An Open Letter To Fox News

Re: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,58760,00.html


I see that your reporter Steven Milloy is a very busy man... he must be, since he didn't take the time to do any digging into what I assume was a very convincingly written press release from the "American Council on Science and Health". Had he done so, he would have very quickly found out (as I did) that the ACSH is a "front" organization for public relations companies to dole out bunk science as though it were the real thing. For substantiation, I point you to their board of directors:
http://www.acsh.org/about/directors.html

where you will note that “Lorraine Thelian” of Ketchum Public Relations is listed as a director.

15 seconds more research lead me to this site:

http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2002Q3/ketchum.html

where you will discover that:
“Ketchum has frequently turned to ACSH for help in its efforts to downplay health problems associated with its clients. In 1990, for example, ACSH president Elizabeth Whelan joined a behind-the-scenes Ketchum campaign to undermine science writer David Steinman's book, Diet for a Poisoned Planet, which had offended the California Raisin Advisory Board (CALRAB) by documenting high levels of pesticides in raisins.
With coaching from Ketchum, Whelan wrote a letter to then-White House Chief of Staff John Sununu warning that Steinman and others "who specialize in terrifying consumers" were "threatening the U.S. standard of living and, indeed, may pose a future threat to national security." Her letter was copied to the heads of the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Agriculture, Department of Health and Human Services, Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Surgeon General. The USDA joined efforts at "minimizing potential public concern about issues in the book." A scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, who wrote the introduction to Diet for a Poisoned Planet, was pressured to withdraw his name from the book and later fired.

Details of the Ketchum campaign against Steinman surfaced when a whistleblower leaked documents including an internal memo by Betsy Gullickson, a Ketchum senior vice president. In the memo, Gullickson plotted to obtain a prepublication copy of the book manuscript and a schedule of Steinman's upcoming book promotional activities "so that we can 'shadow' Steinman's appearances." Ketchum operatives telephoned talk shows that were planning to interview Steinman, depicting him as an "off-the-wall extremist without credibility" and attempting to persuade the programs to cancel the interviews altogether.

Ketchum has represented many clients in the food industry, including the California Almond Board, Dole Foods, H.J. Heinz, Kikkoman, Miller Brewing, the National Meat & Livestock Commission, Nestlé, Oscar Mayer Foods, the Potato Board, Stouffer's, and Wendy's restaurants. On behalf of the California Prune Board, it renamed prunes as "dried plums," the name by which you are likely to find them in the supermarket today. Ketchum also designed the Beef Industry Council's 1985 "Beef Gives Strength" advertising campaign, which deceptively portrays beef as a health food while ignoring the fat content of most red meats.

In 1992, Ketchum and the American Egg Board sponsored a seminar for health writers, titled " Risk Communication: Challenge for the 1990s," which attempted to downplay the risks from cholesterol in eggs (whose yolks add more cholesterol to the average American's diet than any other single food). The seminar included a report describing an 88-year-old man who had eaten 25 eggs daily for more than a decade and had a normal blood cholesterol level. “

And remember Lorrain Thelian, the Director? We find out that:

“Ketchum's Washington office, where Lorraine Thelian works, handles most of the firm's "environmental PR work" on behalf of clients including the American Automobile Manufacturers Association, the Aspirin Foundation of America, Bristol Myers Squibb, the Consumer Aerosol Products Council, Dow Chemical, the National Pharmaceutical Council, the North American Insulation Manufacturers Association, and the American Industrial Health Council, an industry-funded group that lobbies against what it considers "excessive" regulation of carcinogens. Ketchum boasts that the D.C. office "has dealt with issues ranging from regulation of toxins, global climate change, electricity deregulation, nuclear energy, product and chemical contamination, and agricultural chemicals and Superfund sites, to name but a few."

Clearly, we can see that the case presented in the article on your site are the arguments of a for-hire think tank that, in reality, represents only the views that their clients want to relate to the public, not legitimate, objective information.

This is bad science, a bad commercial, and you are promoting it as the truth. It’s things like this that destroy the credibility of journalists the world over.

Do a little research next time.