LIVING SCARED : Controversial Stories Go Against the Grain : Reporting: New York Times’ Keith Schneider says he is looking beyond the usual pronouncements of doom on dioxin and other issues. But some critics say his work is ‘deceptive’ and deliberately provocative.

In 1970, when Keith Schneider was 14, he joined environmental activists in the first Earth Day, helping to clean up and paint a railroad station and pull automobile tires out of the Bronx River in his hometown of White Plains, N.Y.

Schneider was interviewed by a New York Times reporter that morning for an Earth Day story, a proud moment in his adolescent life.

But Schneider is 38 now, a New York Times reporter himself, and to many environmentalists--and to a number of journalists--he has become a traitor, the symbol of a revisionist view on the environment that is beginning to take hold in some quarters after two decades of media coverage that many acknowledge has been overwhelmingly sympathetic to the environmental movement.

What has Schneider done to attract all this attention? He has written such things as: “Many scientists, economists and government officials have reached the dismaying conclusion that much of America’s environmental program has gone seriously awry.” He has also written stories that raise such questions as:

* Are government policies on cleaning up toxic waste “raising risks to public health instead of lowering them”?

* Is the government spending too much money and effort responding to “popular panics” rather than “sound scientific analyses”?

* Is the government wasting billions of dollars every year on relatively minor problems, thus “leaving little money for others that cause far more harm”?

Rae Tyson, who covers the environment for USA Today, says it was courageous of Schneider to write these stories; Schneider and the New York Times should be commended for them, he says. But, Tyson adds, “if you’re going to do it, you should do it based on good, solid science, and some of that stuff just had too many holes in it for me.”

David Ropiek, longtime environmental reporter for station WCB-TV in Boston, is more blunt. Some of Schneider’s reporting, Ropiek says, has been “purposefully deceptive.”

Some of Schneider’s critics say he has taken deliberately provocative positions as a means of drawing attention to his work and of making a mark for himself, and that he now has a vested interest in trying to prove that his published skepticism is valid.

Schneider vigorously defends his work as “following the data wherever it leads and coming to conclusions about real risks, which are important and which are not . . . a much richer story” than the narrower stories warning about impending environmental doom that have dominated the media.

“Environmental journalism suffers from the same thing a lot of American journalism suffers from--too much dogma,” he says.

In one especially controversial story in 1991, Schneider wrote that dioxin--long considered the most potent artificial carcinogen and the chemical compound involved in the Love Canal, Agent Orange and Times Beach environmental crises of the 1970s and ‘80s--is now “considered by some experts to be no more risky than spending a week sunbathing.”

That story--and that statement in particular--triggered an avalanche of criticism. Many journalists accused Schneider of trying to “write the final chapter” to a scientific controversy that is still evolving--a charge that Schneider scoffs at.

Four months ago, Schneider reported that a draft summary of the EPA report said that cancer was “not the most serious health hazard (from dioxin) at common exposure levels” and that “subtle effects on fetal development and the immune system” were “of greater concern.”

But in an interview Friday, William Farland, director of the Office of Health and Environmental Assessment for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, rejected that characterization. “I would not say that one is a greater concern than the other,” he said.

On Tuesday, the EPA will release two, long-awaited 1,000-page reports on dioxin. Farland, who directed the assessment studies that led to these reports, says they will warn of the dangers of dioxin to fetal development and to the human immune system, as well as “reconfirm the position that dioxin is a probable human carcinogen . . . despite what has been said in the press.”

“We continue to believe that dioxin is a human carcinogen and the data we have in this reassessment has strengthened that position,” he said Friday.

Farland said the dioxin reassessment study “adopts the hypothesis that the major pathway for exposure by humans is through the food chain,” but that there is a “major data gap” on dioxin levels in food.

The EPA is concerned about dioxin, he said, because of what he characterized as “the small difference” between the routine exposure to dioxin in daily life and the exposure that produced adverse effects on animals in laboratory tests.

Schneider said he defends his May story and “all of what I’ve reported on dioxin.”

His work, he said, has largely reflected debate over the question of whether dioxin constitutes a public health emergency, as many environmentalists argue, or whether it is a risk that has been largely controlled, with only new sources of potential risk to be dealt with.

