ABC Mislabels CSPI in Story on Faulty Labeling
Network reporters leave out liberal tag, history of anti-industry advocacy.

By Ken Shepherd
Business & Media Institute
May 12, 2006

     It comes naturally to the media to leave out the “liberal” label when presenting an advocacy group in its “consumer” stories. That’s what ABC reporters did with a May 11 “World News Tonight” story on a lawsuit against the makers of a popular soda – about soft drink labels.

     “Today a non-profit group threatened to sue the makers of 7-Up for promoting the soda as 100 percent natural,” anchor Elizabeth Vargas noted, introducing reporter Lisa Stark’s story.

     “The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) says the 7-Up campaign is misleading, they want these ads changed,” Stark began, narrating over footage of a television ad for 7-Up Natural, without any information about the advocacy group.

     “We’re saying the company should be honest with consumers and really honest in the marketplace,” CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson told Stark, charging that the sweetener in the soda, high fructose corn syrup, is hardly a “natural” product and hence the product’s labeling is misleading.

     Stark, like Vargas, did not label CSPI as a liberal group, although it favors litigation and tax increases to tackle real or perceived social ills.

     Recently, CSPI pulled an anti-soda lawsuit filed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts only after a settlement with soft drink manufacturers brokered by former President Bill Clinton.

     In his press release announcing the school soda ban, Jacobson expressed a thirst for more regulation, including the elimination of the “sale of candy, cookies, French fries, potato chips” as well as snack foods and “sports drinks” which are “standard fare in school vending machines.”

     Aside from litigation, CSPI favors other liberal remedies for social problems, such as instituting a fast food tax or raising taxes on beer to discourage heavy alcohol consumption by young people.

     Rather than being the advocate for unsuspecting consumers ABC presents them as, CSPI is an advocate for artificially raising the costs of “junk food” and alcoholic beverages which millions of Americans of their free will choose to purchase.

     The Business & Media Institute reported recently how another network papered over CSPI’s litigious agenda in a morning show interview.