Errors, Lies, & "Corrections"
January 2001
By Edward S. Herman
from the page:
" New York Times reporters have had a strong propensity to swallow chemical industry propaganda: most dramatically with Keith Schneider's proposition that exposure to dioxin is no more threatening than “spending a week sun-bathing” (originally said to be the view of “scientists,” but eventually admitted to be Schneider's own creation); and Gina Kolata's error laden review and Nicholas Wade's angry repudiation of the book Our Stolen Future—“creating an environmental scare without evidence,” Wade told the authors, without having read the book (see Mark Dowie, “What's Wrong with the New York Times's Science Reporting,” Nation, July 6, 1998). “Junk science” for the Times is not the science produced by industry or its hired hands to protect its right to sell, it is the science of environmentalists and tort lawyers; the paper's use of the phrase replicates the views of industry. The Times has never yet reported the sensational disclosure that both Monsanto's and BASF's studies showing the harmlessness of dioxin, which were actually used by the EPA in fixing tolerances, were based on fraud. It has never reviewed or cited the powerful book by Dan Fagin and Marianne Lavelle on Toxic Deception: How the Chemical Industry Manipulates Science, Bends the Law, and Endangers Your Health (Birch Lane, 1996), and I will be surprised if it ever reviews Joe Thornton's recent Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy (MIT Press, 2000) as this impressive work calls for radical constraints on the chemical industry. "
And this relates to MONSANTO:
"For example, when the EPA discovered in the late 1980s that Monsanto had failed to deliver several hundred internal studies of possible ill-effects of chemicals, contrary to law, and a follow-up moratorium on penalties resulted in the industry coughing up 11,000 internal studies that should have been submitted to the regulators, the Times never even reported this development, with its huge implications for the workability of existing procedures for testing and protecting the public from any adverse effects of chemicalization of the environment."
from the page:
" New York Times reporters have had a strong propensity to swallow chemical industry propaganda: most dramatically with Keith Schneider's proposition that exposure to dioxin is no more threatening than “spending a week sun-bathing” (originally said to be the view of “scientists,” but eventually admitted to be Schneider's own creation); and Gina Kolata's error laden review and Nicholas Wade's angry repudiation of the book Our Stolen Future—“creating an environmental scare without evidence,” Wade told the authors, without having read the book (see Mark Dowie, “What's Wrong with the New York Times's Science Reporting,” Nation, July 6, 1998). “Junk science” for the Times is not the science produced by industry or its hired hands to protect its right to sell, it is the science of environmentalists and tort lawyers; the paper's use of the phrase replicates the views of industry. The Times has never yet reported the sensational disclosure that both Monsanto's and BASF's studies showing the harmlessness of dioxin, which were actually used by the EPA in fixing tolerances, were based on fraud. It has never reviewed or cited the powerful book by Dan Fagin and Marianne Lavelle on Toxic Deception: How the Chemical Industry Manipulates Science, Bends the Law, and Endangers Your Health (Birch Lane, 1996), and I will be surprised if it ever reviews Joe Thornton's recent Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy (MIT Press, 2000) as this impressive work calls for radical constraints on the chemical industry. "
And this relates to MONSANTO:
"For example, when the EPA discovered in the late 1980s that Monsanto had failed to deliver several hundred internal studies of possible ill-effects of chemicals, contrary to law, and a follow-up moratorium on penalties resulted in the industry coughing up 11,000 internal studies that should have been submitted to the regulators, the Times never even reported this development, with its huge implications for the workability of existing procedures for testing and protecting the public from any adverse effects of chemicalization of the environment."
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