SCAREMONGER

Our Stolen Future has won the seal of approval from renowned scientists Robert Redford (“All who are concerned with preserving the Earth and the health of its children and grandchildren will find this book both important and rewarding”) and Al Gore (whose foreword calls it a sequel to Rachel Carson’s now-canonized Silent Spring). Fenton’s flackmastery — along with the publisher’s six-figure publicity effort — led to breathless coverage by all three major newsweeklies, the New Yorker, and Esquire, whose reporter even ran out to get his sperm count checked.

Already in its fifth printing, the book contains speculative charges about the effects of synthetic chemicals on the environment. These chemicals, called “endocrine disruptors,” are said to mimic estrogert and to disrupt hormonal development. They are potentially so heinous that, according to the authors, they might be reducing sperm count. They might be causing undescended testicles and shorter penises. They might be increasing reproductive dysfunction, and may even be responsible for a host of ” social problems” like child abuse, lower IQ and SAT scores, crime, impairment of motor abilities, mental retardation, and “the loss of human potential.”

The book is essentially smorgasbord science — it picks only the results that support its thesis and ignores other studies directly contradicting it. This method is actually anti-scientific, because the authors start with a culprit (synthetic chemicals) and then hunt for a disease (resulting in the conjectural laundry list). Instead of positing hypotheses and then trying to prove or disprove them, Our Stolen Future advocates its position by seeking out selective evidence, then drawing general (albeit equivocal) conclusions.

The book’s publication, like other Fenton-assisted outbreaks, is beginning to devolve into what can basely be called a scientific pissing contest. The environmentalists selectively release alarming charges with sympathetic endorsements and credulous media attention, which leaves those business interests directly harmed by the charges to play catch-up. In this case, both the Chemical Manufacturers Association and the American Council on Science and Health have released small volumes refuting Our Stolen Future charge by charge.

And there is much to refute. Evidence of the alleged symptoms persists in wildlife, especially in heavily polluted regions: gulls in the Great Lakes that have gone lesbian, for example, and short-penised alligators in a lake where there was once a pesticide spill. But there is no proof that the disruptors cause comparable symptoms in humans when we are exposed to synthetic chemicals in amounts regulated by federal agencies. The very idea of “endocrine disruption” sounds fairly daunting until one learns that the same compounds already exist naturally in many foods — including garlic, peanut oil, and potatoes, to name just a few. The total effect of synthetic chemicals in this regard is actually 40 million times lower than the same effect from vegetables and other foods.

Not to mention that at least one reputable study, by Columbia University’s Harry Fisch, shows that sperm counts haven’t fallen, period. “! was certain I’d find a decline,” Fisch told the Wall Street Journal, “especially because we have seen a rise in fertility problems. But I was surprised. I see no decline. None at all.”

Perhaps the book’s conclusions aren’t surprising considering that its authors are environmental activists. Theo Colborn, upon whose secondary research the book is primarily based, is a scientist with the World Wildlife Fund. John Peterson Myers is director of the W. Alton Jones Foundation, one of the deep pockets of the environmental movement. Diane Dumanoski is a Boston Globe environmental reporter who did most of the writing. In 1990, she told an environmental gathering, “There is no such thing as objective reporting. I’ve become even more crafty about finding the voices to say the things I think are true. That’s my subversive mission.” And in 1994, she told the Los Angeles Times that in order to secure a frontpage spot for a story on the ozone hole, she called a source and “negotiated something that really wasn’t accurate . . . something much balder than what was true.”

While Fenton employees are working publicity for the book, the show is actually being run through Environmental Media Services, headed by Fenton’s cohort Arlie Schardt. A former press secretary to Al Gore, Schardt now holds media breakfasts for A-list reporters to “educate” them on issues largely put forward by clients of either his firm or Fenton Communications. Some have suggested that Schardt’s shop is a non-profit arm of Fenton Communications, and this charge works Fenton into a lather. “We’re completely separate entities,” he insists. So separate, in fact, that they share the same offce space and the same receptionist. If you call an employee of one operation, they can transfer you to the other, and Schardt admits that Environmental Media Services hires Fenton Communications with tax-exempt, non-profit money ” probably almost every week.”

