Media Myth: Nine Worst Business Stories
(of the Last 50 Years)

1. DDT
 

     The media campaign against the pesticide dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, more commonly known as DDT, began in 1962 with the publication of activist Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring.”

     “The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials,” Carson wrote. “This pollution is for the most part irrevocable; the chain of evil it initiates not only on the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible.”

     The New York Times quickly picked up Carson’s banner with its review of her book and rarely looked back, leading the charge against DDT until it was finally banned in 1972.

     As late as August 1962, the Times was recommending DDT as a pesticide in its gardening columns. But the paper did an abrupt about-face with the review titled “There’s Poison All Around Us Now.”

     While The Wall Street Journal’s review reasonably declared that “the evidence is not yet in” to fully support Carson’s claims, the Times’s reviewers didn’t express any hesitation in accepting her claims as proven fact. Another Times review published in April 1963 criticized industry reaction to the book and claimed that “everything that has happened in research since the book was published … has confirmed her thesis that the residues of poisonous sprays are getting into our food supply.”

     While noting here and there that DDT still was effective in pest control efforts, the Times engaged in a campaign to support the book’s premise by documenting what seemed every bird and fish death thought to be attributable to the chemical: “Thousands” of fish in California; lake trout in New York; 70,000 trout in Oregon; “millions” of fish in the Mississippi River; and an untold number of Gulf shrimp in 1963 and 1964.

     In January 1966, the Times even warned that pesticides were being found in stillborn babies – although the report mentioned there appeared to be no link between stillbirths and pesticides. Then in 1969, a report warned that “the pesticide DDT could be seriously affecting man through sex organ changes” after female rats experienced “increases in the weight” of the uterus and “stimulation of production” of estrogen.

     In a story foreshadowing today’s claims that the science of global warming is “settled,” a Feb. 6, 1966, article in The New York Times by Jane Brody criticized “cries of ‘more research is needed.’”

     The Times issued its first editorial call for a ban on March 21, 1967. Calling the chemical “highly poisonous,” “obnoxious” and “totally unnecessary,” Times editors praised legislative efforts to “bring its complex technology under humane, civilized control.”

     While it took a more measured tone two years later in an April 20, 1969, editorial calling the chemical “potentially dangerous,” the Times declared victory in reporting that “the days of DDT are clearly numbered.”

     A year later, when the chemical still hadn’t been banned, editors renewed their call for a ban, this time urging an “immediate” ban rather than a phase-out being pushed by some government leaders 

     When the ban started looking extremely likely in 1971, the Times started to print stories seriously questioning the need for a ban. The paper ran columns declaring that “environmentalists are ‘irrational,’” “DDT is Good for You” and questioning “Why Are We Exterminating DDT?”

     But equally negative reports and letters to the editor accompanied the too-little, too-late coverage, and the Times officially praised the ban in an editorial calling the decision “landmark in the national struggle to preserve and restore the country’s natural heritage.”

     Even after its ban, The Washington Post blamed DDT for everything from toxins in the Great Lakes to lower sperm counts in American men, in two separate articles in the Sept. 12, 1979, edition.

     During the 34-year prohibition, however, there were rare instances in which reporters mentioned the negative effects of the ban. A 1979 flea “invasion” was attributed in part to the ban when Dr. C. Bruce Morley said in an Oct. 27, 1979, article in The Washington Post that “since the ban of DDT, the insecticides used are not as effective as the ones in the past … I guess that’s because of environmental regulations.”

     “The primary difference between then and now is that the problem has become worse,” Ralph Livingtone of California Rural Legal Assistance told Congress of pesticide use in June 1979, according to The Washington Post. The June 30 article went on to say that “pesticide use has more than doubled [since 1969]. The banning of a handful of pesticides, notably DDT and certain chlorinated hydrocarbons, has shifted sales to more toxic compounds.”

     In the decades following the U.S. ban, as other nations followed suit, “millions of people around the world suffer[ed] the painful and often deadly effects of malaria because one person sounded a false alarm,” the Competitive Enterprise Institute says on its Web site RachelWasWrong.org.

     Malaria infects more than 500 million people every year, killing more than one million of them, according to the World Health Organization. In 1970, the National Academy of Sciences reported that DDT had prevented “500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable” in the previous two decades.

     CEI reported that “because of reduces use of DDT, malaria rates skyrocketed in the 1990s after having reached historic lows in the 1960s while DDT was in use.” Sri Lanka alone saw a dramatic increase in cases of malaria after it stopped using DDT – from a low of 17 cases to more than half a million in 1969.

     “When a malaria-endemic country stops using DDT, there is a cessation or great reduction in the numbers of houses sprayed with insecticides, and this is accompanied by rapid growth of malaria burden within the country,” according to the Malaria Foundation International, a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting malaria.

     The group notes that “without DDT, malaria rates are returning to those seen in the 1940s, affecting additional millions of infants, children, and adults.”

     The World Health Organization announced it was reinstating DDT for use in malaria control on Sept. 15, 2006. While the organization noted in its announcement that “extensive research and testing has since demonstrated that well-managed indoor residual spraying programmes using DDT pose no harm to wildlife or to humans,” the media insisted on declaring the decision “controversial” and risky.

     The Washington Post announced the lifting of the ban on Sept. 16, 2006, by noting that “DDT has few if any adverse effects in human beings,” but gave voice to the Pesticide Action Network North America, which claims that DDT causes premature birth and development retardation in children.

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