Howdy, all--
I've been following the SANET discussion about the 20/20 slam of
organics and John Stossel's journalism with interest.
The current issue of /Brill's/ (March 2000) has a lengthy analysis of
his methods, "Laissez-Faire TV," written by Ted Rose. You can pick it
up at your newsstand (look for Martin Sheen playing the president,
from the TV series "The West Wing," on the cover). Or you can wait a
month and check the archives at the Brill's Web site:
http://www.brillscontent.com/
/Brill's Content/, is a magazine dedicated, in the words of its
publisher, to sorting out truth from lies in the newsmedia. I
personally consider that a task on the order of Psyche sorting seeds
in the Greek myth, but admire anyone who tries. (If you recall the
myth, she enlisted the help of ants.)
What caught my eye about the /Brill's/ piece is its tracing of
Stossel's career: he started out as a consumer reporter for WCBS in
New York City, and won notice, acclaim, and airtime championing the
rights of Just Plain Folks. But it appears that it wasn't from the
heart or a sense of compassion. As evidenced by the fact that as soon
as he had the chance--some years after getting hired by the highly
prestigious corporate medium of ABC News in 1981--he took on a
corporate viewpoint.
That was about the point in US history where the exploits of Nader's
Raiders became old hat, journalistically, and the exploits of Wall
Street cokeheads, Sloane Rangers, assorted preppies and other
nouveaux riches started getting more media attention. In 1981,
remember, the jingoistic toadies of the White House Press Corps
reported with uncritical enthusiasm how $11 million was spent on the
presidential inauguration in January, Nancy Reagan dropped $206,508
on new china for the White House in September, and Ronnie gave away
30 million pounds of moldy surplus cheese to poor Americans around
Christmas, in the same year he busted the Professional Air Traffic
Controllers Union (PATCO).
After going to ABC News--do I remember correctly that former ABC
sports producer Roone Arledge was running the news division
then?--according to Rose's account, Stossel had "a growing
realization that he (and all the other reporters) had been asking
the wrong questions. ...Journalists and politicians tend to focus on
the benefits of government action, according to Stossel, without
considering the negative impact of those regulations on the free
market."
And what, my friends, could be sexier, in the years when Ron handed
the baton to George Herbert Walker Bush, than busting on the portions
of the government that still held out for giving a damn about
citizens? In those intensely mean-spirited years, the news pendulum
(backed by corporations' ballooning PR budgets) swung to hyping the
virtues of destroying any program, effort, or viewpoint that kept the
rich from consolidating their wealth as fast as possible.
So Stossel, with what appears to be a good radar for the zeitgeist,
and a solid sense of how to cash in on that, built his reporting fame
on a very limited notion of cost, a pit-bull style (see the /Brill's/
sidebar on the chainsaw job he did on Philadelphia dentist Owen Rogal
in 1989), and caring more about ratings than objective analysis.
Rose points out that Stossel thinks, for instance, that it's
outrageous for Ralph Nader to champion the mandating of seat belts in
school buses. Stossel reports risk assessment studies--and concurs
with them--that the risk of an accident is low enough to not justify
the cost of as much as $1,800 per bus to fit them with seat belts. (I
personally think that a child's life, health, or safety is worth a
tad bit more than $1,800. But in the era of Bottom-Line Bottom
Feeding, accruing profit is Job One. Gambling on risk assessments,
like gambling on The Market, makes you more imaginary money than
exercising the precautionary principle or investing in non-wealthy
people or building the soil. And it's faaaaar less complicated for
those who prefer an entitlement or lottery based view of society.)
Nader responds that Stossel's concept of cost is limited, when you
consider the benefits beyond protecting children in accidents. For
example, children who become accustomed to buckling up are more
likely to do so as adults. Calculate how much adults' failure to
buckle themselves--and their children--up costs society. Then compare
that to the cost of educating children to use seat belts in the
direct, daily, simple, tactile way of providing them seat belts and
teaching them to use them.
Ah, but that's way too complicated.
How do we tell that more complex story, when it's easier--and a
helluva lot more macho--to bust on regulators, slash at "the
government," and pillory consumer activists? This interests me
because part of my new work is about communicating this kind of
information. Accurate pricing, that reflects real costs, is just one
of our work areas. We at Redefining Progress develop indicators and
methods that aim to re-internalize the externalized costs of a
consumerist, growth-based society. It's one of the fabulous
challenges of my career, to help this group figure out how to tell
those stories in compelling ways. And to strategize on getting heard
above the mass media bass drumbeat of economic boom.
Given that embittered cynicism and an addiction to irony seem to
characterize the American social scene right now, I believe it'll
take a zeitgeist shift toward more compassion, for us to be able to
tell those stories in the mass media and be heard. And in the
meantime, we need all the humor, warmth, feisty satire, and sincerity
we can manage. Will that win out? I have no idea. But the alternative
isn't viable, IMO.
As for Stossel and Avery--in this case the medium is very much the
message. Stossel doesn't do his own research, and Avery's notion of
research often appears to derive from fantasy (judging from his
invention of the CDC study of /E. coli/ in organic food).
It's unfortunate, the amount of damage that a story like the 20/20
one (or any of Avery's much-publicized distortions) can cause organic
farmers, sustainable farmers, and the honest, soul-searching,
painstaking work we have all done to build alternatives to Fordist
Food, Yuppie Chow, and FrankenMunchies. My experience in sustainable
ag, throughout the 1990s, is that we, like organics, have not been
nearly assertive enough in our communications. In a mediascape such
as exists today, and is evolving rapidly, we ignore that at our peril.
One last point. I've been an organic grower since the mid-1970s, and
I haven't yet put excrement on my food. So these hypnotically
repeated assertions of poop on food fascinate me. The fact that
certain people are reaching so far to equate our the products of our
movement with the products of bowel movements...why that would get
projected onto organic food in particular would make somebody an
interesting Ph.D. thesis in psychology. :^)
peace
misha
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Michele Gale-Sinex
Home office: 415-504-6474 (504-MISH)
Home office fax: Same as above, phone first for enabling
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The man does not know enough to keep the beans out of chili. --Molly Ivins
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