Schardt explains away Dumanoski’s open admission of bias and advocacy: “I think those are distortions of something. . . . I don’t pretend to know the whole story. It seems like an effort to detract from the contents of the book, which should be the focus of criticism.” Fenton also bristles at any inference of chicanery. “We don’t want to scare people out of their minds,” he says. “We believe the public has the right to know about debates in the scientific community. What [the opposition] wants is for nobody to know anything except for what [its] scientists say.”

That is a charge that can better be leveled at EMS and Fenton Communications, according to Joe Walker of the Endocrine/Estrogen Newsletter and others. Both Walker and another writer for his newsletter were thrown out of a March 14 press conference for the book by EMS/Fenton employees at the request of author Theo Colborn. Walker had been reporting both sides of the endocrine-disruptor issue for months, and would have been able to ask informed and possibly adversarial questions about Our Stolen Future. When I confronted Schardt with evidence that Walker had been summarily tossed, he conceded, “If he was credentialed and we asked him to leave, that was a mistake on our part.”

Colborn failed to respond to a written interview request. But it’s small wonder she’s ducking detractors. Two of the book’s primary sources on the low- sperm-count issue, Richard Sharpe of the Medical Research Council in Edinburgh and Niels Skakkebaek of the University of Copenhagen, recently chastised the enviro group Greenpeace in the Independent of London for similar claims that synthetics cause reproductive abnormalities — small penises especially. They told the Independent that such findings ” misrepresent this research. . . . It is premature to call for a ban on these or any other chemicals before more research is done. . . . They are taking something that is a clearly stated hypothetical link and calling it a fact.”

Both Fenton and Schardt assured me the researchers a) had been misquoted in the Independent and b) had no such problems with Our Stolen Future. ” We called Skakkebaek,” Schardt said, “and he said that was a distortion of something he said several years ago. As far as I know, he vetted [Our Stolen Future] and fully approved it.” Fenton told me, “We have letters from Skakkebaek endorsing the book.” When I asked to see the letters, he said, “I’m not sure yet.” Schardt later did produce two letters to author John Peterson Myers from Skakkebaek congratulating him on the book, thanking him for mentioning him (Skakkebaek), assuring him that the Independent quote was about Greenpeace and not Our Stolen Future, and admitting that he and the authors “share the same concerns.” But these were hardly whole-hog endorsements, nor did Skakkebaek claim that the quote was a distortion, as Schardt had said.

When I called Sharpe in Scotland, he said the Independent statements came from a press release he and Skakkebaek issued last summer. Of Our Stolen Future, he added, “I haven’t finished reading [it] yet, but we still say that the link between environmental chemicals and adverse effects on human health is still hypothetical. There’s no cause and effect established — I don’t think we can actually conclude one way or the other. It’s not something at the moment I would say is leading to the end of the world, or infertility, or anything like that.”

Skakkebaek, Our Stolen Future‘s alleged endorser and vetter, told me, ” I have not finished reading the book.” And after I repeated to him what Sharpe had told me, he said, “I would completely agree with Richard.”

This is hardly the first time Fenton has shaded the truth. The Alar scare, which he basically created, tells the story. In 1989, Fenton promoted a Natural Resources Defense Council report called “Intolerable Risk: Pesticides in Our Children’s Food.” The report contained no original lab studies, but simply embelished the claims of an EPA study that had Alar causing tumors in mice. Alar was a chemical then used by approximately 15 percent of apple growers to improve the color and shelf-life of apples and to keep them from falling prematurely before harvest.

