Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
Scientific data underpin our decisions about health. They’re used by the public to make lifestyle and buying choices; by doctors to diagnose and treat patients; by government officials to formulate policy; by industry to create and refine services, and to make health claims about those services; and by insurers to decide what diseases and treatments are covered. And that’s only a portion of the ways the results of scientific research touch and affect our everyday lives.
The key link between research and these consumers is the media. Professional journals evaluate and publish research papers based on the editors’ perceptions of the validity and importance of the findings. The mainstream media reports these results, making them accessible to lay readers and offering commentary and lifestyle advice based on the evidence. Without the media, scientific discoveries would languish, unacknowledged and unapplied, in the minds and lab notebooks of the scientists who made them. So the media plays an indispensable role in transporting information from the realm of its creation to that of its application.
Ideally, media is not just a conduit, unquestioningly conveying information from its creators to the social sphere. Media has traditionally served as a counterbalance to power, whether that power is governmental or scientific (the ability to peer deeply into nature and tell us its secrets is most certainly a form of power). This watchdog function of the media requires critical thought about data and their reliability. It requires that tough questions be asked. It requires journalistic independence. And it requires transparency of motive, so that the ultimate consumers of information can make informed decisions about how to evaluate the ways different media outlets interpret scientific evidence.
Unfortunately, this kind of independent, intelligent health journalism is rare. Neither professional journals like the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) nor mainstream media outlets like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting can be relied upon for informed, courageous, and unbiased health coverage. I give those examples in particular because they are seen as the pinnacles of their type of media; the ones you’d least expect to fiddle with the truth. I don’t mean to pick on them for being worse than other media; indeed, you don’t have to look hard to find much less intelligent and honest health reporting in your newspaper and on the evening news. I just want you to understand that the problem isn’t “a few bad apples,” but rather the system in which the media is embedded, and the profit-seeking entities to which the media is beholden.
PROFESSIONAL RESEARCH JOURNALS
Research findings’ first stop on the way to public consumption is one of the professional journals, which vary in influence and prestige. Articles in Nature, JAMA, and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) often make the evening news if they seem interesting and relevant. Other prestigious journals are more obscure, known only to practitioners in the field the journal covers. Examples include Cancer Research, The American Journal of Cardiology, and hundreds of others that focus on specific disciplines and subdisciplines. Still other journals are known in the field as second tier, surviving on contributions that are considered “not up to snuff” by the top-tier publications.
The most important safeguard journals use against bad research is called peer review. This means that the editorial board sends manuscripts submitted to journals for publication to two, perhaps three, qualified reviewers (experienced scientists in that same field) to assess the quality of the research and the significance of the findings. The reviewers remain anonymous to the manuscript authors. This system is designed to filter out poorly done and unreliable research. When it is performed honorably, it is one of the most important guarantors of scientific integrity. Any supposedly authoritative article that has not passed through peer review should not, in my opinion, be invoked as proof of anything.
Peer review falters, however, when the reviewers bring their own biases to their decisions. When they decide in advance that certain research topics are out of bounds. That particular study designs (such as wholistic ones) are illegitimate. That certain conclusions just can’t be right. In other words, when they cling dogmatically to their paradigm rather than seeking to expand or transcend it. Peer review can easily become an iron cage that stifles curiosity and creativity, discouraging many promising lines of research by all but assuring that they won’t be published. This happens far too often. And it’s no coincidence that a substantial reductionist bias permeates peer review, since that bias may serve the financial interests of the journals themselves—by attracting or keeping advertisers.
You may recall, from when we talked about reductionist versus wholistic study designs, that testing the effects of drugs was the subject most amenable to reductionist study design. It makes sense to study a reductionist phenomenon—for example, a single-function pill—via a reductionist lens. And, not surprisingly, medical journals make a lot of money when they please Big Pharma. Professional journals, like mainstream newspapers and magazines, are funded in large part by advertising. Marcia Angell, former editor of NEJM, reports that in 2001 the pharmaceutical industry spent $380 million on medical journal advertising. Without this income, the journals could not exist. So it’s no surprise that the peer review process doesn’t bite the hand that feeds those journals.
