BPA — the chemical compound used to protect your canned food from contamination — is now to the American media what global warming denial is to the right. In each case, you have on the one hand a worldwide consensus among scientists about what the science actually says, and on the other a group that insists on believing otherwise. The difference is that there are considerably fewer chemists who believe BPA is unsafe than there are climatologists who believe global warming isn’t happening.
Despite this, the media is filled with a daily drumbeat of breathless stories claiming that BPA is linked to cancer, obesity, wheezing — you name it. As the Miami Herald put it last week, there is now “a cascade of studies linking BPA to health problems.”
What’s missing from this narrative is what happens to the cascade when it is put under critical scrutiny by other scientists. Last month Germany’s Society of Toxicology released a scientific review by some of its country’s top investigators which looked at 5,000 BPA studies, and which explained — just like the World Health Organization did in November, and the European Union’s Food Safety Authority did the same year — why the studies claiming a risk fail the test of replication: wrong methods, poor statistics, lack of rigor.
But do the U.S. media report what these critical reviews and risk assessments find? Overwhelmingly, no; instead, tiny studies that lead to huge scary headlines make the daily editorial cut.
At times, the editorial judgment is bewildering. If you wanted to understand a complex controversy over chemistry, why would you choose to publish a mommy blogger and environmental activist over an actual scientist, as the New York Times did last week, with “Hitting the Bottle,” an op-ed by Dominique Browning?
Browning normally blogs about hummingbirds and flowers and, as she puts it, “the miraculous beauty of everyday moments.” By contrast, The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper, asked the chairman of Britain’s Expert Panel on Endocrine Disruption, Professor Richard Sharpe, to illuminate the science on BPA to its readers, which he did by explaining why the cranks and campaigners behind the scare simply defies common sense: “if several huge studies using the human-relevant route of exposure show no effect, but a small preliminary study does show effects, which would you believe?” he asked.
But not even the New York Times can approach the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal when it comes to protecting readers from the other side of the story. Recently, managing editor George Stanley publicly attacked one of the paper’s opinion columnists, Patrick McIlhern, for daring to mention the German Society of Toxicology study on his blog.
Why was noting the mere existence of this study, published in one of the world’s leading academic journals, so offensive to the news side of the paper? “The acknowledgments section,” protested Stanley in a comment to McIlhern’s blog, “reveals that the scientists all have financial ties to the plastics industry — just as we have found over and over again, regarding this $7 billion product.”
Except the acknowledgements section didn’t say any such thing. Stanley “is definitively wrong,” said Professor Jan G. Hengstler, one of the lead authors of the paper. “The acknowledgment section shows that one out of the nine scientists who contributed to the paper is working with the company producing BPA.”
A second author has a tangential connection, but the other seven cannot be tied to industry in any way, because they have either worked for governments, or, like Hengstler, have only ever received public funding. Plus, the members of the Society of Toxicology overwhelmingly approved the paper’s conclusions at the annual meeting, so it reflects the opinion of hundreds of scientists.
In an email to me, Hengstler said, “I have no idea what led the editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to the obviously wrong statement that I have ‘financial ties to the plastics industry.’ ”
Well, that’s easy. If the public understands why so many leading scientists believe the case against BPA to be methodologically flawed, then they might begin to question why the Journal Sentinel’s award-winning investigation on BPA relied exclusively on this flawed science. In turn, they might take a dim view of the paper smearing scientists to protect its conspiratorial version of reality.
Britain’s professor Sharpe, an endocrinologist at the venerable and independent Medical Research Council, has warned that the hysteria over BPA is threatening the entire credibility of the scientific method because no matter how many times the claims that it is dangerous fail the test of replication, the narrative never changes.
But it’s worse than that: The media’s relentless focus on motive at the expense of methodology has caricatured BPA as a battle between science-loving Democrats and the environmental movement on one side, and science-distorting Republicans and their industry paymasters on the other.
