PBS Documentary Draws Fire From the Chemical Industry

Bill Moyers’ Monday documentary, “Trade Secrets,” about four decades of public relations, legislative and lobbying tactics employed by the chemical industry, doesn’t mince words: “The laboratory mice in this vast chemical experiment are the children. They have no idea what’s happening to them and neither do we,” he says, in the concluding words of an advance version of the 90-minute program.

The program also doesn’t include interviews with industry representatives, who will instead participate in a 30-minute, unedited panel discussion following the documentary, which airs on many Public Broadcasting Service stations. KCET-TV will air the program beginning at 8 p.m.

Late this week, Moyers found himself under attack by an industry trade association, the American Chemistry Council, which, without having viewed the program, put up a Web site, https://www.abouttradesecrets.com, calling it “journalistic malpractice” to have excluded them from the documentary portion of the show.

The documentary is based on a stash of chemical industry documents, spanning several decades, that were submitted as part of the discovery phase in a lawsuit over the death of a chemical plant worker. Moyers says his longtime collaborator, producer Sherry Jones, was tipped off to their existence by the Environmental Working Group, the same organization that last year mounted a vigorous attack against John Stossel’s organic food report on ABC News’ “20/20.” Some of the documents, which PBS has called in a statement “a massive archive of secret industry documents as shocking as the ‘tobacco papers,’ ” have been used in at least one newspaper series.

The documents provide for a wide-ranging target, starting with past manufacturing practices of vinyl chloride and what workers were told about safety. It contrasts that with what the industry knew, according to documents from 1959 on, and efforts to shape public opinion over the years. “What we saw was a strategy here, a powerful industry marshaling forces to create a regulatory system to its own design and how they did it,” Moyers says during an interview.

The program later jumps to the industry’s efforts in the 1980s to defeat potentially damaging legislation. It concludes by showing Moyers learning that his blood contains traces of 84 out of 150 chemicals for which it was tested.

Moyers says he and the producers decided early on that current industry representatives would be asked to participate in the round table but not be interviewed for the program. “We want the documents to make their case and then we want to talk to the industry about questions the documents raise,” he says. “These documents are a fact, they exist. It’s not a matter of opinion or point of view. It’s what the industry knew and when they knew it and they are represented, by these documents.”

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After trying unsuccessfully for several weeks to convince Moyers to interview them for the piece, the Chemistry Council on Wednesday put up its Web site, saying it was “disappointed and dismayed by Bill Moyers’ unwillingness to allow our industry the opportunity to respond to allegations or correct possible errors in the 90-minute documentary before it is broadcast.”

“I’m not going to stand here and say everything the industry did, however far back you go, is something we’d be doing today,” says Terry F. Yosie, the association’s spokesman, who will be one of the industry representatives on the panel discussion. “The industry has clearly learned a great deal, it has learned from those mistakes it has made, and it would be nice to know that a balanced story would create an opportunity in the 90-minute portion of the program to also talk about that aspect.”

He said he and Moyers are still discussing the subjects to be covered in the panel and he said the industry hasn’t yet decided who its second representative will be.

Moyers, meanwhile, says he was expecting some sort of attack. In a Feb. 22 letter to PBS colleagues he outlined his concerns about any “premature disclosure” of the show’s contents, given his experience with the industry on a 1993 “Frontline” documentary on pesticide residue in children’s food, which was subject to an intense advance campaign to discredit it.

* “Trade Secrets” can be seen Monday night at 8 on KCET-TV.