Fumento, M

...Stossel has established a consistent pattern over the years of using researchers from the “conservative labyrinth” of think tanks, institutes, and foundations as “experts” to support the ideological message of his reports. His reliance on Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, whose “research” has been discredited by academics such as Gerald Bracey (2005, p. 3), for his arguments in “Stupid in America” offers us a recent case in point. Stossel’s associations with discredited, corporate-sponsored activists such as Greene date back to the 1990s. In 1997, for example, he relied on Michael Fumento, a Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute, to make his case against governmental environmental regulation (see}:

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https://www.drillednews.com/post/fake-science-is-a-real-danger

Back in the mid-aughts, I was an editor at Environmental Science & Technology. It's the top peer-reviewed journal for researchers who study complex environmental problems and their impacts, including air, water, and toxic chemical pollution. I worked in the news section, making these studies understandable to average readers, as well as scientists and physicians who were unfamiliar with environmental research.

But over time, I noticed that much of the “new research” we published wasn’t terribly unique. If ES&T put out a study finding that a particular chemical seemed to be toxic to children, or _{The New York Times covered}_ one of our “blockbuster” air pollution studies, I could search for 10 minutes and find multiple papers with similar findings. What was the point of spending all this time and money to study the environment and public health if nothing was being done to address the problems?

During this period, I started hearing complaints from some environmental scientists, that the industries whose products and technologies they studied were funding research to undermine findings that those products harmed public health. At first I thought this couldn’t be true. I had studied biology in college and believed that science was an objective process to reveal the world’s mysteries.

Then I met Fred Vom Saal.

Around 2004, I’d been chosen to attend an exclusive science conference on toxic chemicals, along with Vom Saal, a University of Missouri professor of reproductive biology. Vom Saal studied a chemical in plastics called bisphenol-A, or BPA. In humans and other animals BPA mimics estrogen, meaning it can disrupt our body’s hormonal system. According to Vom Saal, industry-funded scientists were attacking his research by repeating his studies, but with slight changes in the protocols so that the problems he’d discovered with BPA wouldn’t turn up. With these studies in hand, companies then claimed that Vom Saal’s research was shoddy.

I listened to Vom Saal rant for about 30 minutes one summer afternoon during a break in the conference, then exited politely. Science, like every profession, attracts its share of crazies. It was easier for me to accept that Vom Saal was a tad delusional than to believe that industry scientists manipulated research.

But then I started hearing about Tyrone Hayes, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Hayes was studying atrazine, a _{widely-applied herbicide}_ that controls weeds and increases crop yields in corn and sorghum. Scientists were discovering that this chemical was the most common pesticide contaminant of ground and surface waters, and finding it in some drinking water wells, too. Hayes’ research showed that atrazine interfered with testosterone, chemically castrating some animals and turning males into females.

The next question should have been: What was atrazine doing to humans?

But like Vom Saal, Hayes contended that corporate scientists were publishing studies that nearly mirrored his own, with slight changes in protocol to get results that found no problems with atrazine. According to Hayes, these studies _{were part of an orchestrated campaign}_ to make him appear incompetent. But Hayes struck me as an odd fellow and a bit eccentric. As with Vom Saal, I had my doubts about him.

Then along came climate scientist Michael Mann.

In the summer of 2005, Congressman Joe Barton, R-Texas, began investigating Mann, along with several other climate scientists, for allegedly making “methodological flaws and data errors.” _{Barton demanded information}_ on their financial backing from government agencies and access to their data and computer codes. He questioned their relationships to organizations studying climate change. It seemed like a juicy story that was right in line with ES&T's science news coverage, so I contacted sources to learn more and begin writing stories.

Because ES&T didn’t cover climate change, I knew little to nothing about climate science. What I did know came from reading the mainstream news, which put across climate science as controversial, and climate researchers' many troubling claims about global warming as overblown. But I also knew that these outlets were probably getting the story wrong, because of an interaction I’d had the year before with some fellow reporters at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

One day at the conference, while six or seven of us were standing in a circle during a break, the conversation shifted to climate change. Because I didn’t know much about the subject, I kept asking the others questions, trying to understand whether the research was any good. A woman who covered the environment for a newspaper out west began laughing, saying that there were about a dozen scientists who said that climate science was nonsense. She kept contact information around for all 12 of them, she told us, becauseher editors required her to put one of these doubters in every story to provide journalistic “balance."

Several reporters in the circle giggled. This was my first hint that what I was reading in the media on climate science might be overemphasizing contrarian opinions.Because what everyone in that circle already knew, and I was learning, was that by 2004 thousands of climate experts around the world had published research showing global warming was real, and mostly caused by carbon dioxide pollution from burning oil, coal, and gas.

My article about Barton’s investigation of Michael Mann quoted several experts who told me the affair was a “witch hunt.” But a question kept nagging at me: Why had Barton started this investigation in the first place? It didn’t make any sense. So I began looking at the entire sequence of events that led up to it.

In his letter demanding information and records, _{Barton had referenced a front-page article}_ in The Wall Street Journal that discussed research published by Stephen McIntyre, a retired mining consultant. In several of these papers, _{McIntyre had poked holes in Mann’s}_ research. At this point in time, some journalists and activists were beginning to expose many of the scientists questioning climate science as industry lackeys. But McIntyre was retired, creating the appearance of independence from any extraction industry and greater credibility.

On a lark, I called up McIntyre’s former employer. Surprise! I caught him still working for industry. Then I looked into thejournal Energy & Environment, where McIntyre had published some studies. It turned out to be _{a sad publication}_ without any substantive peer review process, and operated by an editor without any science credentials — but who assured me that while she didn’t have any training in science, _{her husband had}_ a doctorate in physics.