The EPA had decided to ban Alar earlier that year because its study determined that it might cause cancer in as many as 50 in a million people. Unbeknownst to most people, however, was that the mice in this study developed cancer only after being fed doses 35,000 times higher than a schoolchild’s estimated daily intake. In other words, the schoolchild would have had to eat 50,000 pounds of apples a day over a lifetime to contract cancer from Alar. The EPA, it need not be pointed it out, likes to play it safe — real safe. Still, even the EPA determined that Alar posed no immediate health threats and allowed growers to use it for 18 more months before the ban was imposed.

This did not deter Fenton, who parlayed “Intolerable Risk” right into a 60 Minutes scoop with Ed Bradley in front of a skull-and-crossboned apple back-drop calling Alar “the most potent cancer-causing agent in the food supply today.” Fenton deliberately designed a follow-up coalition to fan the flames called Mothers and Others Against Pesticides, headed by noted scientist Meryl Streep. “Our goal was to create so many repetitions of NRDC’s message that average American consumers . . . could not avoid hearing it,” he wrote in a memo leaked to the Wall Street Journal. “The idea was for the ” story” to achieve a life of its own, and continue for weeks and months to affect policy and consumer habits.”

It did. The Alar story caused the culinary equivalent of the War of the Worlds panic, with school cafeterias pulling apple juice from their shelves and mothers running after buses to retrieve apples from children’s lunchboxes. The Department of Agriculture estimated that apple growers in Washington state alone lost at least $ 125 million in just six months. The panic led then-Food and Drug Administration director Alvin Young to call the scare “one of the worst instances of where statements were made without the benefit of scientific review.” The Farm Bureau and EPA both put out statements saying that it was safe to eat apples. Richard Adamson, director of the National Cancer Institute division that studies cancer causation, said eating apples with trace amounts of Alar posed “certainly less than the risk of eating a well-done hamburger” and about the same as a peanut butter sandwich. And Alar was deemed safe in its regulated amounts by the American Medical Association, the National Cancer Institute, the World Health Organization, Health and Welfare of Canada, and Britain’s Advisory Committee on Pesticides.

None of this mattered. Alar was such a p.r. fiasco that its manufacturer, Uniroyal, withdrew it voluntarily. Fenton was delighted: “Consumer buying habits changed overnight. Lines started forming in health-food stores. The sales of organic produce soared. All of which we were very happy about.” As apple growers went broke, the Natural Resources Defense Council profited, according to an interview that Fenton gave Propaganda Review, a leftist San Francisco journal: “We also designed [the campaign] so that revenue would flow back to NRDC from the public and we sold this book about pesticides through a 900-number and the Donahue show, and to date, there has been $ 700,000 in net revenues from it.”

A former Abbie Hoffman confidant (he brought Hoffman home from the underground for his Barbara Walters interview), Fenton was a high-school dropout who became a photographer in 1968 for the Liberation News Service, a pro-Vietcong anti-war wire service. Later, he became public-relations director at Rolling Stone, and his first freelance accounts included Ralph Nader, Mother Jones, and the Sierra Club.

Then came the Communists. Though he says “the attempt that has been made by some to characterize me as a Marxist is a joke,” Fenton represented Angola’s Marxist MPLA regime, Maurice Bishop’s Grenada, and the Sandinistas. He seems especially to love leftist guerrillas, considering his glossy brochures for the Salvadoran FMLN and his efforts on behalf of Jennifer Harbury, the American lawyer who conducted electrolyte-and-water hunger strikes and vigils until she found out what had become of her slain Marxist Guatemalan guerrilla husband, Efrain Bamaca.

One Fenton employee opined about Harbury, “It’s just a great story. There’s mystery, romance. ! have never in my life gotten more than a dozen calls for the film rights.” While awaiting word on her husband — whose rebel group, according to the State Department, extorted money from landowners, forcibly conscripted children, and endangered civilian lives while assaulting army bases — Harbury credited a breakthrough on the case to, once again, 60 Minutes. Ted Turner’s Castle Rock has bought the film rights, and Schardt tells me that Ted’s Turner Foundation has also kicked $ 30 grand into EMS’s till.

