They’re Starving Me with Science!
Newsweek blames glut of information for public’s confusion on what’s good to eat, overlooks media’s role in parroting the food police.

By Ken Shepherd
Business & Media Institute
March 7, 2006

     Newsweek’s got the “Food News Blues.” The cover story for the March 13 issue of the newsweekly looked at how “a new appetite for answers has put science on a collision course with the media.” Science is often complex or incomplete – but that doesn’t stop the media from reporting it every time. The Business & Media Institute found that Newsweek has seldom fought this principle in the past when it comes to nutrition science.

     “Headlines and sound bites can’t capture the complexity of research,” wrote Barbara Kantrowitz and Claudia Kalb. “Science works in small steps, and failure and mistakes are an integral part of the process.” In short, they added, “Experiments flame out; hypotheses crash and burn.”

     That means the media have an obligation for level-headedness in reporting scientific information, particularly when it relates to a healthy diet. But as Dr. Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, was quoted in the article, “The media reports all studies as if they have the same degree of certainty. There’s no real label of quality.”

     While Newsweek was complaining about how the media often befuddle the average American with confusing nutrition science reporting, it neglected to hold itself to scrutiny for past stories. The magazine, like many other media, has uncritically presented the views of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which hypes fears of fast food or popular snacks, such as movie theater popcorn. Repeating CSPI’s alarmism doesn’t exactly encourage readers to take scientific claims with a grain of salt.

     A Business & Media Institute review found 12 Newsweek articles from Jan. 1, 2001, through March 7, 2006, with a CSPI mention. In 10 out of the 12 articles, CSPI was treated positively or uncritically for its push for more regulation of fast food, particularly on the basis of fat content. On the rare occasion when CSPI was held to criticism, it was mild and in jest.

     In “Health: Bad Crop of Quorn?” in the Aug. 26, 2002, Newsweek, writer Anne Underwood reported on CSPI’s call to ban Quorn, a vegetarian meat substitute made from a fungus. Underwood noted for readers that more people get sick from peanut allergies than Quorn, but concluded that consumers should “try to forget that it’s made from a moldlike fungus. That’d turn anyone’s stomach.”

     And while Newsweek columnist Gersh Kuntzman jokingly labeled CSPI’s director Michael Jacobson in a May 20, 2002, Newsweek Web exclusive as “nothing if not a good news whore,” months later he defended CSPI against criticism from the free-market Center for Consumer Freedom, which he dismissed for being financed in part by the restaurant industry.

     “Yes, a lawsuit against McDonald’s is absurd … but if just a few people order a salad instead of a Big Mac after hearing about how unhealthy McDonald’s food is, those trial lawyers have done us a small service. Because, let’s face it, we’re all pretty dumb,” wrote Kuntzman in a Dec. 9, 2002, Web exclusive.

     Admitting its error may be the first step to recovery, but Newsweek has a long way to go towards improving its coverage. Kantrowitz and Kalb at one point claimed that corporate financing means study results are more favorable to the food industry, but they didn’t cast the same doubt on taxpayer-financed studies as trending towards the interests of government regulators and bureaucrats.

     Long before Newsweek caught on that the media’s reporting on nutrition might be plagued with problems, TheBusiness & Media Institute issued two comprehensive studies on media bias in covering the obesity debate.