Given that the toxicologists and endocrinologists who have protested the safety of BPA are overwhelmingly liberal, this is not only an intellectual betrayal, but also a political one. And it puts us all at risk.
Despite this, the media is filled with a daily drumbeat of breathless stories claiming that BPA is linked to cancer, obesity, wheezing — you name it. As the Miami Herald put it last week, there is now “a cascade of studies linking BPA to health problems.”
What’s missing from this narrative is what happens to the cascade when it is put under critical scrutiny by other scientists. Last month Germany’s Society of Toxicology released a scientific review by some of its country’s top investigators which looked at 5,000 BPA studies, and which explained — just like the World Health Organization did in November, and the European Union’s Food Safety Authority did the same year — why the studies claiming a risk fail the test of replication: wrong methods, poor statistics, lack of rigor.
But do the U.S. media report what these critical reviews and risk assessments find? Overwhelmingly, no; instead, tiny studies that lead to huge scary headlines make the daily editorial cut.
At times, the editorial judgment is bewildering. If you wanted to understand a complex controversy over chemistry, why would you choose to publish a mommy blogger and environmental activist over an actual scientist, as the New York Times did last week, with “Hitting the Bottle,” an op-ed by Dominique Browning?
Browning normally blogs about hummingbirds and flowers and, as she puts it, “the miraculous beauty of everyday moments.” By contrast, The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper, asked the chairman of Britain’s Expert Panel on Endocrine Disruption, Professor Richard Sharpe, to illuminate the science on BPA to its readers, which he did by explaining why the cranks and campaigners behind the scare simply defies common sense: “if several huge studies using the human-relevant route of exposure show no effect, but a small preliminary study does show effects, which would you believe?” he asked.
But not even the New York Times can approach the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal when it comes to protecting readers from the other side of the story. Recently, managing editor George Stanley publicly attacked one of the paper’s opinion columnists, Patrick McIlhern, for daring to mention the German Society of Toxicology study on his blog.
Why was noting the mere existence of this study, published in one of the world’s leading academic journals, so offensive to the news side of the paper? “The acknowledgments section,” protested Stanley in a comment to McIlhern’s blog, “reveals that the scientists all have financial ties to the plastics industry — just as we have found over and over again, regarding this $7 billion product.”
Except the acknowledgements section didn’t say any such thing. Stanley “is definitively wrong,” said Professor Jan G. Hengstler, one of the lead authors of the paper. “The acknowledgment section shows that one out of the nine scientists who contributed to the paper is working with the company producing BPA.”
A second author has a tangential connection, but the other seven cannot be tied to industry in any way, because they have either worked for governments, or, like Hengstler, have only ever received public funding. Plus, the members of the Society of Toxicology overwhelmingly approved the paper’s conclusions at the annual meeting, so it reflects the opinion of hundreds of scientists.
In an email to me, Hengstler said, “I have no idea what led the editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to the obviously wrong statement that I have ‘financial ties to the plastics industry.’ ”
Well, that’s easy. If the public understands why so many leading scientists believe the case against BPA to be methodologically flawed, then they might begin to question why the Journal Sentinel’s award-winning investigation on BPA relied exclusively on this flawed science. In turn, they might take a dim view of the paper smearing scientists to protect its conspiratorial version of reality.
Britain’s professor Sharpe, an endocrinologist at the venerable and independent Medical Research Council, has warned that the hysteria over BPA is threatening the entire credibility of the scientific method because no matter how many times the claims that it is dangerous fail the test of replication, the narrative never changes.
But it’s worse than that: The media’s relentless focus on motive at the expense of methodology has caricatured BPA as a battle between science-loving Democrats and the environmental movement on one side, and science-distorting Republicans and their industry paymasters on the other.
Given that the toxicologists and endocrinologists who have protested the safety of BPA are overwhelmingly liberal, this is not only an intellectual betrayal, but also a political one. And it puts us all at risk.
