After leaving Tozzi’s service, Milloy became president of his own organization called the Regulatory Impact Analysis Project, Inc., where he wrote a couple of reports arguing that “most environmental risks are so small or indistinguishable that their existence cannot be proven.”70 Shortly thereafter, he launched the “Junk Science Home Page” (www.junkscience.com). Calling himself “the Junkman,” he offered daily attacks on environmentalists, public health and food safety regulators, anti-nuclear activists, animal rights activists, the EPA, and a wide range of other targets that he accused of using unsound science to advance various political agendas.
The tone of the Junk Science Home Page seemed calculated to lower rather than elevate scientific discourse. If his targets were not “psychologically challenged” or “bogus,” they were fearmongering “blowhards,” “turkeys,” “wacko enviros,” or members of the “food police.” Using school-yard taunts and accusations of “mindless anti-chemical hysteria,” Milloy routinely attacked the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, including Science, Nature, the Lancet, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. He dismissed reports of a thinning ozone layer as “nutty.” He opposed automobile emissions testing as “just another clever ploy to separate you from your money.” His website also featured an extended attack on Our Stolen Future, the book about endocrine disruptors by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and Peter Myers. Milloy’s online parody, titled “Our Swollen Future,” included a cartoon depiction of Colborn hauling a wheelbarrow of money to the bank (her implied motive for writing the book), and referred to Dianne Dumanoski as “Dianne Dumb-as-an-oxski.” Nor was he above an occasional ethnic slur. “Tora, tora, tora,” he wrote in response to reports that Japanese researchers were concerned about endocrine disruptors.
Milloy was also active in defense of the tobacco industry, particularly in regard to the issue of environmental tobacco smoke. He dismissed the EPA’s 1993 report linking secondhand smoke to cancer as “a joke,” and when the British Medical Journal published its own study with similar results in 1997, he scoffed that “it remains a joke today.” After one researcher published a study linking secondhand smoke to cancer, Milloy wrote that she “must have pictures of journal editors in compromising positions with farm animals. How else can you explain her studies seeing the light of day?” In August 1997, the New York Times reported that Milloy was one of the paid speakers at a Miami briefing for foreign reporters sponsored by the British-American Tobacco Company, whose Brown & Williamson unit makes popular cigarettes like Kool, Carlton, and Lucky Strike. At the briefing, which was off-limits to U.S. journalists, the company flew in dozens of reporters from countries including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Peru and paid for their hotel rooms and expensive meals while the reporters sat through presentations that ridiculed “lawsuit-driven societies like the United States” for using “unsound science” to raise questions about “infinitesimal, if not hypothetical, risks” related to inhaling a “whiff” of tobacco smoke.71
The differences between ACSH and TASSC over the tobacco issue came to a head in June 1997, after Milloy attacked a Harvard University study published in the New England Journal of Medicine as an “abuse of statistics” and a case of “epidemiologists trying to pass off junk science as Nobel Prize work.” This rhetoric became the basis for a story, titled “Smoke Rings,” which appeared in a June 1997 issue of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s, conservative National Review. Elizabeth Whelan, who describes herself as “a longtime National Review fan,” was so “disappointed” in the article that she wrote a letter to the editor warning that “NR should be wary of relying on a source that considers the New England Journal of Medicine a purveyor of junk science. In labeling the Harvard study ‘junk science,’ you may be inadvertently junking all science.”
“We respect Dr. Whelan’s work on many subjects, but when it comes to tobacco she loses her grip on reality,” the National Review replied.72 Even she, it seemed, could sometimes be a “wacko fearmonger.”
