TV Review : A Balanced Look at the Medfly War on KCET

The couple sits at their living-room table, and the whip-whip-whip of an approaching helicopter seems to envelop their house. “Here it comes,” says the wife to reporter Jeffrey Kaye. The chopper blades sound as if they’re directly overhead. “You feel invaded,” she says. Then the husband firmly adds: “I’m angry about this.”

“This” is the ongoing spraying of malathion over L.A.’s residential areas as part of California’s effort to eradicate the Mediterranean fruit fly. Kaye’s report for KCET Channel 28, “Politics and Pesticide: War on the Medfly” (tonight at 7:35) is consummately balanced: You also get the frustration of the fruit grove farmer who can’t understand why those city people aren’t willing to put up with a little inconvenience for quality produce.

Yet after the 30-minute program has neatly tallied up the arguments on both sides, a troubling conclusion is unavoidable: Poor science has driven poor public policy.

Even if the Medfly is eradicated, the emotions on both sides won’t be, and a strength of Kaye’s coverage is legitimizing and not dismissing those emotions. But the crux of this story is a battle between scientists: on one side, Isi Siddiqui, in charge of the spraying program, who insists that there is “no evidence of adverse health effects” from malathion; on the other, Marc Lappe, who claims that a 1980 study he helped co-author--a study that indicated considerable uncertainty as to malathion’s long-term effects on humans--has been skewed by spraying advocates in Sacramento.

Kaye shows environmental scientists and health officials disagreeing with each other, and it is precisely this disagreement that adds great weight to Lappe’s uncertainty principle. While Kaye--a reporter for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” who is developing a much-needed longer report on the issue--is right to conclude that the Medfly battle dramatizes the chasm between California city and farm, it doesn’t compare with the drama between good and bad science, and how they’re used in the political arena.