The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [97]
In the breast implant melee, lawyers, by frightening off respected researchers, most likely did more to forestall the truth about implants than chemical companies did by placing advertisements in medical journals or helping to pay for studies. How, then, to explain why Flanders and others on the political left chose to side with a bunch of rapacious good-old-boys from Texas, over and against accomplished women journalists and scientists?57
At least part of the explanation lies in the age-old adage, thy enemy’s enemy is thyfriend.Those old boys from Texas functioned as mercenaries in a war that liberals and progressives were waging with conservatives over a separate but related issue called tort reform. In the mid-1990s a Republican Congress set out to enact legislation that would place caps on the damages plaintiffs can receive in product liability cases and medical malpractice lawsuits. To seduce public support they supplied the media with horror stories of what presidential candidate Bob Dole dubbed “lawsuit abuse.” Reporters and commentators took the bait and told again and again anecdotes about a woman who spilled McDonald’s coffee in her lap and got $3 million, and a tricycle manufacturer ordered to pay $7.5 million in a suit over the color of its bikes, which the plaintiffs said concealed a dangerous flaw in a wire handbasket on the handlebars.58
News organizations that bothered to check out the McDonald’s case discovered that a judge reduced the $3 million coffee award to $480,000, not an ungodly amount considering that the elderly woman had endured two hospitalizations and painful skin grafts, and McDonald’s had kept its coffee at a blistering 180°F to 190°F. And those that looked into the tricycle tale learned that color was a peripheral issue in a case brought by the family of a child who suffered permanent brain damage from riding a bike with numerous design flaws, only one of which had to do with the paint job. The family actually ended up receiving only a fraction of what the jury had initially recommended.59
In short, breast implant settlements proved to be among the few genuine examples of what the Republicans’ “Contract With America” referred to as “outlandish damage awards [that] make a mockery of our civil justice system.” In the entire period between 1965 and 1990 juries had handed down awards of more than $10 million in only thirty-five product liability cases. The multimillion- and multibillion-dollar judgments in implant cases in the early 1990s provided some of the best evidence for the conservatives’ argument, and liberals and progressives could ill afford to concede the point. Instead they turned the tables. They claimed that journalists who criticized the implant settlements were out to “vindicate ‘victim’ corporations,” as Flanders put it. And they suggested that corporations such as Dow, with the help of unwitting reporters, were propagandizing about the implant issue in order to weaken laws that protect the public from unsafe products. The tort reform movement was just “another case of corporations using their political clout to escape potential liability,” according to the author of a Ms. article about implants.60
A Shot at Sanity
Following Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996 the firestorm over tort reform died down, leaving behind little actual reform but lots of silly warning labels. Starbucks Coffee, hoping to avoid lawsuits like the one against McDonald’s, put on the side of its cups, “Careful, the beverage you are about to enjoy is extremely hot.” A Batman costume carried the following notice: “FOR PLAY ONLY: Mask and chest plate are not protective; cape does not enable user to fly.”61
Yet while shoppers