Junk Bonds
Casual visitors to Milloy’s Junk Science Home Page might be tempted to dismiss him as merely an obnoxious adolescent with a website. They would be surprised to discover that he is a well-connected fixture in conservative Washington policy circles. He currently holds the title of “adjunct scholar” at the libertarian Cato Institute, which was rated the fourth most influential think tank in Washington, D.C., in a 1999 survey of congressional staffers and journalists.73
Milloy’s vitriolic style may seem strange to outsiders, but it generates and channels the anger that right-wing pseudopopulists have become adept at mobilizing against environmentalists. Milloy’s website frequently provides phone and fax numbers that visitors can use to bombard news editors and politicians with correspondence. Using dittoheads to amplify his messages, he has claimed responsibility for engineering the 1999 firing of George Lundberg as editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and for the passage of legislation by Congress that substantially alters the rules regarding data disclosure by government-funded scientists.
In addition to the website, Milloy is a prolific author of eco-bashing articles that the Cato Institute helps circulate to newspapers and other publications. His diatribes against junk science have run in publications including the New York Post, the Washington Times, Arizona Republic, Electricity Daily, San Francisco Examiner, Detroit Free Press, Investor’s Business Daily, Cincinnati Enquirer, USA Today, New York Post, London Financial Times, San Francisco Examiner, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Chemical and Engineering News. The Chicago Sun-Times has run “special reports” by Milloy that are offered as news stories rather than editorials, in which he downplays environmental concerns about issues such as biotech foods. He can rein in the rhetoric when he needs to, and some of his stories read like straight news. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about his writing for the Chicago Sun-Times is the newspaper’s failure to provide its readers with any information about his background as an industry lobbyist. It describes him simply as “a Washington-based business writer specializing in science” who “holds advanced degrees in health sciences from Johns Hopkins University and a law degree from Georgetown University.” (Milloy’s “advanced degree” from Johns Hopkins is a master’s degree in biostatistics.) Indeed, some of the publications that quote Milloy tend to inflate or distort his credentials. He has been described in various places as a “risk expert,” an “economist,” and a “statistician.”
Like other corporate-funded front groups, the organizations that flack for sound science are sometimes fly-by-night organizations. Called into existence for a particular cause or legislative lobby campaign, they often dry up and blow away once the campaign is over. The tendency of groups to appear and disappear creates another form of camouflage, making it difficult for journalists and everyday citizens to sort out the bewildering proliferation of names and acronyms. This was indeed what happened with The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, which was quietly retired in late 1998. Its legacy, however, continues. Milloy’s Junk Science Home Page now claims to be sponsored by an organization called “Citizens for the Integrity of Science,” about which no further information is publicly available. It is one of dozens, if not hundreds, of industry-funded organizations and conservative think tanks that continue to wave the sound science banner. Some are large and well-known, while others are small-scale operations, as the following examples illustrate:• The Washington Legal Foundation continues to press the campaign against “junk science in the courtroom.” It runs quarter-page advertisements in the New York Times, calling them “public service messages” by “free enterprise advocates with public interest know how.” In a 1997 ad, headlined “Junk Science Makes Junk Law,” the WLF recited the familiar litany—Alar, Bendectin, breast implants. “Just imagine the products Americans will never have because of junk science,” it concluded.74 Internal Philip Morris documents describe WLF as “a close ally of PM for many years. WLF h
as been involved in numerous aspects of the tobacco industry debate. They have filed amicus briefs against the EPA; they have written and promoted policy papers supporting our position on the advertising/First Amendment issue; and, most recently, they authored a major paper detailing why the tobacco industry is already one of the most highly regulated industries in America and does not need further regulatory control.”75
• The Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank that spent the 1960s and 1970s envisioning nuclear war scenarios and defending the war in Vietnam, today employs “adjunct scholar” Dennis T. Avery as an in-house, anti-environmentalist expert on junk science. Avery is author of the tract Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic and has championed the idea that organic food is more dangerous than foods grown using synthetic pesticides. In the fall of 1998, Avery began claiming that “people who eat organic and ‘natural’ foods are eight times as likely as the rest of the population to be attacked by a deadly new strain of E. coli bacteria (0157:H7).” This happens, he says, because organic food is grown in animal manure. He claims his data comes from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the federal agency that tracks outbreaks of foodborne illness. In reality, organic food is no more likely to be grown in animal manure than nonorganic food. The CDC vigorously denies Avery’s claim and has even gone to the unusual step of issuing a news release disavowing it. Nevertheless, Avery’s message has been repeated in media op-ed pieces written by Avery with titles such as “Organic Foods Can Make You Sick”76 and in news stories by the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, and numerous other publications in the United States and Europe. In February 2000, Avery was the featured expert for an ABC 20/20 story by television reporter John Stossel which speculated that “buying organic could kill you.” Stossel’s piece made no mention of Avery’s affiliation with the Hudson Institute, let alone any mention of the institute’s corporate funding from agrichemical and agribusiness heavyweights, including Monsanto, DuPont, Dow-Elanco, Sandoz, Ciba-Geigy, ConAgra, Cargill, and Procter & Gamble. Stossel also claimed that 20/20’s own laboratory tests had found as many pesticide residues on organic produce as on the conventionally grown variety—a claim the network would have to retract later when its researchers admitted that no such tests had been conducted.
