The following documents, illuminating an act of journalistic courage and independence and the appreciation it aroused in unusual quarters, appear in ScienceWriters via a most circuitous route. J. Ralph Blanchfield, a British food science consultant and Web editor of the British Institute of Food Science and Technology, posted on the Internet with appreciative comment, an article in the London Daily Telegraph by a remarkable food journalist who resigned her job on the British newspaper Independent, in protest of her paper's handling of the furor associating Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in cattle with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The posting was seen by Merritt Clifton, editor of ANIMAL PEOPLE, a publication on vegetarianism, who posted it with his comment on a listserve of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Our Joe Palca saw it there and forwarded it to ScienceWriters. Thanks to all.
I have been waiting to see if anyone else would post the following article from the Daily Telegraph of Wednesday 24 April. (For the information of subscribers outside the UK, the Daily Telegraph is a Conservative "quality" national newspaper).
As nobody else has posted it, I am doing so. I do not normally take the media as sources of accurate authoritative information on BSE, I do not regard the author, well-known as a writer on food, as a scientific expert on BSE and do not necessarily endorse all her comments on it; but this article is interesting in revealing, from the inside, the conduct of a supposedly "quality" national newspaper.
Food Writer Emily Green on why the media's reaction to the mad cow disease prompted her to resign from a national newspaper:
FOR NINE years I have dreaded appearing in Private Eye. I have written about food for the Independent, and there is only so much menu-speak one can get away with before ending up in "Pseuds Corner". Oddly enough, when my name finally did appear last week, it was not for pretentiousness, but for being an "honourable exception". I had resigned over the paper's handling of the mad cow disease crisis.
For seven days from March 21, the media turned savagely on the nation's farmers. Quotations from "Government scientists" and "leading microbiologists"-such respectable men that they spoke anonymously-were blown into banner headlines. Unsigned leaders bayed for slaughter of perfectly healthy cattle. Courtesy of lay-out artists and editors, victims of a mystifying illness were inextricably linked in our imaginations with the food we eat. I was dumbstruck by the wickedness of it.
As with any bust up, there is a history. I had been close to leaving. There is only so much crostini one can write about without getting sick of tricked-up toast. Add to that the Independent's uncomfortable relationship with its managing shareholder, Mirror Group Newspapers, and the frustrations involved for long-standing staff.
Veteran journalists of the Independent have my eternal respect and affection. Yet, when we dealt with the possibility that mad cow disease can be transmitted to humans, it was not the paper's original, idealistic ethos that ruled, but the Mirror Group's taste for hysteria. Suddenly we were no better than the stricken Observer, the Daily Mail and the most dreadful of the bunch, the Daily Mirror. We even made the Guardian look sensible.
Many reasonable journalists have put it to me that the sensational response by the press to the Government announcement of March 20 was merited by the seriousness of the revelations. I must put the contrary point-only a handful of journalists writing that day understood what was happening. Most had little familiarity with bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
Nor did they recognise the official press conference for what it was --a hurried bit of back-pedalling to ensure that the Government was seen as prompt in complying with the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease surveillance recommendations made in the 1989 Southwood report (a sincerely written, but flawed, document). The Government announcement was, crudely, insurance against blame in a litigious era.
Colleagues concede that the scare had blown up because of a curious, tortured, modern logic that turns an admission of uncertainty into the certainty that there is a threat. But they also insist that crisis management was poor. This is true. Stephen Dorrell, the Health Secretary, and Douglas Hogg, Minister of Agriculture, are either more interested in protecting their backs than in protecting the country, or they are inept. One way or the other, they are unfit for government.
Wisdom, common sense and compassion were utterly absent. The Government and the journalists who wrote so many screaming accusations have failed to understand the ramifications of their actions. Where was the sense of scale? Even at the height of the BSE crisis, in 1992, less than half of one per cent of British cattle were diagnosed as having the disease. During the past eight years, fewer than 160 000 cattle have tested positive-that figure accounts for 85 per cent of those slaughtered on suspicion of harbouring the disease. Yet the free-wheeling press tells us we have eaten millions of infected animals.
Whimsically inflated numbers aside, there is no doubt that plenty of diseased cows have slipped into the food chain. The Holstein diagnosed in 1986 was hardly the first with BSE. Urban newspaper editors failed to understand what farmers have long known: bovine spongiform encephalopathy is not new, merely new to the general public.
References to cows with "the staggers" go back centuries, or "scrapie in oxen" decades. We have been eating them for a very long time and the incidence of CJD is dropping, not rising.
To admit this does not diminish the importance of BSE. Nor is it a defence of the worst excesses of commercial agriculture. My horror is that unnecessary, wantonly whipped-up panic will destroy the small farmers, abattoirs and butchers who most deserve nurturing.
This is to accuse the accusers: the Government for spinelessly sacrificing food producers in order to protect its own reputation, and newspapers for shamelessly pretending that hyperbolic hacks are experts. We cannot hysterically bully and legislate farmers into feeding us well. Pity the nation that tries it.
From Merritt Clifton, editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE:
The accompanying post-within-a-post re media handling of the BSE controversy is forwarded for the interest of fellow SEJ members. Unlike Emily Green, late of the Daily Telegraph, who seems to be strongly pro-beef as well as pro-fair and informed coverage, ANIMAL PEOPLE is editorially pro-vegetarian. Nonetheless, we share much of Green's concern about the quality of BSE-related coverage in major mass media, both in the U.S. and abroad.
We've been following BSE for various media since 1988, and in fact ANIMAL PEOPLE in June 1994 reported the same scientific information that produced the recent beef panic when it was disclosed to the British House of Commons in March 1996. However, we emphasized in our coverage that the American Veterinary Medical Association did not believe BSE and CJD could be related, while Franklin Loew, then dean of the Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine, argued only that the possibility of linkage should be investigated, not that it exists.
After the beef scare erupted in March, we re-contacted our 1994 sources, all of whom agreed that our cautious approach was still the wisest approach, including the people advancing the BSE/CJD hypothesis and Loew, who is now dean of the Cornell School of Veterinary Medicine.
Our coverage of the medical aspect has accordingly remained conservative, in the interest of fairness and accuracy.
On the editorial level, from a humanitarian perspective, we are concerned that if people give up beef but do not give up eating meat altogether, the result will be many more pigs and chickens being raised in confinement, under conditions far less humane than those associated with raising any form of beef but veal. From an ecological perspective, we are additionally concerned about further pressure being placed on depleted fish stocks by a public which feels it must have flesh but will not eat beef.
So far as we're aware, these are aspects of the BSE/CJD scare not yet examined by any other media.
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