by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

If you're trying to make sense of the recent "food disparagement" lawsuit by Texas beef producers against Oprah Winfrey, it might help to remember Connie Grieg's moment of terror on the evening of April 23, 1996.

The date was one week after the now-famous program in which Oprah had allowed a debate between Gary Weber of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA) and vegetarian activist Howard Lyman. Lyman had easily won the argument, horrifying Oprah and her audience with vivid details about cannibalistic animal-feeding practices and their link to England's outbreak of mad cow disease. Angry, the cattlemen had responded by pulling $600,000 dollars in advertising from Oprah's network and were already threatening legal action.

Under pressure, Oprah had taken the extraordinary step of inviting the cattlemen to make a second appearance, this time all by themselves. Weber would come back for a second time, and Connie Grieg -- an Iowa cattle producer -- would join him.

"This time, we agreed to a live show with no editing. Oprah also agreed not to have an opposing viewpoint," Grieg explained to Beef magazine, an industry trade publication.

The program itself went smoothly, exactly as planned. Weber reprised his role as "expert," while Oprah muttered apologies through what seemed like gritted teeth. Grieg, who had received intensive media training plus two hours of coaching the night before from NCBA staffers, played the role of a safety-conscious, lovable family farmer.

The moment of terror, when it came, did not occur on the Oprah show. It came later that evening, when Grieg celebrated by taking the family out to eat at a seafood restaurant. "We walked in, the hostess looked at us and asked: 'Hey, weren't you on 'Oprah' today?'" Grieg said. "I started to stammer."

She had been caught, she realized. Caught, in public--eating seafood.

After an awkward moment, Grieg managed to regain her composure and "explained that we eat beef every day and just felt like a change."

Of course, no one really eats beef every day, not even a dedicated propagandist for the NCBA. Grieg's hastily-improvised cover story speaks volumes, however, about the beef industry's preoccupation with image over substance and its fantasy-view of American eating habits.

Whatever was said about mad cow disease on the Oprah show, the most terrifying moment for the industry came when Oprah said that she had been "stopped cold from eating another burger." This surfaced clearly during the trial when Bill O'Brien, head of the Texas Cattle Producers, explained on the witness stand why Oprah's follow-up show with Weber and Grieg was "too little, too late" to atone for the first show.

"I don't think it repaired the damage," O'Brien said. "She didn't go on the program and eat a hamburger before the world."

From this perspective, the dangers specific to mad cow disease, or for that matter Howard Lyman's description of animal-feeding practices -- or, for that matter, the First Amendment -- are mere details to be swatted away like flies, an attitude which shows through repeatedly in the beef industry's handling of the PR problems posed by the Oprah trial.

With respect to the issue of mad cow disease itself, the cattlemen pursued a strategy of simple evasion. Their message to the media was that they were willing to discuss the question of whether the trial infringed upon the First Amendment, but they did not want to be dragged into a discussion of whether mad cow disease (known technically as "bovine spongiform encephalopathy" or BSE) posed any problems in the United States.

In his eagerness to avoid the subject, NCBA president-elect Clark Winningham even claimed on January 9, 1998 that he was under court order not to comment about the Oprah trial. "Wish I could," he said.

Three days later, Winningham lifted his self-imposed gag order and spoke freely to reporters. "Our fear is that the trial revives the issue of BSE in the minds of the consumer again," he said. "The fact that she is moving the show has become a news item, and it will give her a lot of free publicity, but that hurts us because mad cow disease gets pushed out in the headlines again."

Corporate Reapers: The Book of Agribusiness [1].

"Formula pricing," along with terms like "captive supplies" and "forward contracting," are phrases seldom heard or understood outside the meat industry. They refer to a cattle-buying system which pushes the envelope of legal activity and, for all practical purposes, amounts to monopoly price-fixing.

"Captive supplies" are cattle which are fed by meatpackers themselves or contracted from closely-allied sources like Engler. By keeping their packing plants full for days or weeks with captive supplies, meatpackers are able to force down the market price of cattle by simply not buying for long periods. This in turn enables them to "forward contract" for future purchases at "formula prices" which they dictate, again undercutting the open market.

These artificial price manipulations also provide system insiders like Engler with advance information about price fluctuations, enabling them to reap additional profits through market speculation in cattle futures.

During the month in which Oprah's controversial mad cow program aired, Engler was in fact the largest supplier of "captive supplies" to IBP Ltd. His role in keeping the market artificially low was dramatically illustrated on May 2, 1996, when IBP's sources of captive supplies ran out of inventory. In a matter of two hours, prices surged upward from $54 to $60 per hundredweight.