• The Competitive Enterprise Institute, backed by major oil companies, claims that “thousands of scientists agree there’s no solid evidence of a global-warming problem.” It boasts of media hits in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, Good Morning America, and Larry King Live. CEI’s activities include a “Death by Regulation” project aimed at “shifting the policy debate” about environmental regulations by making the argument that “government intervention carries its own deadly consequences.” It claims, for example, that automobile emissions standards drive consumers to buy smaller, flimsier automobiles, causing more deaths from car crashes. Similarly, it argues that there are “adverse public health effects of medical drug regulation and nutritional labeling.” Drug regulations, it says, keep new medications off the market. As for nutritional labeling, it believes that wine makers should be able to advertise that wine consumption prevents heart attacks. 77 However, there should be no requirement for labeling of milk from rBGH-treated cows. During the peak of the PR campaign against EPA’s secondhand smoke report, CEI cranked out opinion articles for major newspapers with titles such as “A Smoking Gun Firing Blanks,” “EPA’s Bad Science Mars ETS Report,” and “Safety Is a Relative Thing for Cars; Why Not for Cigarettes?” CEI funders include the American Petroleum Institute, Amoco, ARCO Foundation, Armstrong Foundation, Burlington Northern Railroad Co., Carthage Foundation, Charles C. Koch Charitable Foundation, Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, Coca-Cola, CSX Corp., David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, Detroit Farming Inc., Dow Chemical, EBCO Corp., Ford Motor Co., General Motors, IBM, JM Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Pfizer Inc., Philip Morris Companies, Phillip M. McKenna Foundation, Precision Valve Corp., Sarah Scaife Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, and Texaco Foundation.
• The Illinois-based Heartland Institute publishes anti-environmental books with titles like Eco-Sanity by institute president Joe Bast. It also has a “PolicyFax” system through which it makes position papers available on a wide range of issues, including reprints of essays by Jacob Sullum, ACSH, the Cato Institute, the National Smokers Alliance, Michael Fumento, and the Tobacco Institute. Although the PolicyFax database includes numerous reprints of articles by Elizabeth Whelan, her writings against the tobacco industry are not included. In addition to repeating the conservative line on everything from Alar to biotechnology to dioxin, Heartland enthusiastically reiterates the tobacco industry line on secondhand smoke. Its board of directors hails from General Motors, Amoco, Procter & Gamble, and Philip Morris, companies that are also among its principal contributors. An internal Philip Morris memo from March 1994 notes that Philip Morris “provided technical comments for the Heartland Institute’s book on Eco-Sanity.”78
• The American Policy Center (APC), headed by longtime PR pro Thomas DeWeese, weighs in on what can safely be called the loony fringe of the sound science movement. One issue of the APC’s newsletter attacks longtime environmentalist and author Jeremy Rifkin as “anti-industry, anti-civilization, anti-people” and accuses him of preaching “suicide, abortion, cannibalism and sodomy.”79 The APC is also the publisher of a report titled “Safeguarding the Future: Credible Science, Credible Decisions,” which says EPA regulatory initiatives rest on “shaky scientific ground.” It also publishes a newsletter called EPA Watch, edited by Bonner Cohen, which accuses the EPA of everything from destroying the U.S. economy to trying to stop people from taking showers. A Philip Morris strategy document describes EPA Watch as an “asset” created by PM funding allocated “to establish groups . . . that have a broader impact for PM.” Another strategy memo discusses plans to promote “EPA Watch/Bonner Cohen as expert on EPA matters, i.e., regular syndicated radio features on EPA activities . . . news bureau function, speaking engagements, whatever can be done to increase his visibility and credibility on matters dealing with the EPA.”80
