• Even if money doesn’t always create bias, it is a leading indicator of bias. Some nonprofit groups receive their money from the public at large or from a broad sector of the public. Consumers Union, for example, receives the majority of its funding from consumers who join in order to receive its publication, Consumer Reports. Groups such as ACSH receive a large percentage of their money from major corporations. Elizabeth Whelan may believe every word she says about the safety of pesticides, and perhaps she would have ended up believing the same things even if she had never received a dollar from the chemical and food industries. Nevertheless, the funding differences between Consumers Union and ACSH offer a fairly clear indication of whose interests are served by each organization.
• The money that corporations pour into influencing public policy is huge compared to the expenditures of nonprofit organizations. In 1998, for example, environmental organizations spent a total of $4.7 million on lobbying Congress. The sum total for all single-issue ideological groups combined—pro-choice advocates, anti-abortionists, human rights groups, feminists, consumer organizations, senior citizens, and a variety of other groups—was $76.2 million. By contrast, the agribusiness industry alone spent $119.3 million, and the lobbying expenditures of all industries combined added up to $1.2 billion. These numbers are just lobbying money and do not include campaign contributions, “soft money,” or any of the other ways that corporations buy political influence. Of course, no one is truly immune from ideological bias. As a practical matter, however, the biases you need to worry about the most are the biases held by people who have the money and power to influence government policies that affect your life.11
The simplest way to find out who is funding an organization is simply to ask. Request an annual report or list of institutional donors. Don’t just ask who is paying the bills. Ask how much money is involved. Spin doctors have mastered the art of the “nondenial denial.” Remember the strategy that Philip Morris used to conceal its role as the creator and primary founder of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition: “We will not deny being a corporate member/sponsor, will not specify dollars, and will refer them to the TASSC ‘800-’ number.”12 The strategy of admitting to being a sponsor while refusing to specify dollar amounts was designed to deflect questions while avoiding outright lies that could embarrass the company if its funding role was later exposed.
Even if an organization itself doesn’t disclose its funding, sometimes the information is available from other sources. Examine the interests and affiliations of the organization’s board of directors. If the organization refuses to make any of this information publicly available or hedges its answers, that in itself is cause for suspicion.
The Devil in the Details
In addition to examining someone’s funding sources, you can also learn a lot about them by asking what positions they have taken in the past on specific issues. Pay attention to nuances. Industry front groups like to portray themselves as moderate and representing the “middle ground.” Watch for words like “sensible,” “responsible,” and “sound” in organization names. Just as the true mission of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition was to stigmatize science that inconvenienced its sponsors, a group called “Citizens for Sound Environmental Policy” is likely to be in the business of trying to discredit genuine environmentalists. Industry-sponsored organizations frequently adopt misleading names. Examples have included the Foundation for Clean Air Progress, the National Environmental Policy Institute, the National Wilderness Institute, the Science and Environmental Policy Project, the Council for Solid Waste Solutions, Citizens for Sensible Control of Acid Rain, and the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy.13
Be especially skeptical of “think tanks,” which have proliferated in recent years as a way of generating self-serving scholarship to serve the advocacy goals of industry. Rather than centers for research and analysis, many of today’s think tanks are little more than public relations fronts, usually headquartered in state or national seats of government. Washington Post columnist Joel Achenbach says, “We’ve got think tanks the way other towns have firehouses. This is a thoughtful town. A friend of mine worked at a think tank temporarily and the director told him when he entered, ‘We are white men between the ages of 50 and 55, and we have no place else to go.’ ”14
Funded by big business and major foundations, think tanks devise and promote policies that shape the lives of everyday Americans: Social Security privatization, tax and investment laws, regulation of everything from oil to the Internet. They supply experts to testify on Capitol Hill, write articles for the op-ed pages of newspapers, and appear as TV commentators. They advise presidential aspirants and lead orientation seminars to train incoming members of Congress.
Think tanks have a decided political leaning. There are twice as many conservative think tanks as liberal ones, and the conservative ones generally have more money. This is no accident, as one of the important functions of think tanks is to provide a backdoor way for wealthy business interests to promote their ideas. “Modern think tanks are nonprofit, tax-exempt, political idea factories where donations can be as big as the donor’s checkbook and are seldom publicized,” notes Tom Brazaitis, writing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “Technology companies give to think tanks that promote open access to the internet. Wall Street firms donate to think tanks that espouse private investment of retirement funds.” So much money now flows in, that the top 20 conservative think tanks now spend more money than all of the “soft money” contributions to the Republican party.15
A think tank’s resident experts carry titles such as “senior fellow” or “adjunct scholar,” but this does not necessarily mean that they even possess an academic degree in their area of claimed expertise. Elsewhere in this book we have criticized the ways that outside funding can corrupt the integrity of academic institutions. The same corrupting influences affect think tanks, only more so. Think tanks are like universities minus the students and minus the systems of peer review and other mechanisms that academia uses to promote diversity of thought. Real academics are expected to conduct their research first and draw their conclusions second, but this process is reversed at most policy-driven think tanks. As economist Jonathan Rowe has observed, the term “think” tanks is a misnomer. His comment was directed at the conservative Heritage Foundation, but it applies equally well to many other think tanks, regardless of ideology: “They don’t think; they justify.”
