citizens for fire safety
heimbach blank
acsh bs
jon oliver
no lnx
If John Oliver Wants To Be Funny About Science Non-Profits, I Can Help Write Better Material
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By Hank Campbell — August 13, 2018
I apologize that John Oliver's invisible accordion got cut off. Credit: HBO
I like comedy news host John Oliver. He was among the top nine funniest guys in the first season of "Community" and he even won an Emmy when Jon Stewart made the jokes of Oliver's colleagues sound hilarious. So I was excited on Saturday when I got to send an email to our Board of Trustees and the staff at the American Council on Science and Health giddy that Oliver, host of HBO's "Last Week Tonight", was going to do a hit piece on us.
Maybe it's not a hit piece, maybe he is pro-vaccine, one replied, and is going to applaud our work on that. Or cheer our dismantling Dr. Oz and his supplement empire (along with half his audience) in 2015. Or note how we helped cause smoking in the US to collapse or exposed Natural Resources Defense Council fraud on "60 Minutes" or any number of wins for the American public in our 40 year history.
No chance, I told them, he makes his money creating what he hopes will be viral clips on YouTube by pretending to be sincere and angry while playing an invisible accordion. If he is going to mention us, I wrote, it is going to be that 'science is a corporate conspiracy' stuff that anti-GMO and anti-vaccine groups promote. And then I started writing this article, nearly 36 hours before the episode even aired, sight unseen. Because I already knew what Oliver would say before even corresponding with the producer.
It's that predictable.
I just hoped it would have been funnier. But he wasn't, as you can see below. Not even a chuckle from the audience when he was talking about "astroturf" groups (those that pretend to be grassroots) put up splashy graphics and our logo and splattered corporate stuff all over it.
If you pause at his graphic for us, you will look closely and then wonder why John Oliver is against window cleaners, washing dishes and is for cigarette smoking.
Instead, if anyone rushes to their computer to investigate us, they will find out the awkward truth about "Last Week Tonight" fact-checking and it will cast into doubt his whole segment. Just 4% of our funding comes from corporations or trade groups. And I am grateful for them. But they are not controlling what 300 scientists and doctors say and couldn't even if they gave us 100%. Our budget is too small to buy anyone off, much less hundreds of volunteer advisors. Watching the segment, I had never even heard of any of the other groups he mentioned, so I wondered why a science education non-profit in existence for 40 years was being lumped in with restaurant owners who don't want to pay minimum wage and some group who thinks the humane society is not humane.
There seemed to be no rational justification for our inclusion so it was perhaps just chance. Or maybe one of the producers has a friend at NRDC or another group who feels fundraising pain when we debunk them and pitched, 'ACSH writes 1,500 science and health articles per year, they are published in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and many more and they undermine a lot of our efforts to scare people, even with 1/1000th of our revenue, so please go after them' and the producer did.
But here is the irony - Oliver is British and Brits love irony - the "evidence" their producer sent me the afternoon before it aired was from an actual astroturf organization - U.S. Right To Know, one of the puppet arms created by Organic Consumers Association to attack and harass the science community using any means at their disposal. And they have means. Very deep pockets. And some sources allege their cozy links to Russia Today, the propaganda arm of the Kremlin, are also a sign of something more malevolent.
They are literally paid to smear the science community. That's not great company to be keeping, Mr. Oliver.
As I noted, he is British, and the U.K. came up with both the anti-vaccine and anti-GMO movements, both of which U.S. Right To Know help, but I do not think he is anti-vaccine. He just attacked them a few weeks ago. Yet they are getting the last laugh. Because he just helped them.
John Oliver and his invisible accordion.
And so what about corporations? We have been around 40 years, of course during that time we have gotten donations from corporations. We're important, corporations have people internally who want to do positive things with their money. The American Heart Association, Salvation Army, PBS, they all get corporate money too - a lot more than 4%. Oliver is 100% corporate-funded. Are secret sponsors telling his writing room who to attack?
Of course not.
Conspiracy theories fall apart pretty quickly under the gaze of truth. I recognize exaggeration is a vital aspect of comedy, I just wish they had written some - comedy that is. Instead of being funny or accurate, he laboriously implies we are working for Big Soda because in our 40-year history we have gotten $50,000 from Coca-Cola, completely transparent. It made no difference in our work, we have said for decades that sodas are a treat, enjoy them in moderation like you do Starbucks mochas or pizza. Sodas don't "cause" diabetes despite how Mr. Oliver attempted to overturn all of biology claiming they do. Too many calories leading to obesity are the predominant cause of Type 2 diabetes, regardless of where they come from.
And maybe that is why no one laughed - even though the audience got tickets 2 months in advance, so they really wanted to laugh. There were probably diabetics in the audience, including the Type 1 kind who are tired of being the butt of lazy soda jokes, there were probably people who used e-cigarettes to get off smoking. There may have been chemists, biologists, and toxicologists, all who cheer our work standing up for science against activists saying the science community is fraudulent. There may be people who know America reached emissions reductions targets 8 years ahead of what President Obama called for in his Clean Power Plan, because of natural gas - the Big Fracking industry he suggests controls us (yet give us no money.) If lower CO2 emissions are a bad thing to John Oliver, I am happy to be on his Black List. But he needs to take a class in physics. (1)
Maybe there was someone in the audience who got botulism because they believe, apparently like John Oliver, that BPA must be harmful because it's a chemical, and they instead bought spoiled food from some anti-science hippie.