As Krebs observes, "This is not simply a case of a television talk show host pitted against a beset-upon cowboy with the white hat battling for 'truth, justice and the American way,' but one of corporate agribusiness's very own seeking to improve nothing more than his own 'bottom line.' "

Mad Cow USA [2], however, there is no reason to believe that the "voluntary ban" had any impact whatsoever on industry feeding practices. Aside from the fact that a "voluntary ban" is a contradiction in terms, Mad Cow USA quotes agricultural extension agents and feed salesmen who confirm that the practice of feeding rendered cattle back to cattle continued, and may even have increased, after the voluntary ban was declared.

And Weber's claim that rendered feed "has been cooked at temperatures high enough to sterilize it" can only be characterized as deliberately misleading. As Weber well knows, the infectious agent that causes mad cow disease is extraordinarily resistant to high temperatures and is capable of remaining infective even when heated to 720 degrees fahrenheit--more than twice the temperature used to "cook" rendered animal feed. Its ability to survive the rendering process is precisely what enabled mad cow disease to grow to epidemic levels in the British cattle population.

As evidence of the Oprah program's "sensationalistic" exaggerations, commentators frequently pointed to vegetarian activist Howard Lyman's claim that mad cow disease "could make AIDS look like the common cold."

But consider the context in which the show aired on April 16, 1996. Less than a month earlier, the British government had abruptly reversed a decade of denial by announcing that people were dying from a new variant strain of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and that mad cow disease was the most likely cause. The scientist who headed the U.K. government's Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee, James Pattison, had even admitted that millions of people could already be incubating the disease, which is indetectable, incurable, always fatal and invisible for years or even decades before emerging as an Alzheimer's-like killer.

Or consider the conclusions of the Food and Drug Administration, which appeared nine months after the Oprah show, when FDA finally got around to publishing "proposed regulations" banning the practice of feeding cattle back to cattle.

"The data and information raise concern that BSE could occur in cattle in the United States," the FDA wrote, "and that if BSE does appear in this country, the causative agent could be transmitted and amplified through the feeding of processed ruminant protein to cattle, and could result in an epidemic."

Lyman, of course, used somewhat more colorful language. He called it "mad cow disease" instead of BSE. Instead of "processed ruminant protein," he talked about "feeding cows to cows." The bottom line, however, is that Lyman and Oprah Winfrey went on trial because they dared broadcast the same conclusions that the FDA itself would reach nine months later: Feeding cows back to cows is a dangerous, bad idea.

Lyman also accurately stated that England's epidemic was caused by the cannibalistic practice of feeding "ground-up" cows back to other cows through a practice known as "rendering." He was even correct when he stated that everything from house pets to highway roadkill went into the mix. The cattlemen might be forgiven for thinking that it is sensationalistic and in poor taste to discuss these gory matters, but the details themselves are accurate. Lyman had the right to say it, Oprah had the right to broadcast it and hamburger lovers have the right to know it.

As far as accuracy is concerned, Lyman's comments have aged better than comments made at the time by NCBA product safety director James Reagan. "There is no scientific evidence that says there is a relationship between BSE and that if you eat meat in Great Britain that you would develop CJD or BSE or whatever," Reagan said in a radio appearance aimed at rebutting the Oprah show. "Both of those are diseases of the central nervous system, but they are completely different."

Today, a solid scientific consensus has formed around the conclusion that James Reagan was dead wrong. Even the British beef industry has conceded that there is a link between mad cow disease and new variant Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (nvCJD). If passing out false information is a crime, therefore, the cattlemen ought to be on trial themselves.

If the cattlemen believe that Oprah's program gave a one-sided perspective of things, they have an obvious remedy. They can publish and disseminate point-by-point critiques of Lyman's statements, pointing out fallacies or mitigating circumstances. They can challenge him to open public debates, and in defense of their positions they can afford to hire the best experts money can buy. After all, the meat industry already spends a hundred million dollars a year hawking its products; its opinions and promotions and celebrity spokespeople dominate the commercial airwaves.

Instead of going this route, however, the cattlemen chose to sue, taking advantage of the new "agricultural product disparagement laws" that food industry lobbyists have succeeded in pushing through 13 state legislatures over the course of the past six years. The lawsuit against Lyman and Oprah is the first test in court of these so-called "veggie libel laws," but as vehicles for censorship they have already succeeded brilliantly outside the courtroom.

PR Watch [2], First Quarter 1998, Volume 5, No. 1 [2]