Big Pharma also funds medical journals in a more insidious way, through article reprints. When a study published in a prestigious journal supports the claims of a drug manufacturer, that’s good news for sales, because one way the pharmaceutical company gets the word out to doctors who will prescribe the drug is through expensive, glossy reprints of the article that the drug rep delivers (generally accompanied by a box of donuts or fancier fare). The journals enjoy huge profit margins on these reprints, sometimes up to 80 percent, according to former British Medical Journal editor Richard Smith.1 And a study published in 20102 correlated high reprint sales with industry-funded studies. In other words, the published studies that pharmaceutical companies paid for were much more likely to generate big reprint profits for journals. How much money are we talking about? It’s not unusual for a single reprint order to cost millions of dollars.3
Setting aside the obvious question of whether the peer review boards of medical journals prefer studies that show positive drug effects, we can see that wholistic research is unlikely to become a reprint profit center. In whose financial interest is it to spread the word that eating processed food and factory-farmed beef, dairy, and poultry increases disease risk? Even “natural foods” retailer Whole Foods profits from processed foods; the Wall Street Journal reported in 2009 that CEO John Mackey admitted, “We sell a bunch of junk.”4
Medical journals, in short, are given a financial incentive, if not outright pressured by their pharmaceutical benefactors, to publish reductionist studies that promote the efficacy of pharmaceuticals and other profitable interventions. Other models and viewpoints are seriously underrepresented in the medical literature, leading those who read that literature—doctors, researchers, policy makers, and the public—to believe mistakenly that the biased sliver of data that passes through the medical journal filter actually represents a larger truth.
I’ve seen publication bias of medical research journals many times in my own career. Although we were able to publish our findings on the effect of animal protein in highly qualified journals, further commentary on the broader significance of these findings has been another matter (one I intend to push even more vigorously after this book is completed).
Earlier, in chapter three, I mentioned the conversation I had with my colleague Peter Magee, the editor in chief of Cancer Research, the leading cancer research journal in our field. I told him of the new experiment my lab was planning, which would compare the remarkable protein effect on cancer growth with the well-accepted effect produced by a really potent chemical carcinogen, and which I suspected would show that a relatively modest change in nutrient consumption might be even more relevant for cancer development than exposure to the potent carcinogen. He was skeptical, but he agreed that, if we actually got such results, he would consider highlighting our findings on the cover of the journal.
Once we were ready to publish, however, my editor in chief colleague had retired. His replacement and the new editorial review board were inclined to dismiss nutritional effects on cancer. They wanted papers on ideas that were more “intellectually stimulating”—papers that looked at how cancer works in molecular terms, especially if these ideas concerned chemicals and genes and viruses. Despite our adhering strictly to reductionist experimental procedures, our investigation of nutrition’s effects on cancer growth was almost akin to nonscience. Needless to say, Cancer Research did not publish our paper.
I received another cold shoulder from medical journals after collaborating with the director and founder of the True North Health Center, Dr. Alan Goldhamer. We coauthored a retrospective analysis of the dramatic effects of his fasting program on his clients with hypertension.5 Every one of the 176 successive patients who were analyzed for the paper experienced a drop in blood pressure, most of which began within a few days of beginning the fast. The effect occurred relatively rapidly, was more substantial than that produced by any antihypertensive drug ever tested, and was free of side effects. It proved to be an unusually effective intervention. But journals like JAMA and NEJM, whose income depends on heavy advertising from antihypertensive medicines, declined publication in spite of reviewer recommendations to publish. They chose their wealth over your health.
The most egregious case of bias and muzzling I’ve witnessed on the part of a scientific journal revolved around a deeply flawed study6 that purportedly proved that the dangerous Atkins Diet was more effective in helping overweight and obese women lose weight than three other diets, including Dr. Dean Ornish’s low-fat diet. The study was published in JAMA in March 2007, despite the article grossly misrepresenting the study’s results. One example: the authors claimed that their subjects on the Ornish diet were limited to 10 percent fat, as the diet recommends. But a careful review of the data table showed that over twelve months, participants supposedly on the Ornish plan actually consumed about 29 percent of their calories in fat. Yet the authors insisted that they had performed a fair comparison. In that deception they were aided by the JAMA Letters section editor, Dr. Robert Golub, who refused to publish a single critique calling attention to the study’s very serious shortcomings, including commentaries submitted independently by Dr. Ornish himself, Dr. John McDougall, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, and myself. After JAMA ignored these submissions, I wrote to Dr. Golub, complaining about his journal’s antiscientific actions, and urging him to publish at least one informed critique of this flawed study. His reply? A pithy:
Dear Prof. Campbell,
Your letter has been rejected, and we will not engage in further e-mail correspondence about it.
