Saturday, December 09, 2023

Overlaps

"You're right from your side / I'm right from mine," Bob Dylan wrote in one of his less-known songs. Similar sentiments from other artists capture the convoluted nature of antagonistic truths.

This raised a particular dilemma for journalists as we attempted to cover corporate and civic affairs.

Take foe example an incident from the "Circle of Poison" investigation in the 1970s. I was initially focused on the practice of U.S. companies that shipped banned pesticides to Third World countries, exposing farmworkers and their families to health risks, and the pollution of their environment.

Then, at a conference in Mexico, an executive of Dow Chemical asked me, "I understand your concern but what's wrong with helping a hungry world eat?"

His point was that even if the pesticides were considered too dangerous for us here in the U.S., food scarcity was such in poorer countries that such compromises made sense. After all, at least in the short term, pesticides boost food productivity.

His comment motivated me to look into exactly which crops the hazardous pesticides were being applied to. That research led to a breakthrough when I discovered that almost all of the crops sprayed in Third World countries were for export crops destined to end up right back here in the U.S. and other rich countries.

This completed the "circle" analogy and guaranteed our book would cause many more waves than it would have had we solely focused on the impacts overseas.

So an industry representative indirectly helped me complete my investigation. My guess is that he didn't know himself what the pesticides were used for; he had probably just assumed, as I had, that they were part of our “foreign aid” effort to boost local food production in poor countries.

This example is one reason why I always counseled student journalists to probe all sides of the issues they investigated. Environmentalists and worker safety activists may have one perspective; manufacturers and farmers may have another; regulatory agencies may reflect yet another point of view.

In the interest of achieving the highest quotient of the publishable truth, journalists have to consider whether everybody might be right, at least in certain ways, at the same time. In my example, the guy from Dow was right -- there’s nothing wrong with helping hungry people get food. The environmentalists were right -- pesticides harm the environment. And the regulators that push for more sustainable methods of agricultural production were right about what's best for the long term.

Everyone was partially right. The truth could be found in the overlaps.

[NOTE: This is an update of an essay I first published three years ago and is based on lectures I gave at U-C, Stanford and SF State over the decades.)

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