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.

align="BOTTOM">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.

align="BOTTOM">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.

align="BOTTOM">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.

align="BOTTOM">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.

align="BOTTOM">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."

align="BOTTOM">"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.

align="BOTTOM">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.

align="BOTTOM">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.

align="BOTTOM">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."

align="BOTTOM">Merco retaliated with a libel lawsuit against
Kaufman, TV Nation and its parent company, TriStar Television.