Dr. Golub should have been dismissed forthwith from his position with a reprimand. This is a lack of integrity of the highest order. But in the current system of medical publishing, it’s just business as usual. After all, the Atkins Foundation is more than a diet; it’s the propaganda arm of a billion-dollar business. They call the tune, in the form of funding grants totaling millions of dollars per year,7 and the doctors and researchers who don’t mind prostituting their professional credibility dance merrily across the pages of the most trusted medical publications in the world.
THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA
Most people don’t read medical journals; instead, they get their health news from newspapers, television news, and news websites owned by large media corporations. Ideally, journalists who cover the health beat peruse the top medical journals, attend professional conferences, and interview scientists about new discoveries and ongoing research. They use their own scientific training and background (meager as it often is) to evaluate and interpret findings to a public that lacks scientific expertise—which includes most elected officials. One of the key contributions of health journalists is to set the context of new findings by showing how the new information fits into existing knowledge. Does it confirm, contradict, expand, or add nuance to the current paradigm?
In short, the public-facing media is supposed to be fair, thorough, and knowledgeable on the subjects they report. But they are too often none of the above. Most media bow to the subtle power exerted by the conglomerates that own them (in the case of the major networks and print media outlets), advertisers and/or underwriters, government regulators, and even elected officials (in the case of public broadcasting and other government-supported public media).
Both for-profit and the vast majority of nonprofit media simply echo the industry and government line. That line reinforces the reductionist paradigm and, as an extra bonus, produces some wonderfully gripping and sensationalist news to keep titillating the public: “A scientific breakthrough in the War on Cancer!” “New anti-obesity pill based on Amazonian superfood!” “Can chocolate cure depression?” You’ve seen many similar headlines and teasers, I’m sure.
If the mainstream health media were better—more scientifically literate, independent, and thoughtful—then the research establishment couldn’t get away with the distortions of truth that come from shoddy study design and biased medical journals. The journalists, and the public they represent and educate, would demand more variety in study designs, clearer explanations of the limits of current knowledge, and more inquiry into questions that really matter. After all, we the people are the ultimate source of all the funding, whether through our federal taxes funneled through the NIH, or our health insurance premiums and co-pays going to pharmaceutical companies, or our charitable donations to disease societies and patient advocacy groups. If the media really were free and fair, they would represent our interests. Instead, they function, with little exception, as mouthpieces for industry, telling us the side of the story industry wants us to hear while pretending it’s the whole truth. They spin the evidence positively and negatively to legitimize our broken health system and make it appear to be the only way things could be.
As we’ve seen, reductionist research may produce “truths” out of context that serve only to mislead and befuddle us. When the media report these minutiae as if they mean something important, it contributes to the public’s sense of confusion. They share out-of-context details about fiber in oatmeal, lycopene in tomatoes, and vitamin A in carrots. One day they tell us that a glass of red wine a day will help us live longer, and the next day we discover that even one glass is toxic to the liver. Low-fat diets are great today; tomorrow, full fats are in. The result of all this reporting? Most consumers throw up their hands and alternate between false hope (“Hey, sardines prevent heart attacks!”) and fatalism (“Looks like everything’s gonna kill you. Might as well stop worrying about it.”). This bipolar attitude toward nutrition serves the industrial profiteers who sell us these foods, as well as the ones who sell us the treatments for the diseases our poor food choices cause. All this confusion and noise also lets bad ideas sneak through and look good by comparison.
The reporting I’ve described here is unavoidably biased toward industry’s interests. Bias does not necessarily mean lying. It can also mean exactly this: spinning minor details into major revelations.
Another form of bias involves omitting inconvenient data. The media can report only a small percentage of the biomedical findings that are produced every year. A legitimate media function is to act as a filter, choosing and sharing what’s valid and most important while ignoring the rest. But some media outlets use this responsibility as an excuse for failing to report on some of the best and most important health information, because it doesn’t fit into the reductionist paradigm or undermines the goals of an advertiser or sponsor.
