

There has also been a very important right-to-know issue connected with the new bio-technology products. Many consumers and environmentalists have insisted that the milk produced by cows given Monsanto's growth hormones, and soybeans and other farm products that are bio-engineered, should be labeled as such. Vermont and other states have tried to legislate labeling, and a number of European countries have been concerned about allowing such products entry as well as sale without labeling. There are deeper problems at stake here than disclosure to consumers, but it is notable that the mainstream media in the U.S. do not consider either issue of great importance. These matters have been given back-page treatment at best, and no editorial criticism in the national media. The New York Times editorially condemned the “food disparagement” laws in the case of Oprah Winfrey versus the Texas cattle ranchers (“Free Speech About Food,” January 19, 1998), but neither it nor the other national papers have spoken out in favor of labeling bio-engineered products (or against “audit privilege laws”). It would appear that in these cases producer sovereignty overwhelms any concern for biological threats or consumers' right to choose.

Junk Science-Based “Scares”

As noted earlier, the media use the phrase “junk science” mainly as the industry uses it, to refer to non-industry-friendly science, not DuPont-, Ciba-Geigy-, or Monsanto-friendly science, despite the long record of the industry's scientific frauds and its use of science as a public relations tool. Similarly, the media tend to jump on each industry bandwagon claiming that a challenge to industry products is a “scare” based on bad science.

Alar. This was dramatically illustrated following a CBS “60 Minutes” broadcast in February 1989 which featured the cancer risk of Alar, a chemical used on apples to keep them from dropping early and to improve their color. The EPA had stalled in taking action on Alar for 16 years, following lab tests in 1973 that showed that Alar produced cancer in mice. Later tests confirmed this result. In May 1989 the EPA finally banned Alar as posing a carcinogenic threat, and in 1992 the National Academy of Sciences confirmed the seriousness of this threat. Alar should have been banned in 1973 under the Delaney clause, which barred the use of any carcinogen in food.

Nevertheless, after the CBS program caused a sudden shrinkage of apple sales, the industry and its PR and media allies, with initial support from the EPA, denounced an “Alar scare” allegedly based on junk science. This claim was quickly institutionalized in the mass media, and Jane Brody, Walter Goodman, and Gina Kolata in the New York Times have referred to this scare repeatedly as established truth. Most recently, Brody's article on “Health Scares That Aren't So Scary” (August 18, 1998) cited Alar as the number one case in point. Brody used as her sole uncontested source on this and other scares a document put out by the American Council on Health, an industry-funded propaganda operation, identified by Brody only as “based in New York.” She falsely stated that the EPA had not found Alar unacceptable as a carcinogen, and implied that the high dosages given mice in laboratory tests made the tests useless (a regular industry gambit—when the tests do not yield the right conclusions). On September 5, 1998, a “Corrections” in the Times acknowledged Brody's failure to properly identify the Council and to admit that the EPA had found Alar carcinogenic and banned its use.

The dioxin scare. As noted, the New York Times and Washington Post both failed to mention the 1990-1991 disclosures that Monsanto's and BASF's dioxin studies were fraudulent, and the Times never reported the compelling 1987 evidence of collusion between the EPA and paper industry to downplay the dioxin threat. These suppressions set the stage for both papers, but especially the Times, aggressively taking the industry line in the 1990s that the dioxin threat was overrated, that in the words of Times reporter Keith Schneider, dioxin exposure “is now considered by some experts to be no more risky than spending a week sunbathing” (August 15, 1991).

In a devastating critique of Schneider's reporting (“See No Evil,” American Journalism Review, 1993), Vicki Monks showed, first, that the sunbathing analogy was concocted by Schneider and was repudiated even by his pet expert Vernon Houk. In a later report (September 26, 1993), allegedly based on the findings of a panel of independent scientists assembled by the EPA, Schneider claimed that the panel found that, “the risk to average Americans exposed to dioxin...is lower than previously believed.” Schneider cited no panel scientist to this effect, and Monks quoted several that say his conclusion had no basis in the panel's findings. The panel members and other scientific studies in the same period suggested that dioxin is even more dangerous than previously recognized; that it posed a threat to reproductive and immune systems at levels already occurring in people's bodies. Schneider never reported this important finding. When questioned by Monks about his subsequent March 21, 1993 statement that “new research indicates that dioxin may not be so dangerous after all,” he told her that he was referring only to dioxin's cancer-causing potential, but his article never stated that qualification, and Monks showed that the scientific consensus contradicted his statement on dioxin's cancer threat as well.