Unlike most p.r. people, Fenton has said he’ll represent only those he has an ideological kinship with — which doubtless yields tremendous psychic payoffs. Fortunately for Fenton, it also reaps more material benefits. His reported income from representing governments alone was $ 3,287,402.90 between 1982 and 1993. He told an interviewer that he made about $ 100,000 a year over three years from representing Sandinista interests. But monetary rewards have not co-opted him, as he insists, “I’m not a Marxist, I’m a Democrat!”

Fenton serves as an exemplar of the notion that with the failure of communism, environmental policy is now the Armageddon of the hard Left. Whether the distortions are overtly political or deal with environmental science, Fenton serves as an omnipresent Professor Moriarty figure. Even when he’s not the chief architect of an embellishment, he and his clients are often in the vicinity.

In the 80s, it was Fenton who did publicity for the Christic Institute’s ” Secret Team” lawsuit alleging that a host of government offcials was in a drug-running-assassination nexus with Contra rebels. These charges were so wild that even Mother Jones and the Nation ridiculed them. The lawsuit eventually prompted an enraged judge to order the Christics to pay back $ 1.2 million in defendant legal costs because of the suit’s frivolity — an action that bankrupted and finally silenced the outrageous “Christies.”

In 1992, Fenton was hired to help wage a $ 100,000 media campaign against the timber industry by Lighthawk, a non-profit outfit that took media and celebrities on aerial tours of ravaged national parks. When NBC did a piece on Clearwater National Forest in Idaho showing dead fish and aerial shots of clearcut forests, they obtained some footage from Lighthawk, part of which was taken on Fenton-run sorties. There were two minor problems with the report. Footage of dead fish supposedly killed by the toxic river in Clear- water actually came from farther south, and aerial shots of the lumberjack- ravaged forest were actually of the Olympic National Forest in Washington state — which had been cut due to fire damage. NBC president Michael Gartner, already under fire for the Dateline truck-bomb fiasco, resigned shortly thereafter, and Tom Brokaw read a lawyer-drafted apology. (Brokaw’s wife was a member of Fenton’s anti-Alar front group, Mothers and Others Against Pesticides.) Both Lighthawk and Fenton deny culpability.

But it is in scientific quarters that Fenton most effectively works his voodoo. He always operates from the same schematic: create a science scare, usually involving existing government figures that are grossly exaggerated, then push for more research and tighter regulation or outright banishment of cancer-causing chemicals. This strategy has become all the more hysterical in light of an increasingly unsympathetic 104th Congress.

Fenton helped represent a coalition of activists fighting efforts in Congress to roll back environmental-protection laws. The activists publicized outdated meat-industry data to claim the e. coli bacterium is present in 3.5 percent of ground beef. They called it “hamburger roulette.” The Nationwide Microbiological Data Collection Programs examination of steer and heifer carcasses put that figure at 0.2 percent — meaning that Fenton and company overstated the risk by 17 times.

Then there’s the Environmental Working Group, which Fenton has represented in efforts to cause cancer scares through its reports on pesticides in tap water and baby food. Bruce Ames of the University of California, Berkeley, called the baby-food report “an attempt to scare parents over something that is no threat to their children’s health.”

When I asked Fenton whether he was uncomfortable representing a group whose research is largely dependent on citizen-monitoring projects, not scientists or doctors whose work appears in peer-reviewed journals, he said, “They do have doctors and they send it to scientists.” Richard Wiles, the group’s vice president of research, conceded to me that the Environmental Working Group does not have a single doctor or scientist on staff, but “we do have an engineer.”

Wiles does insist that “we do run our research by scientists.” I called one of those scientists, Burton Kross of the University of Iowa. In an EWG report called “Pouring It On — Nitrate Contamination of Drinking Water,” Kross states that nitrate poisoning via drinking-water contamination “certainly contributes to national infant death rate statistics” from the condition known as blue-baby syndrome. After checking with numerous regulatory and health agencies as well as scientists who couldn’t name one single case of blue-baby syndrome contracted from a public water supply in this country, I asked Kross to do the same. “To my knowledge there are no cases in the U.S.,” he said. “Several people have asked me that, and I don’t dispute it.” Then what proof does anybody have that federally regulated water supplies are contributing tributing to infant mortality? Wiles of the Environmental Working Group responded by saying, “It’s just obvious, you can’t expose that many infants to contaminants.” Pretty scientific.

