GAP's in your defense - Government Accountability Project

Washington Monthly, Feb, 1990 by Alexander Kippen

When GAP chooses to take a case to the media, its credibility and persistence are key. "60 Minutes" executive producer Don Hewitt is typical in wanting to flush out the motives of any group that brings a whistleblower's gripe to the program's attention. "If I find out that a group is always on left-wing causes, or right-wing causes," says Hewitt, "I get suspicious. You've got to be very careful of ideology."

Although GAP'S credibility is high, the organization was involved in at least one incident in which the truth was a little twisted. An article about poultry plants published under Tom Devine's byline in the magazine Southern Exposure claimed: "Since workers are not allowed to go to the bathroom, they sometimes have to use the floor. Chickens that fall in the urine and excrement are routinely picked up and returned to the line." This passage suggests that chickens sometimes come into contact with human feces because employees are forced to defecate where they work. And this is false-when pressed, Devine admits that while the workers sometimes urinate near the assembly line, the excrement in question comes strictly from the chickens. Devine's original draft read: "Whistleblowers report that employees are not allowed to leave the floor to go to the bathroom, so frequently they have to use the floor-where chickens fall, routinely are picked out of the sewage and returned to the line." Devine claims that the added false assertions in the published article were not his doing, but that of the magazine's editors. Maybe so, but Devine's original sentence certainly implies contact with human feces. Although this episode is fairly minor since all accounts agree that there were serious health hazards at the plant, it still serves as a reminder of a failing that GAP, like any other publicity driven organization, had best watch out for: the temptation to gild (or in this case, smear) the truth.

Has GAP succumbed to that temptation on other occasions? Ralph Nader says that GAP is "credible" and that Devine is a "solid guy." John Richard, a lawyer who has worked with Nader for 11 years calls GAP "among the best in the public interest community . . . . They don't puff things, they're not sloppy, and they're not ideologues." Tony Roisman, formerly of Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, who worked with GAP representing whistleblowers in the nuclear power industry, says, "They were meticulous in my experience . . . they made sure what came out was fight."

Tom Devine first took Bartley's story about chickens to a CBS "60 Minutes" producer GAP had dealt with previously. Nevertheless, it took months of prodding a series of junior and senior producers before the network would commit to the story, and then three months for it to put the piece together. With a layout of the Simmons plant provided by GAP, CBS was able to position its hidden cameras to catch the most unsanitary targets before being discovered. As a result, 30 million people saw what Hobart Bartley saw.

Getting the story out that spectacularly protected Bartley from being fired. (Out of disillusionment, he later quit.) For a long time, Simmons officials ignored Bartley's repeated warnings of unsanitary conditions. "If I condemned 150 chicks as diseased, they'd pick out 147 and say they were fine." And his USDA bosses kowtowed to the plant's management, warning Bartley not to "bird-dog" the Simmons people. When Bartley refused to back off, the USDA transferred him in August 1985 to the night shift at another plant about six miles away. He went from "grader in charge" at Simmons to "other grader" at the Hudson Foods plant in Noel, Missouri. But in addition to publicizing Bartley's case, GAP forced the USDA to erase the negative comments from his employee file, and blocked the USDKS move to suspend him.