Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [25]
In successfully avoiding application of the precautionary principle, industry spokespersons have argued that the existing system is based on “sound science.” But science does not tell us that industry has any right to put chemicals into the environment that have any risk at all, let alone telling us what risks are acceptable—these are political decisions. Furthermore, if the chemicals in the environment have not been tested for all the variables that are relevant to social choices, such as their long-term effects on immune systems and reproduction as well as any cancer threat, and the effects of their breakdown products on the environment—and none of them have been so tested—the political, not scientific, basis of “sound science” is evident.
The chemical industry has produced, and long denied any harm from, innumerable products—from tetraethyl lead in gasoline and PCBs in batteries to asbestos, DDT, and Agent Orange—that are now well established as seriously harmful, only withdrawing them (often only from domestic use) under overwhelming legal and regulatory pressure. For the products they have wanted to sell, they have always found scientists who would testify to their harmlessness (or that claims of harm were not scientifically proven). There has been a consistent sharp difference between the results of industrysponsored science and those of independent researchers working the same terrain.136 And there have been numerous cases of fraud in industry testing, industry use of testing labs that arranged the data to find industry products acceptable, and political manipulation to weaken regulatory standards.137
Despite these industry abuses of science, the media have largely accepted the industry’s claim that it supports “sound science,” in contrast with its critics’ use of “junk science.” From 1996 through September 1998, 258 articles in mainstream newspapers used the phrase “junk science”; but only 21, or 8 percent, used it to refer to corporate abuses of science, whereas 160, or 62 percent, applied it to science used by environmentalists, other corporate critics, or tort lawyers suing corporations (77, or 30 percent, didn’t fit either of these categories).138 In short, the media have internalized industry’s selflegitimizing usage, just as they have normalized a status quo of caveat emptor (buyer beware) rather than of safety first.
The media have also regularly gotten on board in dismissing concerns about chemical threats as unwarranted “scares,” such as the alleged scares over dioxin and the danger of Alar on apples. But these and other scares often turn out to be based on genuine health hazards.139 Meanwhile, the media rarely report and examine in any depth the frequent evidence of the inadequacy of regulation and testing and of the real costs of chemicalization of the environment.140 For example, the International Joint Commission (IJC), a joint Canadian–U.S. 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 is failing, and since 1992 has called for the ending of the manufacture of chlorine as essential to fulfilling its task. The national media virtually ignore this appeal, and the IJC’s U.S. cochairman 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 is anything to worry about.”141 We believe that the propaganda model helps understand this lack of knowledge.
In the health insurance controversy of 1992–93, the media’s refusal to take the single-payer option seriously,