America seems to be experiencing a steep and disturbing decline in honesty. Consider, for example, three stories recently in the news: Jayson Blair, the University of Michigan diversity case, and the debate over smoking-related deaths.
Scandal at the Times
In May, the New York Times reported the resignation of Jayson Blair, a reporter caught lying about facts and sources, followed by the resignations of two senior editors who at first ignored and then tried to minimize the significance of his fraud. At least 36 of 73 articles written by Blair since October 2002 apparently contained faulty or false reporting.
The general public can be forgiven for not being shocked. An opinion survey conducted in 2002 found just 21 percent of us believe all or most of what we read in local newspapers, and 45 percent believe news stories are “often inaccurate.” The surprise, to the extent there was any, was that a prominent newspaper finally admitted what its readers knew all along.
This scandal didn’t occur at just any newspaper, but at the country’s self-described “newspaper of record.” The Times, though, has been a biased and unreliable source of news for many years. During the 1920s and 1930s, when Stalin was murdering millions of his own citizens, Times correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting all was well in the socialist utopia.
Conservatives and libertarians could make a sport of counting instances of selective reporting, editorializing in news stories, and heavy-handed spin in every issue of the Times. They could, that is, if it weren’t so easy. The front page of the Times’ May 11 issue–the issue carrying an apology to readers for the Blair scandal–carried an editorial by David Rosenbaum opposing the Bush tax cuts and a story based on junk science titled “Neighbors of Vast Hog Farms Say Foul Air Endangers Their Health.”
In Bias, his book about liberal bias in the media, Bernard Goldberg reports a study of Times coverage of homelessness which found the paper ran 50 stories on the subject in 1988, when George Bush was President, compared to only 10 stories in 1998, when Bill Clinton was President. The homeless problem was no less acute in 1998 than in 1988. The Times was simply less interested in using the issue as a club to beat a Democratic administration.
We can only hope the Times’ recent travails will diminish the frequency with which its writing appears in other newspapers, or at least the influence of articles that appear under its byline.
Diversity Lies
The University of Michigan awards minority applicants 20 points (out of a maximum total score of 150 points) solely for being nonwhite. Opponents of such discrimination took the university to court, and the Supreme Court rejected the point system by a 6-3 vote on June 23.
This case belongs in a story about lying because in its defense, the University of Michigan cites a 1994 study it says proves its admissions practices have a positive effect on learning and student behavior. But when that study was initially released, its authors said it proved just the opposite. The study’s original executive summary said racial preference programs stigmatized African-American students and caused increasing polarization on campus, and said diversity “quite simply … does not, in itself, lead to a more informed, educated population.”
Chetly Zarko, a freelance writer who acquired the original executive summary by filing Freedom of Information Act requests, described his pursuit of the truth in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The university still refuses to make available to other researchers the raw data used to produce the report or to explain why the version of the study’s executive summary now displayed on the university’s Web site says the opposite of the original.
A national survey of 4,000 college students, faculty, and administrators conducted by Stanley Rothman, Seymour M. Lipset, and Neil Nevitte is probably a more reliable guide to the true effects of diversity. Rothman et al. found most respondents felt efforts to increase diversity had negative, not positive, effects on student achievement and race relations. In fact, increased diversity was associated with increased feelings among students that they had suffered discrimination on campus.
Tobacco Lies
Plenty of lies are told about the health effects of smoking, though it is even less politically correct to point them out than it is to question affirmative action programs. Heavy smoking over the course of a lifetime increases the risk of lung cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses. No one doubts or denies that. However, the absolute risk to smokers and the risk to nonsmokers from secondhand smoke have been exaggerated by public health nannies intent on making careers out of telling others how to live.
Public health officials long have claimed smoking is responsible for some 450,000 deaths a year in the U.S. However, starting two decades ago, scientists have discovered viruses play a bigger role in many types of cancer than previously thought. Did estimates of the number of deaths caused by smoking fall to reflect this new knowledge? No. Scientists have since discovered a quarter of all cancers may have genetic causes. Again the estimate of the number of smoking-related deaths remained unchanged.
In April 2003, experts reported obesity may cause 10 times as many cancer deaths each year as previously thought, accounting for some 14 percent of all cancer deaths in men and 20 percent of those in women. This finding should have caught the attention of anti-smoking activists because smoking and obesity are closely correlated; the number of deaths once attributed to smoking should be reduced by even more than the 14 to 20 percent estimates for the general population.
Have you read anywhere that health experts have reduced their estimates of the risk of smoking? Neither have I. Instead, they simply lie.
Secondhand Lies
Or they talk about secondhand smoke. Some anti-smoking activists claim it is “the third-leading cause of preventable death in the United States.” Another lie.
The latest scientific study on the health risks of secondhand smoke appeared in May in the prestigious British Medical Journal. The authors found no association between exposure to secondhand smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer. (Actually, the authors found risk factors of less than 1, meaning exposure could be beneficial to a person’s health.)
A news story in the May 16 edition of the Wall Street Journal, which often is as politically correct in its news reporting as the New York Times, devoted just five sentences to summarizing (but never quoting) the study and 12 paragraphs to attacking one of the study’s authors and quoting hyperventilating anti-smoking activists.
The story was so one-side it failed even to acknowledge the existence of coauthor Geoffrey Kabat, a respected epidemiologist at the State University of New York and member of EPA’s Science Advisory Board on ETS (environmental tobacco smoke). Kabat was cited in the federal district court decision that threw out EPA’s classification of secondhand smoke as a known carcinogen.
An excellent critique by Natalie Sirkin of the Journal story appeared in the June 7 “The Week That Was” column on the Science and Environmental Policy Project Web site (http://www.sepp.org). According to Sirkin, EPA’s Science Advisory Board admitted “We presently know little about causes of lung cancer in persons who have never smoked.” The relative risk factors found by EPA are, by a factor of 10, smaller than what professional epidemiologists believe necessary to constitute proof.
EPA’s estimate of the relative risk of a non-smoking wife getting lung cancer from a smoker-husband, for example, is 1.19. Studies of exposure to electromagnetic fields estimate the risk to be nearly 10 times as great, yet EPA refused (rightly so) to classify EMF as a known carcinogen.
In a letter to the Journal published on June 4, Kabat wrote, “many of the criticisms cited are dealt with in detail in our article, which underwent a rigorous review by three prominent scientists.” He says “vested interests in the American Cancer Society, to say nothing of the anti-smoking activists” reject the evidence “not because of its methods but because people are upset by our results.”
In other words, they are lying.
