Cowed Media Disease

It's the day after U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman announced the first case of mad cow disease in the United States, the telephones at the Center for Media & Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin are ringing constantly with press inquiries.

"I've never seen anything like this in my 30 years of activism!" John Stauber, executive director of the center and co-author of the 1997 book Mad Cow U.S.A., is saying. Stauber has been warning for years about the threat of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), better known as mad cow disease, coming to America.

And after years of very limited press interest, this is something else. In between taking calls on December 24, he recalls a 1992 conversation with a reporter from the Wall Street Journal--an experience typical of the difficulty he had trying to get media to sound the alarm.

He had begun investigating mad cow disease as an outgrowth of research he was doing on recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), the genetically engineered drug designed to increase a cow's milk production, while at the Foundation on Economic Trends, a Washington, D.C. group that examines developments in science and technology and their impacts.

"I got a call from a retired Eli Lilly drug researcher who told me that if rBGH came on the market in the U.S., we would be seeing mad cow disease," recounts Stauber. He didn't see the connection. The scientist explained: "If you inject cows with rBGH, you will have to feed them fat and protein supplements," because rBGH takes a heavy toll as it hikes milk production. Likely to be used, he said, would be "the cheapest form" of fat and protein: slaughterhouse waste. And this waste, the researcher said, would inevitably include parts of animals infected with mad cow disease -- and the disease would be passed on. The use of slaughterhouse waste was how mad cow disease had spread in Great Britain and elsewhere in Europe in the 1980s.

Then Stauber filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, obtaining a 1991 report that discussed the pros and cons of banning feed containing slaughterhouse waste: "The advantage of this option is that it minimizes the risk of BSE," it read. "The disadvantage is that the cost to the livestock and rendering industries would be substantial."

Stauber called a Wall Street Journal reporter who specializes in agriculture and told him of all this. The reporter said it was "a theoretical issue. Call me when they find the first cow" with mad cow disease.

Stauber told him: "They'll be calling me when they find the first cow."

Media cowed

"And now they've found the first cow and [are] calling me," he says as the phones ring non-stop at his public interest organization, a non-profit dedicated to investigative reporting on the public relations industry. (The center's website declares: "Whether the issue is health, consumer safety, environmental preservation or democracy and world peace, citizens today find themselves confronted by a bewildering array of hired propagandists paid to convince the public that junk food is nutritious, pollution is harmless, and that what's good for big business and big government is good for the rest of us.")

The Wall Street Journal reporter's stance was representative of the media view on mad cow disease coming to the U.S. that he encountered, says Stauber, even after the publication of Mad Cow U.S.A., with its pages of documentation, much obtained through FOIA, pointing to the disease reaching America -- unless strong steps were taken. The book, co-authored by Sheldon Rampton, editor of the center's PR Watch, was "ignored by the mainstream media."

The attitude, says Stauber, was akin to, "You don't need a yellow light or a red light at the intersection until there is a pile-up and bodies strewn across the intersection."