On March 21, 1993 Schneider claimed that there was a new “third wave” of more reasonable environmentalism based on “science” and not driven by “popular panics.” He cited no scientist supporting the third wave, but did include the wise use movement in the vanguard (without mentioning its industry funding), and cited Monsanto head David Mahoney's observation that people were finally recognizing the truths that industry has been pushing. Throughout his writings on dioxin, Schneider's main—almost exclusive— scientist spokesperson was Vernon Houk, who in May 1991 gave his opinion that the Times Beach, Missouri residents who had been evacuated from a dioxin contaminated town in 1982 never should have been moved. Schneider and the Times played this up on the front page, and Schneider claimed that this “reversal” by Houk also reflected the new wave. But Houk hadn't reversed his position at all—and Vicki Monks showed that Schneider knew this from his own earlier reports. Houk had long been a dioxin defender, was responsible for the sabotaging of a study of the effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam veterans, and eventually ended up as an open spokesperson for the paper industry (all unreported by the Times).

Schneider's terrible reporting was widely picked up in the media and was cycled and recycled—in both the Times and elsewhere. It was repeatedly stated that dioxins were no more harmful than sunbathing and, as the Chicago Tribune editorialized, “dioxin has turned out to be something of a non-issue where humans are concerned.” This is the process whereby industry junk science becomes institutionalized and genuine chemical threats are transmuted into “alarms.”

Our Stolen Future, Kolata, and Times policy. Peter Montague has shown convincingly that Gina Kolata's hostile Times review of Theo Colbourn (et al's) Our Stolen Future was an incompetent and extremely biased hatchet job (Rachel's Environmental & Health Weekly, #486, March 21, 1996). Other Times reporters also disliked Our Stolen Future, with its message of possibly serious environmental damage attributable to the industrial status quo. In his Nation article on “What's Wrong With The New York Times's Science Reporting?” (July 6, 1998), Mark Dowie reports that when Colbourn and her co-authors visited the Times to discuss their book, Nicholas Wade, Kolata's then-superior flew into a rage, denouncing them as “creating an environmental scare without evidence.” Wade hadn't read the book, but his reaction to “bad [i.e., critical of industry] science” was automatic. It is evident that Kolata, who Dowie calls “a faithful apologist for corporate science,” reflects New York Times policy. Dowie points out that the paper has repeatedly refused to publish corrections of Kolata's misquotations and errors, and she has remained in place to do her industry service for a decade. Keith Schneider also lasted almost a decade as an environmental reporter, and according to Dowie, senior editors in New York called Schneider to congratulate him on his dioxin series. Meanwhile, Philip Shabecoff, Philip Hilts, and Richard Severo were pushed out of environmental reporting as too critical. Shabecoff recalled that his boss told him that, “New York is complaining. You're too pro-environment and they say you're ignoring the economic costs of environmental protection.”

Other alarms. Along with the Alar, dioxin, and immune system scares there have been toxic waste site scares, asbestos in schools scares, power line leukemia scares, silicone breast implant scares, and others. The mainstream media have picked these up with an enthusiasm they rarely display in pursuit of industry-imposed damage or regulatory malpractice, and with remarkable gullibility, as in the Alar and dioxin scare cases. When the Times's Brody, Schneider, or Wade mention the asbestos in schools scare, they never refer to the long history of asbestos industry denial of harm from asbestos. They regularly fail to discuss how industry power constrains, influences, and sometimes dominates regulatory policy. Never in all of their accounts of scares, risks, and cost-benefit tradeoffs, do they ever suggest that the precautionary principle should be controlling or that risks and costs should be borne by those imposing a product on society. They have internalized the deep agenda that serves industry needs, and push industry interests, often with enthusiasm and passion.

Concluding Note

The environmental movement has brought important benefits, both educational and in policy actions. However, it has not changed the industry's right to put chemicals into the environment without independent testing in advance of general use, and with only limited provision of public information. There is even a strong regressive movement currently to reduce information availability by means of Audit Privilege Laws. The rule is still caveat emptor, not precaution and reverse onus; the producers remain sovereign; and the mainstream media, by normalizing industry rights and the deep agenda, help preserve that producer sovereignty.             Z