Over the past year, the JS has been publishing a remarkable series of stories about contamination, health and politics. And they just keep coming!
One of the nice revelations for me, as a scientist, monitoring mainstream media coverage of stories about contaminants and health is to discover that a lot of the best reporting on these issues is being done by journalists at regional newspapers around the country. Usually these are stand-alone stories, often focused locally, and often about efforts by local communities to understand links between their health and the left-overs of industrial activities.
Many of these have a strong 'environmental justice' component. Sometimes the stand-alone story becomes an ongoing saga: Alexander Nussbaum and his colleagues at the Record of Bergen County (NJ) offer a prime example with their award-winning series of stories on the Ford Motor Company's pollution of the town of Ringwood. Likewise, reporters at the Herald (Bradenton, FL) and the Herald-Tribune (Sarasota, FL) have doggedly pursued, for years, the aftermath of Lockheed's contamination of Tallevast, FL.
But occasionally reporters working at one of these regional media outlets gets to dig in really deeply into an issue that explicitly goes beyond their region and gets deeply into the underlying science, sometimes even into the political science.
Jane Kay at the San Francisco Chronicle has set a high bar here, with diverse, sophisticated stories on contamination in toys and other consumer products, on endocrine disruptors like bisphenol A and brominated flame retardant, and other 'emerging contaminants' (the things we are just discovering aren't as safe as we'd thought).
Douglas Fischer, while at the Oakland Tribune (he's now editor of The Daily Climate) wrote a superb series on 'body burden' that included original research and wound up with Fischer being the lead author of a peer-reviewed scientific research article in Environmental Health Perspectives.
The newsroom setting the pace now is a group of reporters at Milwaukee's Journal Sentinel, including Suzanne Rust, Meg Kissinger and Cary Spivak. Over the past 12 months they have published over two dozen stories digging deeply into the science and the politics surrounding endocrine disrupting chemicals and how public health agencies are, and are not, keeping apace of scientific understanding.
In one spectacular story they did an independent audit of over 250 scientific studies of bisphenol A and found evidence of clear bias in how a government panel was treating studies funded by government (mostly NIH) compared to those funded by industry, favoring the latter over the former. For example: "Two of the panel's four chapters considered the same kind of studies the newspaper reviewed - looking at the effects of bisphenol A on live animals.
In one of those chapters, focusing on reproductive toxicology, 20 studies by either government or academia were tossed. No study that disclosed it had been funded by industry was rejected."
Their most recent sortie appeared a week ago. In it they analyzed the EPA's failure to compile safety data on a large number of chemicals that are used in high volume in the US. Ten years ago, the EPA launched a voluntary program, called the High Production Volume Challenge, in which companies were to voluntarily provide safety data on approximately 3,000 chemicals that are made in the US each year at volumes in excess of 1 million pounds.
The Journal Sentinel's investigations reports that many companies have not bothered to come up with the data. According to the reporters, Meg Kissinger and Suzanne Rust, "The failure of the EPA's High Production Volume Challenge to make good on its promises is the latest example of how the agency's lax policies favor chemical makers over public demand for information."Environmental Health News