Schneider says criticism of his work has been “political, not scientific,” and he says he has been surprised that it has been “so personal, so mean-spirited, so ardent and emotional.”

Even Schneider’s predecessor on the environmental beat at the New York Times, Philip Shabecoff, has attacked his work as “retrograde . . . bad reporting, just replete with errors.”

During a panel discussion at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists last year, Shabecoff launched a bitter but thinly veiled attack on Schneider (and other journalistic contrarians):

“It makes it easier to be a courageous challenger of the conventional wisdom,” he said, “if you are thereby doing exactly what your publishers and editors want you to do . . . (catering to their) “inherent distrust of environmental activists,” whose efforts threaten “rampant consumerism and therefore their advertising base.”

Other journalists, some of them at the New York Times, echo Shabecoff’s criticism of Schneider. But Shabecoff was taken off the environmental beat in 1991 because he was perceived by many as having become too sympathetic to the environmental movement.

Shabecoff denies this charge. He says he had a series of responsible positions at the paper because “I was considered a good reporter. . . . I did the things a good reporter should do. I covered the facts as thoroughly as I could. I looked for all sides of the issue. I tried to verify everything. Then I went and covered the environment, and I reported it the same way.”

Criticism of his (and others’) reporting, Shabecoff says, reflects a change in journalistic priorities, a turning away from concern for the environment in economic hard times, rather than an abrogation of his journalistic obligations.

But even some of Shabecoff’s longtime admirers say his personal views on the environment had begun to influence his coverage.

“His point of view came through in his reporting to a degree that did make some editors here uncomfortable,” says Joseph Lelyveld, the executive editor, who was foreign editor at the time Shabecoff left the beat. (Shabecoff subsequently left the paper to start an environmental news service, Greenwire).

Schneider, meanwhile has many supporters inside and outside the paper, and--his critics notwithstanding--Lelyveld says he’s “very proud” of Schneider’s work.

Schneider has been controversial ever since he started writing about the environment 14 years ago, he says, and that doesn’t bother him.

Dioxin has also long been the subject of controversy. And conflict. And contradiction.

In 1982, Times Beach., Mo., was evacuated because oil laced with dioxin had been sprayed on its streets. But in 1990, Vernon Houk, director of the Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control, said that new studies showed dioxin to be only a “weak carcinogen.” Had he known that in 1982, Houk said, he would not have urged the evacuation of Times Beach.

Several studies came to similar conclusions about the alleged harmful effects of dioxin on the residents of Love Canal in New York and of dioxin-based Agent Orange in Vietnam: No scientific evidence supported the charges.

“I don’t think it’s legitimate for a journalist to use 1993 science to question a 1983 policy decision,” Tyson of USA Today says. But Sharon Friedman, head of the journalism department at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, says that if reporters had “dug more deeply, they would have found a significant disagreement among experts about dioxin safety levels even earlier in its history.”

Jon Franklin, who won Pulitzer Prizes in 1979 and 1985 for the Baltimore Evening Sun, did dig into the dioxin controversy in 1982 while investigating Agent Orange, the defoliant used by U.S. troops in Vietnam.

In college, Franklin had participated in protests against Dow Chemical Co., manufacturer of Agent Orange and napalm, and he approached the Agent Orange story with what he later called “the righteous fervor that is the armor of the crusading reporter.”

But when he finished his reporting, Franklin concluded that there was no medical evidence that dioxin had caused the cancers, birth defects and other medical calamities that its critics had alleged.

The Agent Orange story was “a myth” manufactured by anti-war protesters, capitalized on by Vietnam veterans and widely disseminated by an unquestioning media, Franklin said in a recent interview.

Too many reporters covering the Agent Orange story had the attitude: “Now we’re going to hang the bastards,” he said. “They refused to look into it further. A lot of them were advocates. This sickened me. It really shook me as a journalist. It changed my attitude toward journalism.”

A few years later, Franklin quit the news business. He now teaches journalism at the University of Oregon.

Keith Schneider has no immediate plans to quit journalism. He’s having too much fun.

It’s been exciting, he says of his work on dioxin and the reaction to it. “I’ve aspired to be considered an important writer, an independent player.”