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

Compounding the irony, one of two examples the Ehrlichs cite of "what a superb job a good journalist can do with a complex scientific topic when backed up by careful technical reviewing," is Our Stolen Future, a 1996 book co-authored by Dumanoski that has been widely attacked for ignoring studies that don't support the authors' hypothesis and for not representing the full breadth of scientific evidence.

Our Stolen Future posits that synthetic chemicals that mimic estrogen and other human hormones-"endocrine disruptors"-may be impeding human sexual development and sending male sperm counts worldwide into a downward spiral. The book has plenty of defenders as well as detractors, and, to their credit, the authors are careful to admit that the evidence is not entirely conclusive, and that there are a number of "mights" and "maybes" involved. Unfortunately, many of the caveats have been lost in the translation, and some of it is the authors' fault: A blurb on the book cover states as fact that sperm counts are down 50 percent across the globe, when in fact the main study asserting that has been widely criticized and contradicted; and one of the authors, Theo Colborn of the World Wildlife Fund, has been somewhat, shall we say, excited in her media statements. She told CBS's "Eye to Eye with Connie Chung" that "The ultimate test for chemicals today, we realize now, has to be whether the chemicals affect reproductive capability, and if we don't do this, we are headed for extinction."

But the media are also at fault here, as they often are when it comes to potentially alarming environmental, health-and-safety, and crime stories. In the CBS story in which Colborn appears, much of the nuance of the book's argument is lost, and the segment veers quickly from egregious to comic. The piece's opening illustration is a man with a low sperm count who can't impregnate his wife. We get the full treatment: the couple's sad vignette, the scientist with the microscope looking at the man's deformed sperm, the quick switch to the contentious Danish study alleging the 50 percent global sperm count drop, and finally the transition to the allegations that endocrine disruptors are a probable cause. There's no indication of the very likely possibility that this is just one of those unfortunate guys who shoot blanks, as any number of men have since time immemorial.

But here's the real kicker: We're introduced to a man, a mortician who can't be identified, who mysteriously started growing breasts, losing libido, and suffering sperm count drop. After a biochemist identified a hand cream that mimicked estrogen as the culprit and the mortician stopped using it, we are told, his condition "improved dramatically."

"The mortician went on to father two more children," the reporter says, triumphantly, before plunging into a panoply of "expert opinions" that, yes, the hand cream was definitely at fault, and that things like plastic-lined soup cans could be dangerous too.

Cut to final scene:

REPORTER (voiceover): We decided to track down that mortician only to find that he most definitely has not returned to full manhood.