THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 10, 1994 TAG: 9407070450
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ROSS C. REEVES
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines
TAINTED TRUTH
The Manipulation of Fact in America
CYNTHIA CROSSEN
Simon & Schuster. 239 pp. $23.
THE PRINT AND electronic media daily spew forth torrents of research data, ranging from the biting habits of dogs to the carcinogen of the week. Opinion polls tell us what we buy, how we will vote, whom we admire, how we live and where we spend our money. We are awash in epidemiological and nutritional studies of health threats, real and imagined.
Bedazzled and bewildered by the complexity of modern technology and social change, we have developed an insatiable and indiscriminate appetite for information. As the title suggests, Cynthia Crossen's Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America sets out to prove that much of this information is biased or phony.
The major culprits in Crossen's comprehensive study are business interests that buy research, exaggerate positive findings and bury negative ones. In complicity are researchers themselves and university administrators, who often reach results with an eye toward sponsors' wishes. The media's increasing (and uncritical) reliance on studies and polls to provide news copy is also implicated.
Tainted Truth is rich in analysis of research methodology and the subtle means by which it can be perverted or misinterpreted. Crossen's case studies begin with seemingly interminable research reports on diet and health, focusing on how Quaker Oats subsidized and hawked questionable data to expand its oat bran product lines. With considerably less gusto but equal rigor, she recounts how the Natural Resources Defense Council manipulated ``60 Minutes'' ' appetite for scandal to create the Alar scare. Pharmaceutical companies, she argues, have had a similar agenda of sponsoring and exaggerating the results of drug tests.
Crossen then moves to advertising, reaching the unremarkable conclusion that survey and test data appearing in ads are not altogether truthful, before taking on the meatier issue of public opinion polls, and thus political decisions and how they can be manipulated by nuances of timing, question phraseology and sample selection. Crossen concludes with a useful ``consumer's guide'' to understanding studies, polls and surveys, as well as a reform agenda for self-regulation by the media, businesses and the research community.
Like its subject matter, Tainted Truth tends to exaggerate its findings. Although there is plausibility in Crossen's argument that the ``tainted'' results of cola taste tests eventually threaten the integrity of all reported research, her own text suggests that abuses are the exception rather than the rule.
A more puzzling deficiency lies in Crossen's focus on private industry to the exclusion of government agencies and public interest ``advocacy'' groups. Tainted Truth confines itself to the ``hidden persuaders'' who want us to buy their goods. This blind spot is of more than passing interest. Her own statistics reveal that the federal government sponsors 90 percent of biomedical research at universities and, judging from what one sees in the press, a significant share of the remainder is funded by advocacy groups. Her suggestion that these sponsors are unbiased, and thus more trustworthy, assumes without evidence that they do not have political and social agendas that ``taint'' their results as well.
By concentrating on the persuaders, Tainted Truth is also able to duck the larger question of whether the influence of research on private behavior, public policy and personal attitudes is justified. The public attention lavished on reports and studies tenuously ``linking'' everyday products and activities to ``increased risk'' of death, disease or injury is itself a remarkable phenomenon, one that is suggestive of a huge shift in social values away from self-reliance and toward aversion to risk. A sequel to the solid foundation of Tainted Truth may profitably ask what this fearfulness and mistrust of the world say about our courage and our common sense going into the next century. MEMO: Ross C. Reeves is a corporate lawyer in Norfolk. by CNB