The Pressroom column in July’s Milwaukee Magazine takes a look at the Journal Sentinel’s five-year crusade to increase scrutiny and regulation of bisphenol-A – BPA for short – the substance used in a wide range of plastics, including food containers from baby bottles to the linings of cans.
The column originated with a Pressroom Buzz item that reported on the fallout when the paper’s now-departed columnist Patrick McIlheran quoted in his blog a German study exonerating the substance of posing any hazard to human health. This, after years of JS reports that essentially argue that the FDA was turning a blind eye to BPA’s health hazards and had relied too heavily on slanted industry research in declining to regulate the material.
JS Managing Editor George Stanley struck back with a comment on McIlheran’s blog that dismissed the study, noting financial ties between its authors and the plastics industry. While Stanley exaggerated those ties, the paper subsequently commissioned its former science reporter, Susanne Rust, who did a lot of the reporting on early BPA stories, to write a story pointing out those ties in the case of four of the authors.
The whole thing expanded to an intra-Journal Communications food fight, with WTMJ talk radio host Charlie Sykes taking to his own blog to bite back at Stanley. (“Wouldn’t this merit a pants-on-fire?” Sykes – who carries two such trophies from the paper’s PolitiFact project – archly concluded.)
One of the paper’s most outspoken critics on the subject is Jon Entine, who directs something called the Genetic Literacy Project, part of the Statistical Assessment Service housed at George Mason University. In articles for the American Enterprise Institute and for the liberal news site Huffington Post, Entine contends that the JS has continued to cherry-pick evidence to paint an exaggerated picture of BPA’s threat to human health. The paper, he suggests, is motivated to do so to justify its past award-winning reports on BPA’s dangers.
Entine isn’t above a little cherry-picking himself, though. He erroneously called Rust’s current employer, California Watch, “an environmental advocacy organization,” when it is in fact a nonprofit investigative reporting operation. And, contending that the JS slanted its story on an FDA decision rethinking BPA regulation – which the paper called “an about face” – Entine linked approvingly to an environmental group’s article that analyzed the FDA’s stance thusly: “‘Some concern’ evidently means not much concern.” Entine’s verdict: The site (treehugger.com) was “playing it straight.”
Yet Entine ignored the organization’s high praise of the JS’ Meg Kissinger, another BPA reporter. And he also ignored Kissinger’s disclosure that inside the FDA there were scientists pushing for an even tougher stance against the material – a stance, recall, that Entine considers unwarranted.
Entine makes a valid point that liberal critics of his arguments assumed he was a right-wing ideologue and lumped him with global-warming deniers; he pointed out to one commenter at HuffPo that he voted for Barack Obama and accepts the scientific argument that climate change is resulting from human activities.
(In a similar instance of selective interpretation, right-wing critics of the JS’ BPA coverage suggested Entine’s article in the liberal HuffPo gave it greater “lefty” credibility – ignoring the fact that Huffington Post publishes a lot of material from across the ideological spectrum.)
Philosophical pondering
As I researched the July column, though, I found myself engrossed in a broader and more complicated – but fundamental – journalistic question: How do we – journalists and readers alike – know what we know? Isn’t the biggest challenge in the news business ultimately epistemology?
I posed the question to Barbara Selvin, who teaches journalism at the Stony Brook University in New York. Selvin is a veteran of the Long Island paper Newsday, as are several colleagues whom she consulted before our online chat. (Full disclosure: Selvin and I also were graduate school classmates.)
Beginning journalists are told to leave nothing to chance – and to attribute everything. “Anything that the reporter did not observe must be attributed,” Selvin told me. The other exception: information that is widely known, such as who is the president, when the Civil War began an ended, or that the HIV virus causes AIDS.
Over time, a reporter “may have established credibility enough to get away with omitting attribution here and there,” she continued. “But it’s a dangerous practice, I think, and I prefer, both as a reporter and a reader, to have full attribution.”
Quoting Howard Schneider, Selvin’s former editor at Newsday and now the journalism dean of Stony Brook, she continued: “News consumers need to understand that journalistic truth is provisional: journalists provide the best obtainable version of the truth on a given day. Sometimes that means reporting incremental developments, or fragments of the story. But the good reporters–and news organizations–keep reporting until they get to the bottom of the story.”
One example of such evolving perception of truth is the Freedom Riders, whose efforts to desegregate intercity bus travel in the South in the early 1960s were recently the subject of a documentary on PBS.
“Initially, they were outside the mainstream and they were disruptive of the status quo,” Selvin observed. “But as time went on and civil disobedience became part of the national discourse, the riders went from unfamiliar to familiar. As journalists got to know the riders, the public, through news reports and profiles, did too, and people saw that the riders were not ‘other’ but were people much like themselves. And as the civil-rights movement evolved, the forces intent on maintaining segregation used violence against the riders and other nonviolent protesters. The protesters became the underdogs, and the American public — including journalists — has a bottomless sympathy for underdogs.”
I asked as well about the way journalists’ narrative frames affect how a story is reported. Selvin said colleagues of hers were skeptical, “arguing that, as former Newsday reporter Fred Bruning put it,‘get the story. assemble the facts. give the appropriate parties a chance to respond. write it clearly. have a beer.’”
Still, even the concept of “appropriate parties” leads to judgment calls, however obvious and widely shared they might be: As Selvin noted, journalists don’t typically solicit comments from Holocaust deniers when they write about Auschwitz, or creationists for stories about evolution, or climate change skeptics on a story about rising sea levels. “To do so would be to create a false equity – the facts in each case best describe the Holocaust, natural selection and climate change.”
(For more on both the Evolution/Intelligent Design issue as well as on climate change, Selvin points to links sent her by a colleague, science writer Julia Mead, whom she also credits for the term “false equity.”)
So in the case of the JS’ coverage of BPA, I asked Selvin, how do readers ultimately judge whether the paper “has gotten the goods” on the chemical – versus having become so committed to its point of view about BPA’s alleged hazards that it may distort its coverage, purposefully or not?
“If neither the JS nor the chemical industry has been able to find a truly independent scientist who discounts the reported hazards of BPA, then it seems to me that for now, the JS has established the hazard,” Selvin suggested. “If some future independent study finds no hazard, the JS is obligated to report that — but not necessarily to give such a finding total credence until the study has been replicated.”
Which brought us to another underlying assumption of the paper’s coverage: That funding itself potentially taints research. That’s a widespread trope in investigative journalism; for example, it’s part of the fundamental premise of John Fauber’s award-winning stories about conflicts of interest in medical research.
“‘The appearance of bias’ — that’s the funding problem in a nutshell. It’s human nature to discount findings that support the position of the funder, especially when independently funded research finds the hazard,” Selvin said. Journalists, she noted, operate under similar principles, with, at the best news organizations, strict rules about accepting gifts, meals and travel.
In the case of the BPA stories, Selvin said, the JS has arguably done the legwork over the years – reading research, consulting experts, exploring the subject in depth – to justify taking on authority on the subject. “At some point — and this may be a journalistic bad habit more than an overriding principle — a certain shorthand develops. The reporters may feel, quite understandably, that given all their previous stories, they don’t need to spell everything out every time. And for readers who have followed the work closely, that may be true.”
But it’s still important for journalists to “never assume that your reader has read your previous work,” she added. “Always write for the person who is coming upon the story for the first time.”
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