Organic Food Industry Demands Full Retraction of ‘20/20’ Report

The organic food industry kept up its attack on ABC News correspondent John Stossel, asking Thursday for ABC to issue a full retraction of his Feb. 4 “20/20” report questioning the safety of organic food.

ABC News declined to comment, although Stossel is expected to address a number of the criticisms on tonight’s “20/20.” It’s unclear if that will include allegations that ABC failed to do adequate tests to prove Stossel’s claim that organic food is more dangerous to consumers than food grown with conventional methods.

At a New York press conference, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group and the Organic Trade Assn. showed outtakes of Stossel’s interview with Katherine DiMatteo, the association’s executive director, in which Stossel said he knew some tests he was using weren’t scientifically significant. DiMatteo said the report, which has already led to one reprimand for Stossel, had been devastating to the more-than-$5-billion organic food industry and that association members are “clamoring” for a class-action lawsuit. But she couldn’t quantify damages sustained by the industry due to the report, which was rerun on July 7.

The groups called for the retraction based on what they say is ABC’s use of misleading or nonexistent data. They did not offer any data of their own to prove that Stossel’s claims weren’t accurate, but Environmental Working Group President Ken Cook said he was “quite convinced” that even if ABC did the proper tests, they wouldn’t find anything to back Stossel’s claims.

ABC has already acknowledged one problem with the report, noting that it cited nonexistent tests. On Wednesday, Stossel was reprimanded, and producer David Fitzpatrick was suspended without pay for one month.

Other critics of Stossel’s work are using the contretemps to renew their claims against the correspondent. The group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting wrote to ABC News President David Westin Thursday with a long litany of alleged past Stossel errors, saying the current controversy “is the latest in a troubling series of errors and distortions in Stossel’s reporting, and we urge you to take this opportunity to investigate his overall record on accuracy.”