HOME > STATS > ARTICLES

USA Today provides the latest installment in a saga that makes one wish scientists edited newspapers:

“States and cities are taking steps to ban toxic substances found in consumer goods ranging from TVs to baby bottles, rather than waiting for the Environmental Protection Agency or other federal agencies to yank them off the market.

Federal agencies "are not protecting the safety of the American public," says state Rep. Ross Hunter, a Democrat who helped push a chemical ban through the Washington Legislature. "If the federal government won't do it, then the states are going to have to do it."

And later in the piece, Hunter says,

“We keep getting more and more scientific evidence of the kind of harm that it can cause to people."

But if the “toxic substances” haven’t been banned, maybe it’s somewhat presumptive, not to mention alarmist, to label them toxic? And why should we believe that Rep. Hunter has a greater grasp of the science than the scientists who conduct risk assessments for the federal government?

USA Today doesn’t say; the paper quotes EPA officials and industry spokesmen saying, respectively, that the government is protecting public health and that the States aren’t technically competent to produce accurate risk assessments, which means that readers are left with a classic “he says, she says,” and have nothing to go on that might help them determine what the truth is, however messy, or what they should do to protect their own health.

At which point, one may ask, “what is the point of this story?”

Here’s what USA Today could – and should – have done:

Rep. Hunter should have been asked to name the studies that he relied on to pass the recent ban in Washington State, and then the reporter should have read them, ascertained what they said, and found independent experts in the field (that is, toxicologists neither affiliated with the industry making or using the chemical nor affiliated with an environmental group agitating for a ban on such a chemical).

By doing this, USA Today could have discovered whether the studies prompting the ban were methodologically sound, and whether their results provided solid evidence of an actual, rather than a hypothetical, risk to humans.

If the studies did not actually support a ban, then the paper would have drawn attention to vast waste of resources occurring at the state level, reassured the public that it was not in imminent danger, and warned of  the potential risks of replacing these chemicals with inferior substitutes (that is placing a ban in the context of what we lose by banning, say, a particular fire retardant).

If the studies did support a ban, the paper would then have been able to expose negligence in regulatory oversight, and possibly win a Pulitzer.

But more importantly, there would have been a point for the reader to take away from the time they gave to reading the story.