BOOK REVIEW : How Environmental Groups Misuse Data to Make Headlines : SCIENCE UNDER SIEGE: Balancing Technology and the Environment by Michael Fumento , Morrow $25; 390 pages
Are you worried about radiation from power lines and video display terminals? Nervous about irradiated food? Upset about Agent Orange and Alar? If so, you’ve allowed yourself to be duped, says author Michael Fumento, and so have the mass media that brought you the bad news.
The flimflam artists who are orchestrating what the author sees as a systematic attack on technology are environmentalists. Groups ranging from the conservative Audubon Society and Sierra Club to the radical Earth First! deliberately misrepresent the results of scientific research, Fumento charges, and put out technology terror stories too juicy for the headline-hungry and insufficiently analytical media to resist.
Fumento, a Los Angeles - based reporter for the respected stock-market newspaper Investor’s Daily, uses the case-study approach, interspersing analyses of environmental news stories with clear, fast-paced lectures on epidemiology, risk assessment and old-fashioned logic.
The author says that perhaps the saddest result of the media’s overblowing of environmental hazards is that most Americans have lost all sense of how to evaluate the real physical risks in their lives. “A woman who doesn’t put her child in a car seat for short trips,” he writes, “will nonetheless show up at a town meeting . . . (and demand) that the local utility move the power line away from the house so the child won’t get leukemia.”
The public’s belief that power lines cause cancer, for example, Fumento says in his incisive “Science Under Siege,” is largely an artifact of one man’s crusade. Paul Brodeur, in his book “Currents of Death,” used some classic steps of indirect environmental terrorism, Fumento says, and employed the mass media to infect the public with his obsession.
First, says Fumento, Brodeur researched the scientific literature--selectively--until he found enough evidence to convince himself that the power lines presented a hazard. In step two, Brodeur talked to well-respected epidemiologists--scientists who use statistical methods to study correlations between environmental developments (natural and man-made) and human illness.
The epidemiologists Brodeur consulted said the evidence for power lines causing leukemia in children was not statistically significant--in other words, there was no story. But instead of accepting their professional verdict, Brodeur took the third and most crucial step in his classic disinformation campaign, Fumento says. Brodeur cried, “Cover-up!”
It was Brodeur’s allegation of a cover-up, Fumento says, that succeeded in grabbing the media’s attention. Now, all the essential ingredients for an emotion-packed, national David-and-Goliath story were in place: A lone, crusading journalist with solid credentials (Brodeur published regularly in the New Yorker) had uncovered evidence that the lives of America’s children were threatened by a new hazard, and the scientific Establishment was trying to suppress him. The New Yorker serialized Brodeur’s book, and soon afterward “60 Minutes” picked up the story.
Of course, sorting out the welter of data on the health effects of electromagnetic fields or any other alleged environmental danger is hard work, even for those who have the time and training. And even the experts often disagree among themselves. Given the complexity of epidemiology and risk assessment, Fumento does a commendable job of explaining these two sciences.
Whether anyone will listen is another matter. Newspaper readers and television viewers, not to mention reporters, have notoriously scant appetite for technical explanations. Fumento quotes ABC’s Jeff Greenfield: “With a complicated technical story like dioxin, the . . . fears of people like us will always carry more weight than the disputes and the cautions of the experts.” Fumento’s new book is a spiky attempt to introduce more intellect into the overemotional popular debate on environmental hazards. A must-read for journalists, “Science Under Siege” offers any reader with a large capacity for detail a lively, well-documented, pro-technology perspective on the risks of modern life.
