When good guys lie: misleading the public is no way to make the world a better place - baseless, alarmist statistics in publicizing social concerns

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 1997 by Glenn Hodges

(Footage of reporter and the mortician, in a dress, walking down the beach)

MORTICIAN: "I... I was feeling like a half-and-half person, and I didn't know who I was because of what had happened with this chemical stuff. "

REPORTER (voiceover): Today the mortician is living as a woman and taking estrogen by prescription. She told us a troubled childhood contributed to a lifelong struggle with her gender identity, and yet ...

REPORTER: "If you bad not been exposed to that estrogen-like cream at work, do you think that you would be living your life as a woman today?

MORTICIAN: "No, I think I would have been living as a man, and that answers the question right there."

You almost expect the mortician to yell "LIVE FROM NEW YORK..." but this is the real deal-CBS news. The reporter does go on to say, "The morticians doctor is extremely skeptical that the cream would cause that dramatic an effect. He believes that other factors are clearly at work here." But that's obvious and doesn't do much to soften the alarmist tenor of the story.

The media have their reasons for pushing scare stories. First, drama sells. An ozone hole is a big story; fifty thousand kidnapped kids is a big story; AIDS threatening you and your neighbor and your children is a big story; the human race on a path to chemically-induced sterility is a big story. Stick to the confirmed statistics and the established science, with all the caveats and maybes, and the stories atrophy in urgency. Second, journalists are just as vulnerable to the "good guy syndrome" as everyone else. When they believe in a cause, they are less apt to judge its particulars critically. Time's science editor Charles Alexander said in 1990, "I would freely admit that on this issue [of environmentalism] we have crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy."

It's true that there is no such thing as objectivity, and that dispassion is not necessarily an ideal goal. But the press should try, if not to be objective, to be accurate. We risk living in an age where all facts are fluid, debatable, and thus irrelevant. The press should not increase that risk. We-the press and the public-need to hold our sources of information accountable, to insist that they not mislead us in the service of a good cause or, worse, "for our own good."