• The National Anxiety Center calls itself “a think tank headquartered in Maplewood, New Jersey” whose mission is to dispel the “widespread, baseless fears” fostered by environmentalism regarding deforestation, pesticides, garbage, and endangered species. Its founder and sole proprietor is Alan Caruba, a longtime PR adviser to the pesticide industry and a personal friend of Steven Milloy. On his website (www.anxietycenter.com), Caruba attacks everyone from EPA director Carol Browner to now-deceased oceanologist Jacques Cousteau as co-conspirators in a “green genocide agenda” to “save the earth by killing humans.” Caruba also contributes to the newsletter of the American Policy Center.
Experts at Being Experts
Since ideology, not science, unites industry’s self-proclaimed debunkers of junk science, it is not surprising that many of industry’s “experts” on scientific matters are themselves nonscientists. In July 1997, the Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy and Research (CLEAR) issued an analysis of the “sound science” movement titled “Show Me the Science! Corporate Polluters and the ‘Junk Science’ Strategy.” It examined the credentials of many leading “science experts” in the Directory of Environmental Scientists and Economists, published in 1996 by the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR). Ostensibly, the directory purported to identify experts in 27 policy fields, ranging alphabetically from agriculture to wildlife. “The environment is too important to leave in the hands of political activists,” it stated in the introduction. “Yet, this is precisely where the United States has left most environmental decision making in recent years. Political activists—not authentic environmental scholars, scientists and economists—have come to dominate both the headlines and Washington’s legislative agenda.” Upon scrutinizing the directory, however, CLEAR found that fewer than half of the experts
listed in NCPPR’s directory were actual scientists, and in fact only 51 of the 141 individuals listed had a Ph.D. in any field whatsoever.
This does not mean that there are no reputable scientists who support the positions taken by groups like TASSC and ACSH. Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Prize recipient, has been involved with ACSH for many years and currently sits on the ACSH board of directors. Former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and former JAMA editor George Lundberg (whose firing Steven Milloy claims to have helped engineer) are also prominent ACSH supporters. For that matter, TASSC in its heyday was able to call on the support of Frederick J. Seitz, an eminent researcher in the field of solid-state physics, past president of the National Academy of Sciences, and retired president of Rockefeller University.
Even scientists are human beings. They may be brilliant in a particular field of research but naive or uninformed about fields outside their specialty, and they are not immune from political ideologies or the lure of money. The conservative political views of Koop and Seitz are well-known. Although Koop certainly deserves credit for his principled stand regarding tobacco, since leaving public office he has participated in several ventures that call into question his objectivity and ability to avoid ethical conflicts of interest. In April 1999, for example, he circulated a letter in Congress urging legislators to allow the Schering-Plough Corporation to extend the patent on its allergy drug Claritin. By keeping the drug under patent, the company would be able to prevent other companies from offering cheaper generic versions, thereby garnering an estimated $1 billion in additional profits. The following month, he met with members of Congress to defend the company’s position on legislation involving another drug used to treat hepatitis C. Koop did not disclose that Schering-Plough had given a $1 million grant earlier that year to his nonprofit organization, the Koop Foundation.81
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