Demand Accountability
One of the reasons that life in the information age has become such a welter of conflicting claims is that journalists have failed to live up to their responsibilities. Reporters are supposed to be one rung up from the average citizen on the information ladder, and they have a responsibility to verify the credentials and reliability of their sources. When they allow their reportage to be leavened with propaganda, they cheapen and degrade their product just as surely as a baker who adds sawdust to his flour. If you see a news story that fails to identify the background, credentials, and potential bias or conflicts of interest of a cited authority, complain. Send a letter, make a phone call.
The scientific press is expected to meet a higher standard of accountability than the general press. When it fails to meet this standard, the harm is multiplied, because general news reporters often repeat information that appears in scientific journals, using even less fact-checking than they would apply to information from other sources. In December 1999, for example, the British Medical Journal published a “study” claiming that shaken (not stirred) martinis have beneficial anti-oxidant properties. The so-called study was part of the BMJ’s annual joke issue. It accompanied other similarly humorous papers examining the effects of “too much sax” on jazz musicians, the frequency of swearing by surgeons, and the question of whether young women named Sharon are more likely to contract sexually transmitted diseases. To drive home the point that this was all tongue-in-cheek, the BMJ’s martini study made frequent pointed references to James Bo
nd, commenting that “the well known fictional secret agent . . . not only is astute in matters of clandestine affairs at a personal and international level but may also possess insights of interest to medical science. . . . 007’s profound state of health may be due, at least in part, to compliant bartenders.” Notwithstanding these efforts to clue in the clueless, wire services including Reuters, Knight-Ridder, the Associated Press, UPI, and Scripps Howard all distributed stories on the martini’s new-found power to ward off cancer and heart disease. Reports on the “anti-aging oomph” of shaken martinis appeared as straight-faced news in more than 100 publications, including the New York Times, Houston Chronicle, London Financial Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Seattle Times, Forbes magazine, and, of course, Playboy.16
Not only does the media fail to adequately investigate the information it reports, often it fails even to disclose information that is readily available. Take, for example, the thousands of video news releases (VNRs) that are incorporated into television news broadcasts. TV news directors certainly know who supplies their VNRs, and it would be very easy to place small subtitles at the bottom of the screen stating where they came from—for example, “Footage supplied by Pfizer Pharmaceutical.” This is almost never done, mainly because the stations themselves realize that it would be embarrassing if people found out how much of their so-called news is actually canned material supplied by PR firms. It can only be hoped that as the public becomes better educated about the use of VNRs and other public relations tactics, pressure will be brought to bear upon the media to reform itself.
Inviting Public Participation
The slogan “question authority” first arose during the radical movements of the 1960s. It contains a great deal of wisdom, but it is inadequate. We need authorities in our lives—people we can trust to fix our cars and computers, to assist us when we become sick, to help us understand and better manage our world. The question really is what kind of relationship we should have with authorities. Should it be a relationship in which the experts regard the rest of us as “a herd to be led,” in the words of Edward Bernays? Or should it be a relationship in which the experts regard themselves as servants of the public? The issue is not whether authorities should exist, but how to make them accountable.
One approach to addressing this problem has been developed by the Loka Institute, an organization based in Amherst, Massachusetts, that has been working since 1987 to promote ways that grassroots citizens and workers can become involved in the scientific process and technological decision-making. It has been studying a type of citizens’ panel called a “consensus conference.” Sometimes referred to as a “policy jury” or a “citizens’ jury,” a consensus conference is similar in some ways to the randomly selected juries used in U.S. courtrooms, except that instead of judging criminal cases, they attempt to reach verdicts on matters of public policy. To organize a consensus conference around a particular topic, advertisements are published seeking local “lay volunteer participants” who are chosen to reflect the demographic makeup of the community and who lack significant prior knowledge or involvement in the topic at hand. The final panel might consist of about 15 people, including home-makers, office and factory workers, and university-educated professionals. The participants engage in a process of study, discussion, and consultation with technical experts that culminates in a public forum and the production of a report summarizing the panel’s conclusions about the topic at hand.
