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AdvertisementIs this your industry?Does this sound like the American agriculture that you know? "Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon -- circa 2009." This is the lead paragraph in TIME magazine's front cover story that hit mailboxes and newsstands Aug. 21. To me, and millions of others in the U.S. agriculture industry, it sounds like a whole lot of the manure that he writes about. It smells like it. too. But when Bryan Walsh, the author of the article, "The Real Cost of Cheap Food," was interviewed by Mike Adams on the AgriTalk radio program last Monday, he said he didn't think the story was sensationalized. Really? But the story has, in fact, stirred a great deal of interest at the expense of accuracy. And Walsh himself admitted the story was not intended to be a balanced story. The angle TIME has been taking with stories, Walsh said, was to allow the author to draw his own conclusions, instead of presenting 50 percent of one side and 50 percent of the other. Walsh said he hopes the story and his angle "improves the system." That's an opinion piece, buddy, not a news story. Walsh's journalism ethics instructor must be in some collegiate classroom somewhere up in arms. In my journalism ethics class, I distinctly remember several weeks of class time being devoted to the importance of clearly distinguishing between opinion and hard news. This column, for example, is MY opinion. It runs on the Opinion page beneath bold, black letters that spell out the word, "opinion." Walsh's story was the front cover--the lead story. It did not label the story as opinion and, consequently, was presented as fact. Readers--3.4 million of them--trust TIME and its editors as a legitimate source of news. I never will again and I hope that even just a fraction of those readers can see the piece for what it was--sensationalized opinion. Holly Martin can be reached by phone at 620-227-1806, or by e-mail at hmartin@hpj.com. Advertisement
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