Fenton’s reign of error may now be in jeopardy. In 1992, he told National Journal: “I think we will soon have as mainstream wisdom that the major source of the great increase in cancer rates . . . is from carcinogens in the food, air and water.” This idea has driven environmentalist thinking for the past 30 years. He added that he “tends to represent viewpoints that later become very mainstream. . . . Our job is to help speed that up.”

The National Academy of Sciences is slowing him down. In a report released in February, the NAS — the most respected body of its kind and liberally quoted on both sides of the issue — stated flatly that the “great majority” of “chemicals in the diet appears to be present at levels . . . so low that they are unlikely to pose an appreciable cancer risk.” It also said that ” cancer-causing chemicals that occur naturally in foods are far more numerous in the human diet than synthetic carcinogens.”

When I brought this up to Fenton, he remained unshaken. “Do you not think it is equally important to report the NAS study that just happened three years before that says that chemicals are a threat to children?” he said.

But the 1993 NAS report, “Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children,” said no such thing. In fact, the report said more data were needed and presented no new data suggesting a health hazard from the regulated, approved use of pesticides.

That’s not what the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group, two Fenton clients, told the public. They jumped the publication of the 1993 report by a few days and distorted it for their own ends. The report, they said, proved children were inadequately protected from pesticide residues and that more regulation was necessary.

It is true that these claims were buttressed by Philip Landrigan of Mount Sinai Medical Center, who chaired the committee that authored the report for the National Academy of Sciences. Landrigan is also a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, the anti-nukes activist group that was also once a Fenton client.

Fenton says, “The NAS will tell you they had two different groups and that they reached somewhat different conclusions.” But the NAS’s president said something quite different in an August 10, 1995, letter obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD “I, too, have become concerned about recent characterizations of the report, both by Dr. Landrigan and news reporters who appear to have misstated the conclusions of the report,” wrote president Bruce Alberts in response to a letter of complaint by Elizabeth Whelan of the American Council on Science and Health. “I have . . . written to Dr. Landrigan to express my concerns about the inaccuracies of his statement [on a Today show broadcast]. In the meantime, I have asked our Office of News and Public Information to carefully monitor any future news coverage of our Pesticides report and to take action to set the record straight if the report is further mischaracterized.”

Disingenuousness of this kind is something Fenton doesn’t easily own up to. In fact, quite the opposite. He is more than willing to accuse others — industry officials, lobbyists, media — of spreading propaganda. “If you report one NAS report without reporting the other,” he told me, “you’re picking one to further the propaganda goal. You’re not doing journalism.” This is breathtaking from a man who told Propaganda Review, “I wish there was some propagandist of the left.”

Like a mother who incessantly insists her obese daughter has a pretty face, Fenton repeatedly reassured me that he is “a person of integrity,” “I don’t lie,” “I’m an open book,” and that old saw, “I have nothing to hide.” Since he constantly rails against those who represent industry, and told a newsletter in 1990, “Anyone involved in attempting to influence this process [determining public policy] should have to reveal for whom they are working, ” I asked him to give me a complete client list. He declined — just as he did when I asked about his billings on behalf of environmental interests, and even when I asked for a Fenton Communications publicity pack.

Perhaps his most candid admission came out of the “Fenton Communique,” a newsletter he sends to clients that I had to filch from his office since the man “with nothing to hide” wouldn’t give me one. I read it in his office lobby (decorated with a framed cover of Omar Cabezas’s Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista) after an employee told me to “just sit there and don’t ask any more questions.” On the very back page sat a lonely small-print epigram with “our motto” written underneath it. It read: ” If you don’t like the news, go out and make your own.”

By Matt Labash