Here are some news stories you may not have heard:
The Cassini space probe did not kill "everyone on this planet:" as some environmental groups and at least one newspaper had predicted. Rather, it left safely for Saturn on Oct. 15, with its fuel load of 72 pounds of plutonium intact.
In dramatizing dangers of the Cassini liftoff, many media were calling plutonium "the most toxic substance known." Thus, they ignored what many researchers believe - that moderate radiation exposure may actually enhance human health. Japanese who lived near Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 194S have been living longer than their peers. Ditto, workers exposed to plutonium at Los Alamos during World War II.
The Aug. 23 issue of the distinguished medical publication, the Lancet, related that HCFCs leaking from air conditioners had triggered an "epidemic" of liver disease. HCFCs are refrigerants the government has mandated to replace freon, which, while entirely safe for humans, is deemed bad for the ozone hole.
You remember the ozone hole, don't you? It seems to be shrinking, just like news coverage of it. Meanwhile, most of the world continues to use the self-same old stuff that was blamed for the problem in the first place, thus confirming what other (also unreported) studies are finding: namely, that freon was never responsible for ozone depletion.
The New England Journal of Medicine reported on Oct. 30 that exposure to DDT and PCB do not increase the risk of breast cancer. By contrast, other (unreported) studies have indeed found that mandated substitutes for these supposed toxins have been poisoning "unsuspecting workers and farmers who had been accustomed to handling the relatively non-toxic DDT."
Actually, this Journal report did get a little play in the press. But this attention was nothing like the fanfare surrounding publication, in 1996, of "Our Stolen Future" - a tome coauthored by former Boston Globe environmental reporter Dianne Dumanoski, with a foreword by Al Gore, that blamed DDT and PCBs for every human ill from infertility to slow learning. By touting this book at that time, the media ignored a review of it in the self-same New England Journal of Medicine, which dubbed the work "the perfect last redoubt of a 'science' no longer on speaking terms with the facts."
As these examples attest, environmental reporting seems almost willfully perverse. Rather than dispense facts, the media sell fear--fear of PCBs, DDT, dioxin, Alar, smoking, breast implants, irradiated foods, nuclear power, high-voltage lines, radon, acid rain, pesticides, herbicides, asbestos, ozone depletion, global warming, species extinction, deforestation and overgrazing, among others. Yet none of these stories accurately reflected sound science. Some were clearly false, and others remain controversial.
Why have the media become such demons of disinformation? The Journal suggests the cause is " chemophobia," which it defines as "the unreasonable fear of chemicals." But whose chemophobia? Rather than blame journalists, editors and television producers for persistent refusal to confront reality, perhaps we should consider that these folk would not be hyping doomsday if it didn't sell.
In truth, Apocalypse remains in high demand. According to an October Wirthlin survey, fully 60 percent of respondents accept media environmental claims without question. By contrast, another recent poll found that nine out of 10 scholars believe the press doesn't comprehend "the tentativeness of most scientific discovery and the complexities of the results" and that 61 percent of scientists hold that news reports are "unduly alarming to the public."
In short, most Americans believe the press, even though it consistently deceives them. Why? Because, I think, they want to believe. Such environmental fictions pander to their own fear of death and their desire to escape responsibility.
Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, many have been lulled into supposing that health and immortality are the norm, and that if they get sick or die, someone usually in a hospital, industry or government - must be to blame.
Rather than accept responsibility for their own choices, they blame chemicals. They find it easier to attribute declines in SAT scores to the presence of DDT in the womb, as Miss Dumanoski and her colleagues did, than on schools, divorce or poor parenting. They find it more convenient to accuse tobacco companies of causing smoking deaths, than themselves for taking up the habit in the first place. They find it less difficult to ascribe heart disease to diet pills than to overeating (a habit that kills many more folks that cigarettes do).
Think of it as a national version of the Twinkie defense: "The environment made me do it." If scare sells, that's because we're buying.
Alston Chase is a nationally syndicated columnist.
Material presented on this home page constitutes opinion of the author.
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