The use of consensus conferences was pioneered in Denmark and is now being widely adopted in Europe as a process for giving ordinary citizens a real chance to make their voices heard in debates on technology policy. “Not only are laypeople elevated to positions of preeminence, but a carefully planned program of reading and discussion culminating in a forum open to the public ensures that they become well-informed prior to rendering judgment,” says Loka Institute director Richard Sclove. “Both the forum and the subsequent judgment, written up in a formal report, become a focus of intense national attention—usually at a time when the issue at hand is due to come before Parliament. Though consensus conferences are hardly meant to dictate public policy, they do give legislators some sense of where the people who elected them might stand on important questions. They can also help industry steer clear of new products or processes that are likely to spark public opposition.”17
The Loka Institute also advocates increased funding for “community-based research” that is initiated and often carried out in collaboration with civic, grassroots, and workers groups. “This research differs from the bulk of the research and development conducted in the United States, most of which—at a cost of over $200 billion per year—is performed in response to business, military, or government needs or in pursuit of academic interests.”18 In 1994, Sclove notes, the Pepsi company announced plans to spend $50 million—approximately five times as much as the total annual U.S. investment in community-based research—to reinvent its Doritos-brand tortilla chips, intensifying the flavor on the outer surface, rounding the chip’s corners, and redesigning the package. “A society that can afford $50 million to reinvent the Doritos chip can do better than $10 million for community-based research,” he says.
If “community-based research” sounds like some pie-in-the-sky idea, Sclove points out that it is already a common practice in Holland, where the Dutch have developed a network of “science shops” that respond to some 2,000 annual research requests. Other science shops have been established in Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Germany, Malaysia, Northern Ireland, and Romania, as well as in the United States. In Highlander, Tennessee, for example, a local community group worked with university researchers to conduct health surveys and videotaped waste dumping by a local tanning company that was polluting the town’s drinking water. In New York City, high school students collected and analyzed data on diesel exhaust exposure and lung function among their fellow students, coauthoring an article that was published in the July 1999 issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Public Health.
These are only a couple of examples of how increased democracy and citizen participation could be brought to bear upon the scientific and policymaking process. The obstacles to doing this are not technical or economic; they are social and political. Society’s failure to incorporate citizen participation into the scientific process reflects our assumption that scientific topics are too complex for the average citizen. In 1992, however, a study conducted by John Doble and Amy Richardson of the Public Agenda Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by opinion pollster Daniel Yankelovich, found that even people who don’t normally pay attention to scientific issues can do a good job of making science-related policy decisions. Doble and Richardson recruited a representative cross-section of 402 people from different parts of the United States to participate. They were given short, balanced presentations about two technically complex issues—global warming and solid waste disposal—and were then asked to discuss and decide what they thought would be the best policy solutions for dealing with those issues. Doble and Richardson also polled 418 leading U.S. scientists regarding the same issues. By and large, they found, the lay participants in the study made the same policy choices as the scientists. With regard to global warming, for example, both groups favored more spending on mass transit, higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars, tax incentives to encourage energy conservation, and programs to plant trees. “Our conclusion from this exercise is that the public as a whole—not just those who are attentive to science—can intelligently assess scientifically complex issues, even when experts are uncertain,” Doble and Richardson stated.19
Even when the two groups made different policy choices, Doble added, the differences “seemed to stem not from different scientific understanding but from different value judgements.” For example, scientists “understood very clearly that nuclear power does not contribute to the global warming problem, and felt that the country needs to build more nuclear power plants by a very large m
argin. Sixty-eight percent of the scientists said that.” By contrast, only 36 percent of the nonscientists favored construction of nuclear power plants, but “in the discussion group, when people talked about the issue, it became clear that their concerns were not technical, they were managerial. . . . They didn’t trust the energy companies, they didn’t trust the utilities, they didn’t trust the government regulators, they didn’t trust the boards that oversee all this stuff, they didn’t trust those groups to manage the technology safely.” They understood the technical issues reasonably well, in other words, but for the public at large, those weren’t the most important issues.20
Activate Yourself
In understanding the hold that experts have on our lives, we should consider the role that we ourselves play as consumers of information. Most propaganda is designed to influence people who are not very active or informed about the topic at hand. There is a reason for this strategy. Propagandists know that active, informed people are likely to already hold strong opinions that cannot be easily swayed. The people who are most easily manipulated are those who have not studied a subject much and are therefore susceptible to any argument that sounds plausible.
Of course, there is no way that anyone can be active and informed about every issue under the sun. The world is too complex for that, and our lives are too busy. However, each of us can choose those issues that move us most deeply and devote some time to them. Activism enriches our lives in multiple ways. It brings us into personal contact with other people who are informed, passionate, and altruistic in their commitment to help make the world a better place. These are good friends to have, and often they are better sources of information than the experts whose names appear in the newspapers or on television. Activism, in our opinion, is not just a civic duty. It is a path to enlightenment.
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