Personal biases can also lead to the obfuscation of scientific truth—even by the nation’s top journalists. Recently, New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata wrote about the discovery of genes that “cause” prostate cancer (just the latest in a long line of such stories, from Kolata and others). What really excited Kolata was the prospect that men could get tested for these genes for less than $300; now most men could find out whether, and possibly when, they would get prostate cancer. According to a surgery professor and prostate cancer specialist quoted in the Kolata article, this testing is part of “the boutique medicine of the future . . . we can know what diseases we will have to face in the rest of our lives.” Kolata, perhaps the most influential health journalist working today, dutifully accepts and passes on this shameless plug for the genetic testing industry as scientific fact.
Kolata’s reports don’t simply inform the public on a day-to-day basis. They often become part of and guide our public conversations about health. And like many other journalists in love with the “next new thing,” she has long emphasized the health promise of genetics research while subtly relegating nutrition research to irrelevance. In 2006, Kolata’s front-page article “Maybe You’re Not What You Eat” caused a national stir. It discussed the 49,000-subject Women’s Health Initiative study, which had failed to show an expected decrease in breast cancer among women consuming a low-fat diet. Her conclusion: let’s all stop worrying about food and instead get behind the future of high-tech medicine to save us from our faulty genes and misbehaving bodies.
This might be a defensible conclusion based on a study that actually showed no positive effect from a low-fat diet. The trouble is, the “low-fat” diet in question was a straw man, on two counts. First, the researchers’ definition of “low fat” was 25-30 percent of calories from fat, a far higher figure than the studies they claimed to be refuting. And second, only 31 percent of the women in the study kept their fat intake below that already unimpressive level.
The problem with the journalism of Kolata and her ilk is not their inability to correctly report the technical details of research studies, but rather their prejudicial misunderstanding (or willful distortion) of some very fundamental science. Although well written and technically accurate, her story repeats the same superficial interpretations as her other writing about dietary findings. And taken as a whole, her body of work does not accurately reflect a balanced approach to scientific research done during her tenure, but rather a clear ideological position.
I cite these stories partly to suggest that media too often report on complex scientific issues in ways that reflect their own subjective preferences rather than the science, especially when it comes to issues of health. There is something very personal about these issues. We often discuss things like genetics and nutrition from a place of passion and ideology, ignoring facts to the contrary, and journalists are no exception.
Bias can’t explain all the media’s failures to give us good nutrition and health information. Another problem is the appalling lack of scientific expertise that many of the most influential reporters covering the fields of health and nutrition demonstrate. Because they are unable to assess critically the quality of health information that industry, government, and academia produce, they typically act as mouthpieces for these institutions rather than advocates for the public’s right to know. Many articles consist of minimally rewritten corporate and government press releases, interspersed with expert interviews that corporate PR representatives conveniently hand them on silver platters. As a result, the reductionist half-truths that masquerade as scientific wisdom get passed on to us unquestioned and undigested. There’s nothing wrong with nonscientists writing about science; I have no interest in limiting debate or silencing freedom of speech. But I do wish that journalists would acknowledge the limits of their expertise, rather than give the illusion of competence where none exists.
All in all, the story the media tells us about health and nutrition comes from a script written by the very people who profit from our pain and suffering. I’ve had far too many firsthand experiences of media manipulation, obfuscation, and suppression of the powerful connection between food and health to believe otherwise.
SPIN, OMISSION, AND INCOMPETENCE ON PBS
Around the same time I began working on this manuscript back in early 2007, there was an episode of the PBS NewsHour in which host Jim Lehrer reported an exciting news release from the ACS: cancer deaths in the United States decreased in 2004 for the second successive year.8 Most notably, it was said to be a “big drop” from 2003. The way it was reported, it seemed that the tide in the War on Cancer, then thirty-six years old and counting, was finally about to turn. Later in the program, NewsHour correspondent Margaret Warner interviewed the chief medical officer of the ACS. Glowing with pride, he offered a few reasons for this big drop in cancer death rates, especially the decrease in cancers of the lung, breast, and prostate: better treatments, more screening, and less smoking. All in all, it was an upbeat report and interview that aired, coincidentally, just in time for the annual ACS fundraising campaign.