It's impossible to know, John Oliver obviously does not read science sites, so he won't clarify.
Be part of the solution, John
Mr. Oliver can be part of the solution if he is worried that anti-science groups are under existential threat because they have 1000X our revenue and still get beat up by us when it comes to actual science and medicine. Since he believes funding is how the science community decides what evidence to accept, with a flick of his pen he could take a tiny fraction of his wealth and simply donate to us here.
Then, armed with his seemingly keen knowledge of how I am solely motivated by money despite knowing nothing about me, he can call me up and demand I change what science topics we will cover.
I will sure enjoy that discussion. I truly will. I will be a lot funnier than his segment on us was. And it won't be the first time he phoned one in.
How You Can Help
If you have Twitter, you can write him and tell him you don't like that he is using anti-science trade groups to undermine trust in science nonprofits. On Facebook, you can comment here. Or you can contact the producer, Charles Wilson, charles.wilson@lastweektonight.com or at (212) 975-8186, and let him you don't like American science being used as his political football.
NOTE:
(1) I put the details in a footnote because this kind of stuff kills articles the way dream sequences in movies do.
Here is what Mr. Charles Wilson, the producer, sent me after spending 5 seconds on Google and finding US Right To Know, and I will address the specific claims he noted one-by-one. In the segment John just says "chemicals" and maybe to him the very word is bad. To science, it is not.
You'll have to click the image to see it full size.
Citizens for Fire Safety - SourceWatch
https://www.sourcewatch.org › index.php › Citizens_for_Fire_Safety
1.
"Citizens for Fire Safety describes itself as a group of people with altruistic intentions: 'a coalition of fire professionals, educators, community activists, burn centers, doctors, firedepartments and industry leaders, united to ensure that our country is protected by the highest standards of fire safety.'
"Deceptive Tactics" · Ties to Big Tobacco · PR to Spin Harms
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › David_Heimbach
2.
Witness for the flame retardant industry The series identified Heimbach as a paid advocate for the industry in a "campaign of deception … to promote the use of flame retardants." Heimbachindicated that in 2009 he became aware of the now defunct Citizens for Fire Safetyorganization.
Professional career · Witness for the flame ... · Discovery and aftermath
Exposed: The chemical industry's fake grass-roots lobbying for fire ...
https://www.latimes.com › business › hiltzik › la-fi-mh-a-look-inside-the-c...
1.
May 15, 2015 - ... coda to the credibility of Citizens for Fire Safety, the ostensibly grass-roots ... Heimbach later gave up his medical license under the threat of ...
Retired UW burn doctor telling tales to promote fire retardants | The ...
https://www.seattletimes.com › nation-world › retired-uw-burn-doctor-telling...
May 7, 2012 - Citizens for Fire Safety Institute, the industry front group that sponsored Heimbach, describes itself as a group of people with altruistic intentions: ...
"Citizens for Fire Safety" Smoked Out: Front Group Folds After Exposé ...
https://www.prwatch.org › news › 2012/09 › citizens-fire-safety-smoked-o...
1.
Sep 10, 2012 - In the fallout, a front group formed by the three biggest manufacturers, calling itself "Citizens for Fire Safety," has been shuttered. The Chicago ...
Missing: heimbach | Must include: heimbach
Citizens for Fire Safety - Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families
https://saferchemicals.org › tag › citizens-for-fire-safety
1.
... children IQ, chlorinated tris, Citizens for Fire Safety, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Dr. David Heimbach, Good Parenting for the Chemical Industry, ...
Dr. David Heimbach - Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families
https://saferchemicals.org › tag › dr-david-heimbach
1.
Dr. David Heimbach ... Chicago Tribune, children IQ, chlorinated tris, Citizens for Fire Safety, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Dr. David Heimbach, Good ...
The Chicago Tribune lights up the flame-retardant industry - Columbia ...
https://www.cjr.org › the_audit › the_chicago_tribune_torches_th
1.
May 21, 2012 - Dr. David Heimbach knows how to tell a story. ... attempts to excuse his falsehoods) for an astroturf group called Citizens for Fire Safety. It goes ...
American Chemistry Council lied about lobbying role on flame ...
https://publicintegrity.org › environment › american-chemistry-council-lie...
1.
May 13, 2015 - Dr. David Heimbach gave false testimony before the California state senate in 2011. Citizens for Fire Safety paid Heimback $240,000 between ...
Toxic Flame Retardants Don't Even Work As Advertised | Toxic-Free ...
https://toxicfreefuture.org › toxic-flame-retardants-dont-even-work-as-adv...
1.
Jan 30, 2013 - CNN aired this excellent report by Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the safety of chemical flame ... the infamous chemical industry front group, Citizens For Fire Safety, and their paid expert Seattle burn physician, Dr. David Heimbach.).