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

When asked about his failed predictions by Stanford magazine in 1990, Ehrlich had this to say: "Everyone wants to know what's going to happen. And you never know what's going to happen. So, the question is, Do you say, 'I don't know,'in which case they all go back to bed-or do you say, 'Hell, in ten years you're likely to be going without food and water' and [get] their attention?"

Yet Ehrlich takes the high road against environmentalists' "unscientific" detractors in his latest book. "[We and our colleagues in environmental science make no claim to perfection, only to doing science as it should be done and to having our work constantly reviewed by peers so that it represents more than our own idiosyncratic opinions." He says scientists shouldn't be blamed for making predictions that don't pan out. He's right; the problem is, his predictions haven't been especially scientific. No scrupulous scientist will state as absolute fact that something will happen if he in reality doesn't know if it will or not. Responsible scientists, environmental or otherwise, add the necessary caveats: This may happen; that might happen.

But overstating your case is a seductive option when you realize that "mays" and "mights" don't necessarily make the front page. Diane Dumanoski, an environmental reporter for the Boston Globe, told this story to David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times. In 1991, a Harvard scientist was predicting a very high probability" that an ozone hole would develop in the Northern hemisphere by the turn of the century, and Dumanoski wanted to get the story on the front page. Her editor, however, didn't think a "probability" merited page one, and told her if it wasn't a sure thing, the story would go inside. So she called the scientist and "negotiated something that really wasn't accurate ... something much balder than was true," as she told Shaw. She got her piece on page one, and it said there would be an ozone hole. Meanwhile, a Northern hemisphere ozone hole remains to be seen (and few expect to see one).

At a conference in 1990, Dumanoski said, "There is no such thing as objective reporting. I've become even more crafty about finding the voices to say the things I think are true. That's my subversive mission." Yet, ironically, the Ehrlichs praise Dumanoski in The Betrayal of Science and Reason as one of the "responsible electronic and print journalists who regularly offer dependable information to the public on the environmental situation" If that's the standard of excellence, it should come as no surprise to find that, as the Ehrlichs disappointedly cite in their book, a 1995 poll found that "51 percent of those polled believed the media's coverage of environmental issues was biased and 35 percent thought the media made environmental issues seem worse than they really are." The Ehrlichs blame the brownlash: "To our distress and that of many of our colleagues, brownlash messages seem to be having a measurable effect on the general public." Might it be that the public is right?