The next day, in my local Raleigh, North Carolina paper, the story dutifully made its appearance on the front page.9 Shortly thereafter, President Bush was persuaded to go over to the nearby NIH laboratories and to declare that “the drop [in cancer rates] this year was the steepest ever recorded.”10 What’s more, this “big” drop was all the more promising, the press regurgitated, because it followed what might be the beginning of a new trend that started the year before.
As someone who has spent most of his career seeking to eliminate cancer, I was fascinated by this wonderful announcement. Rather than depending on the TV and newspaper reports, I decided to dig a little and examine more closely the new figures in this report. Here they are: for every 200 cancer deaths in 2003, there was one less cancer death in 2004, a drop of about a half of 1 percent.11 That’s not the “big drop” that I expected based on the way it was reported. Although any such evidence favoring less cancer, however small, is welcome news, I doubt anyone who watched NewsHour that day, saw the subsequent media reports, or caught the president’s speech would have estimated its magnitude at a measly half of 1 percent.
Furthermore, total cancer deaths from 2002 to 2003 had dropped by only 0.07 percent, a decrease of less than one death in every thousand. The numbers just don’t merit the hype in the ACS announcement, which was diligently reported by media outlets aping one another without investigation or discernment, and which was publicly legitimized by the president. Watching this, I couldn’t help but envy the cancer industry’s control of the media and the bully pulpit of the presidency. What I could do with that kind of PR!
While most of the details of this cancer news item may be technically correct, its presentation is misleading. To say that a decrease in cancer deaths is “big” when it is less than 1 percent is simply wrong. To spend so much time talking about the reasons for this tiny decrease gives it, and its purported causes, far more significance than they deserve.
I know something about cancer. In addition to running my experimental cancer research program for about forty years, I was a member of several expert panels advising on policy concerning cancer causes, and I served on research grant review panels of the ACS, the NCI, the American Institute for Cancer Research, and the World Cancer Research Fund. In fact, I was responsible for organizing a couple of these panels. So when I say that the media is misrepresenting the truth, I speak from experience. Both my research background and my intimate involvement in the real story allow me a perspective that the average media consumer is denied.
The only message of this new ACS report likely to be remembered by the public is this: thanks to all our donations, the search for the cure for cancer is finally starting to pay off. Perhaps you think my concerns about this misleading report on cancer death rates are overstated. I disagree. In this age of information overload, we rely on sound bites like, “We are finally winning the War on Cancer,” to tell us about the world and guide our actions. If winning this war means getting a minuscule change in cancer death rates after thirty-six years of spending tens of billions of dollars on cancer research (yes, billions, and largely by the U.S. government’s NIH; its 2012 budget for cancer research is $5.9 billion12), it’s going to be a very long war. This misguided overconfidence is our single biggest obstacle to truly overcoming cancer. Truly winning the war on cancer requires individual responsibility for our food choices; as long as we wait for the next pharmaceutical breakthrough or genetic engineering miracle to save us, we won’t use the considerable power we already possess to end this scourge. In the meantime, the pharmaceutical/medical industry profits from our continued chase of cancer’s cure, and the junk food and factory-farm conglomerates profit by suppressing knowledge about cancer’s cause.
Had I been a reporter tasked with sharing the ACS press release with the public, here are just a few questions I would have asked: How big was the drop in cancer rates? Who chose the word big? Who funded the report? Which cancer rates declined, and which, if any, remained constant or even increased? (Not to mention: Why are overall cancer death rates in the United States so high compared to China and many other countries to begin with?)
Why didn’t anyone on NewsHour ask these questions? Was it bias? Ignorance? I can’t get inside the heads of the journalists who presented the story, so I can only guess that it was a combination of those sins, along with a relentless news cycle and ever-shrinking budgets that discourage slow and thoughtful consideration in favor of just running with a done-for-them press release.
