Bill Moyers, the dogged crusader of public television, is about to air a typically tough exposé on the chemical industry.
But unlike the most routine news story, the 90-minute documentary includes not a single comment from the industry under fire. Instead, Moyers has invited two industry officials to play defense in a panel discussion after the program.
"We're looking at this as Bill Moyers, media icon, statesman: Why isn't he including us in a story that's going to have a big impact on us?" said Terry Yosie, vice president of the American Chemical Council. "We just want a fair shake."
But Moyers, noting that his report is based on hundreds of thousands of pages of industry documents, said yesterday: "It's not that kind of story. We designed the special to include them from the beginning, but in the half-hour that follows the reportage. These documents exist. They are fact. They are not a matter of opinion or conjecture. We wanted to lay the record down, and then we want the industry to respond to the whole."
Yosie and his colleagues have peppered Moyers and PBS with letters complaining about their exclusion in an effort to change the "Trade Secrets" documentary before it airs Monday night. (The letters are posted on a Web site called AboutTradeSecrets.org ) Yosie spoke to Moyers yesterday after a meeting earlier this month, but the veteran newsman and onetime Lyndon Johnson aide insisted there was no need for an on-camera interview.
Despite the exclusion, Yosie said he and another industry official would join PBS's taped panel discussion. "He's trying to make a comparison between our industry and the tobacco industry -- that we're secretive, deceptive, covering up information," Yosie said. "If we don't show up, that's going to reinforce a message he's trying to peddle that we're tobacco-like. We think we can hold our own."
The program is likely to cause a stir, for there is no question that Moyers has some highly damaging evidence. "It will open the eyes of a lot of people in this country," he said.
The documentary, which includes interviews with people affected by vinyl chloride, draws on an archive of "secret" and "confidential" documents unearthed in a lawsuit by the widow of a Louisiana chemical worker.
A 1959 memo to B.F. Goodrich, for example, says vinyl chloride "is going to produce rather appreciable injury when inhaled seven hours a day, five days a week for an extended period."
A 1966 Goodrich memo says "there is no question but that skin lesions, absorption of bone of the terminal joints of the hands and circulatory changes can occur in workers associated with the polymerization of PVC."
"In other words, they knew vinyl chloride could cause the bone in the hands of their workers to dissolve," Moyers says on the show.
Ironically, the memo says of company officials: "They particularly want to avoid exposés like Silent Spring or Unsafe at Any Speed." Another document, a 1973 Ethyl Corp. memo, says after rat tests that "the results certainly indicate a positive carcinogenic effect."
Should industry officials have been allowed to weigh in? "Sure, we could have interviewed them and cut them down to fit my notion of what I wanted," Moyers said. "But that would have been unfair."
In a letter last week to PBS President Pat Mitchell, Frederick Webber, president of the ACC, said: "We fail to see how his investigative report will be fair, accurate, balanced or complete. It should tell more than one side of a story."
Yosie acknowledged that "this industry, like a lot of industries, has learned a lot from past performance," but cautioned against "just picking out one segment of time and saying it's representative of today." Besides, he said, "our concern about the records he has is that many of them have been given to him by plaintiffs' lawyers who represent a self-interested point of view."
But Moyers, who will plug the show in a National Press Club speech today, is comfortable with his approach. "If I had given it to them too far in advance, they would have tried to do what industry has always done" -- launch a preemptive strike against the broadcast. "The documents are the story, not the debate about the documents."
|
If you have come to this page from an outside location click here to get back to mindfully.org |