PR Watch, Second Quarter 1997, Volume 4, No. 2

by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton

Investigative journalist Nicols Fox, in her important new book Spoiled, calls mad cow disease the "Chernobyl" of food safety issues. So far 19 people in Britain are dead or dying from the human version of the disease, which they apparently contracted from eating infected British beef a decade ago. How many more will die? With a disease that takes years to incubate, no one can say. Some scientists predict a couple of hundred deaths; others say the number could reach hundreds of thousands.

Last year PR Watch exposed the "PR cover-up" that has lulled the U.S.

On June 19, a British judge ruled that two environmental activists had committed "McLibel" when they criticized the McDonald's restaurant chain for serving fatty, unhealthy foods, damaging the environment, paying low wages and mistreating animals.

Although Justice Rodger Bell acknowledged that there was a factual basis for all of these criticisms, under Britain's reactionary libel law he ruled that activists Helen Steel and Dave Morris were guilty anyway and ordered them to pay $96,000 in damages.

In the United States, meanwhile, the food industry is working overtime to enact British-style libel laws that make it easier to silence American activists and journalists.

Howard Lyman, an ex-rancher, vegetarian activist and employee of the U.S. Humane Society, is being sued together with Oprah Winfrey by Texas cattleman who say Lyman and Oprah made "disparaging comments" about beef on the Oprah show of April 16, 1996. Other guests on the program included Dr. Gary Weber, a spokesman for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, and Dr. William Hueston of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Here is a transcript of what was actually said on the show.

The outcome of the McLibel case provides a dramatic example of what happens when the "burden of proof" is shifted in libel cases. British laws place the burden of proof on defendants rather than plaintiffs. In the McLibel trial, this meant that McDonalds did not have to prove that the defendants had deliberately circulated false information. Instead, the defendants carried the burden of proving that what they said was true.

In an 800-page ruling, Justice Rodger Bell undertook a piece-by-piece dissection of a four-page fact sheet titled "What's Wrong With McDonald's," published in 1986 by a group whose members included defendants Helen Steel and Dave Morris.

The corporate technique of suing people into silence and submission has become so popular that it even carries its own cute nickname in legal circles. Such lawsuits are known in lawyer lingo as "SLAPP suits," an acronym for "strategic lawsuits against public participation."

"Thousands of SLAPPs have been filed in the last two decades, tens of thousands of Americans have been SLAPPed, and still more have been muted or silenced by the threat," write law professors George Pring and Penelope Canan in their 1996 book, SLAPPs: Getting Sued for Speaking Out.

In their investigation of the trend, Pring and Canan found that "filers of SLAPPs rarely win in court yet often 'win' in the real world, achieving their political agendas.

Symbolically, at least, the "great Alar apple scare" marks a watershed in industry thinking about the "problem" of free speech. The industry and its PR conduits have endlessly repeated the story of the Alar scare, portraying it as an unscrupulous and unfair attack by environmentalists against apple growers which destroyed farmers' livelihoods by stirring up unfounded consumer fears about a chemical which later turned out to be harmless.

Today, even many journalists believe this myth, even though the facts tell a somewhat different story.

An appeals court has overthrown a 1996 libel verdict won by a New York company that hauls sewage sludge against filmmaker Michael Moore's TV Nation television program and EPA whistleblower Hugh Kaufman.

On August 2, 1994, TV Nation aired a segment titled "Sludge Train," which followed a load of sludge from a sewage plant in New York as it was hauled by train to Sierra Blanca, Texas, where it was applied as fertilizer on ranchland owned by Merco Joint Venture, the company hired to dispose of the sludge.

The purpose of the program, according to a memo written by a TV Nation staffer, was to document "the socioeconomics of waste, about who gets--literally--shat upon." It featured footage of Sierra Blanca residents who complained about odors from the sludge operation, and interviewed EPA whistleblower Hugh Kaufman, who described the ranch as "an illegal haul and dump operation" and said "the people of Texas are being poisoned."

Merco retaliated with a libel lawsuit against Kaufman, TV Nation and its parent company, TriStar Television.