ADVERTISING PRESSURE TO MISLEAD BY OMISSION
Shortly after publication of The China Study, I was interviewed on the phone by Ann Underwood, an informed and well-established senior editor of Newsweek. She told me at the top of the interview that her “senior editor” was very interested in the book. Our conversation lasted for almost two hours and she seemed personally interested in the implications of our message. Obviously, I was somewhat hopeful the interview I’d given would see print, although Ms. Underwood told (warned?) me that she first had to pass it by her editorial board for acceptance. From her especially articulate questions and her personal enthusiasm, I got the impression that I might expect a particularly good article. However, we heard nothing but silence over the next couple of months. I then received in the mail a copy of a Newsweek issue titled “Special Edition of the Future of Medicine”—an entire issue on health. This is it, I thought.
I opened the magazine to see what they had in store and counted more than twenty articles on various medical topics pointing to the future. Except for a rather superficial item on the relationship between diet and Type 2 diabetes, the articles ignored nutrition completely. They were all about new drugs and surgeries and genetics. Were I still in the experimental laboratory rather than wandering among the public, I could have easily become fascinated with the opportunities presented in this issue. Fundamental research into the workings of the cell is thrilling and mesmerizing. But this special Newsweek issue illustrated something far more important for the public. By omitting nutrition, the single most comprehensive contributor to health and well-being, Newsweek did its readers, at best, a massive disservice.
Disappointed, I browsed some of the boilerplate material in the front of the magazine to find this very thoughtful letter from Newsweek Chairman and Editor In Chief, Richard M. Smith:
At Newsweek, we have a long and distinguished tradition of reporting on issues about science, medicine and health. Now, as biomedical research enters a new period of discovery we are proud to offer this special edition (a bonus issue for our subscribers) on the advances that are rapidly changing the face of medicine in the 21st century.
We are pleased that Johnson & Johnson chose to be the exclusive advertiser for this special issue. As I trust Newsweek readers expect, the advertiser had no influence over the editorial content of this magazine.
Johnson & Johnson, one of the biggest medical device companies in the world, was the sole advertiser in the “Future of Medicine” issue of Newsweek, and I’m supposed to believe that Newsweek’s dependence on Johnson & Johnson’s advertising dollars had absolutely no influence on its full-color ode to reductionist, for-profit, nutrition-ignoring health coverage? While I’m sure that a Johnson & Johnson senior executive wasn’t sitting at Newsweek’s editorial meeting giving thumbs up and down to each article, the financially struggling news magazine could ill afford to displease such a powerful benefactor. (Yes, struggling: Newsweek’s revenues dropped 38 percent from 2007 to 2009, and in 2010 it was sold to audio pioneer Sidney Harman for $1, provided he assumed its $47 million debt.13)
Shortly after the Newsweek inquiry, I got a call from Susan Dentzer, who was the health correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. The conversation lasted about an hour and was a good exchange. Ms. Dentzer certainly asked good questions and I thought she seemed quite interested, especially when she said she wanted to explore a possible interview for me with Jim Lehrer. She made no promise, but I nonetheless took some encouragement because I had been interviewed on that program before.
My hope eventually evaporated; an interview never came to pass. Why? I don’t know for sure. But I did notice the increasing number of corporate sponsors now underwriting PBS who would not especially care for my views on nutrition. Someone on the NewsHour staff must have realized how unpopular my views would be with those big corporate sponsors. Why risk a funding backlash, when there are so many other stories out there that could be safely told?
In recent years, big corporations have gotten smarter about covering their tracks when funding supposedly impartial shows like NewsHour. One of the biggest current sponsors of the show is the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, whose President and CEO, Alberto Ibargüen, serves on the board of PepsiCo.14 Knight Foundation trustee Anna Spangler Nelson has been since 1988 a general partner of the Wakefield Group,15 a North Carolina–based investment company that has a stake in many of the state’s medical and biotech companies.16 E. Roe Stamps IV, a Knight Foundation trustee since 2006, is cofounder and managing partner of the Summit Group, an investment company whose portfolio includes specialized molecular diagnostics laboratory ApoCell, Inc., which analyzes the effectiveness of oncology compounds for large pharmaceutical and biotech companies; specialized anatomic pathology laboratory company Aurora Diagnostics, LLC, whose website touts its “immediate access to cutting-edge laboratory procedures,”17 including gene rearrangement; and several other medical technology and healthcare companies. Trustee Earl W. Powell endowed the Powell Gene Therapy Center at the University of Miami.18
My point here is not to criticize the Knight Foundation or its trustees; any of several other NewsHour underwriters, under scrutiny, would have produced similar results. As far as I’m concerned, the foundation does a lot of good work, and in fact generally supports “the little guy” against corporate interests. Furthermore, it makes sense for a charitable organization to fill its trusteeships with successful and wealthy people who can provide policy direction and aid in fundraising. But I do want to point out the inherent conflicts of interest that go undisclosed, unreported, and unaccounted for when a supposedly impartial news organization relies on a funding source whose trustees and executives are embedded in the very system that needs to be questioned and exposed.
I may be wrong to suspect such bias for a news program like NewsHour that is supported by public money, but a previous occasion with PBS about twenty years earlier turned me into a bit of cynic when it came to PBS’s “journalistic independence.” Back in 1992, a couple of years after the New York Times, USA Today, and the Saturday Evening Post had written lead articles on our project in China, PBS proposed the interesting idea to do a story comparing the diet and health habits of three rural communities: one in Italy, one in the United States, and one of our villages in rural China. At least, this is what I was told by a film group in Colorado who had been contracted by PBS (in Chicago) to put together footage. They visited Cornell, China, and the University of Oxford in England for the filming, and did a joint interview in China with me and Dr. Junshi Chen, my friend and Beijing counterpart.
Our conversation on camera in Beijing went well, I thought, especially when we talked about the health benefits of the low fat, mostly plant-based diet in rural China when compared with the typical high-fat, mostly animal-based American diet that the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee of the USDA (the group that produces the well-known Food Pyramid) generally favored. I offered then—and would do so with even more vigor now—that I was neither a fan of the typical U.S. diet nor of the Committee’s politically sensitive government recommendations.
All went well, and the Colorado filmmakers kindly alerted us about two weeks prior to the upcoming TV show. They told us that we would like it, especially because the well-known news anchor Judy Woodruff would be providing the voiceover. Our friends and colleagues gathered around the tube at the designated hour, only to see nothing that had been promised. There was no comparison of the diets of the three rural communities, and the more significant discussions on policy had been purged. Dr. Chen and I were included in the credits at the end of the show, and that was about it. I called my contact in Colorado the next morning to ask what had happened. He said that when the final product was shown to PBS staff, they did not like my criticism of the dietary guidelines and the process by which the USDA constructs them. So those criticisms were simply omitted from the documentary, along with the supporting evidence Dr. Chen and I provided. What remained was a misleading, one-sided narrative that reassured Americans that our diet was fine and our government was protecting our health.
Is it possible that PBS, a celebrated media company known for its impartiality, is not so impartial after all? At the time the documentary aired in 1992, Archer Daniels Midlands (ADM), a company that, as of 2011, generates $70 billion in revenue from its worldwide operations, including sales of ingredients for livestock feed, was prominently featured as a major supporter of the PBS NewsHour. I could only wonder whether ADM’s support was a consideration when the PBS senior management intercepted my comments in the documentary. Perhaps I’m wrong; I invite you to decide.19 In any event, this early experience with PBS left a scar in my mind, which I could not help but recall when Susan Dentzer later interviewed me about The China Study.
I file both of these PBS experiences in a file labeled “Misrepresentation by Omission.” When PBS edited out my comments on the U.S. dietary guidelines, it diminished its reporting. And, funnily enough, my comments at that time really were quite mild, compared to my present views!
SUBTLE POWER AND THE MEDIA
Nothing I’ve written here about the media is particularly dramatic. You couldn’t make a gripping movie about Newsweek or PBS ignoring nutrition as part of its health coverage; I doubt Matt Damon is interested in telling my story on the big screen. Nobody lied, cheated, or conspired. As far as I know, there were no shady back room deals involving suitcases full of hush money. As far as I know, none of the journalists who slanted their stories were even aware of what they were doing, or what pressures they were responding to. These are decent, honest people just trying to fill airtime, entertain and inform an audience, avoid libelous statements, and keep their jobs by not offending those who ultimately underwrite their paychecks. That’s the application of subtle power at its most effective and insidious: no fingerprints, no bruises, no blood, no foul. Just the seemingly innocent reporting of a scientific story as if it were the entire, obvious truth. But the cost of the missing part of the story, as we’ve seen, is nothing less than untold human suffering.