In short, Barton had launched an investigation based on a Wall Street Journal article with some pretty flimsy reporting. Commenting on this article, former Journal editor _{Frank Allen told me}_, “It was a strange story ’cause it had this bizarre undertone of being investigative but it didn’t investigate. And this piece — what I thought was bothersome about it — it purported to be authoritative, and it’s just full of holes.”

Fred Vom Saal, Tyrone Hayes, and Michael Mann: Three different academics, working in different fields, who didn’t know each other, but who each had a story about industry campaigns to undermine their research. Was I a magnet for paranoid fringe voices in science, or were they telling the truth?

Then I began noticing a link between climate change and smoking. Whenever a group or public expert said that climate change isn’t real, it turned out that about 10 years prior, in the mid-’90s, they were likely to have said that smoking isn’t harmful. I found this out by going through a new archive that the University of California, San Francisco had put online, called _{the Tobacco Archives}_.

Digging through these documents, I found that many prominent scientists had worked for the tobacco industry, and that cigarette companies had funded science organizations and nonprofits to cast doubt on the science that showed nicotine was addictive, and smoking a health hazard. It was all very confusing. So I began contacting other reporters and scientists, asking if they knew about this and what they thought it meant.

One winter afternoon, I got a call from a reporter named Mark Hertsgaard, asking what I knew about the links between tobacco defenders and climate denial. By this time, I had spent dozens of weekend and late night hours going through the Tobacco Archive. So I pointed _{him to documents showing}_ that a scientist named Frederick Seitz had worked with R.J. Reynolds to downplay the dangers of tobacco. Seitz wasn’t some nobody: He had been president of Rockefeller University and _{president of the National Academies of Sciences}_. When Mark and I spoke, Seitz was still revered as one of the most prominent scientists in America.

Hertsgaard wrote about Seitz’s work for tobacco and other companies for a _{2006 Vanity Fair cover story}_, confirming that some industries were corrupting the field of science.

I also began to see how corporations influenced the media. While reading the Tobacco Archive one night, I discovered that tobacco companies were paying a Fox News science columnist named Steven J. Milloy, who regularly attacked scientists and journalists reporting on chemical and tobacco harms. In my article about Milloy _{for The New Republic}_, I noted that Eamon Javers of BusinessWeek had caught Scripps Howard columnist Michael Fumento receiving about $60,000 in 1999 from Monsanto, a multi-billion-dollar player in the agricultural biotech sector that Fumento covered. The funding, which Fumento had not disclosed to Scripps Howard, had been routed through a conservative think tank called the Hudson Institute. *

The growing evidence eventually forced me to change my precious thinking that science is always an objective search for the truth. In fact, corporate money is often skewing that journey, and if we look hard enough, we can find disinformation campaigns designed to protect all sorts of harmful products.

In the years since I figured this out, the public television series _{Frontline has documented}_ the disinformation operation that companies ran against Fred Vom Saal. The New Yorker magazine has _{profiled Tyrone Hayes and}_ the corporate campaign to smear him. Michael Mann has detailed the fossil energy industry’s harassment of himself and other climate scientists in a best-selling book, _{The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars}_,

Industries create these campaigns because they are effective at confusing the public and the press about science, which helps to slow or stop policy changes that would require stronger anti-pollution laws, or taking products off the market. Today disinformation has become its own industry, one that distorts not only climate science, but most areas of research where studies might influence how the government regulates corporations.

* :{_{Scripps Howard later fired}_:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background-image:initial;background-position:0px 0px;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-attachment:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;-webkit-tap-highlight-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);box-sizing:inherit"):}: Fumento, who :{_{publicly denounced extreme right disinformation campaigns}_:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background-image:initial;background-position:0px 0px;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-attachment:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;-webkit-tap-highlight-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);box-sizing:inherit"):}: in 2012. He recently wrote :{_{a supportive opinion piece for Monsanto's glyphosate}_:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background-image:initial;background-position:0px 0px;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-attachment:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;-webkit-tap-highlight-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);box-sizing:inherit"):}: pesticide. Milloy remains a mouthpiece for industry, and was a member of Donald Trump's :{_{transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency}_:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background:0px 0px;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;-webkit-tap-highlight-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);box-sizing:inherit"):}:.

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Michael Fumento was once fired after it was revealed that he was writing in favor of industry interests while receiving money from those interests and authored a book titled The Myth Of Heterosexual AIDS. TheNew York Post now thinks you might want to know what he thinks about climate science.

The Post published an op-ed by Fumento on December 5 titled "Global-warming 'proof' is evaporating." In it, Fumento falsely suggested that a slowdown in recent temperatures means that "previous warming may not have been man-made at all" and compared accepting man-made climate change to "cult beliefs" and believing "before Columbus" that the Earth was flat (yes, Fumento appears to need a history lesson about Christopher Columbus in addition to a science lesson).

Like many pseudo-scientific "experts" on climate change, Fumento previously downplayed the dangers of cigarettes while receiving money from the tobacco industry. In the 1990s, Fumento was on the advisory boardof the tobacco-funded "Advancement of Sound Science Coaliton" while downplaying the addictive nature of cigarettes and the dangers of secondhand smoke in the media.

It wasn't the last time Fumento took money from powerful industries while writing in favor of them. In 2006 Bloomberg BusinessWeek revealed that Fumento had received $60,000 from agribusiness giant Monsanto while writing columns in favor of both agribusiness and Monsanto. Soon after the revelation, Scripps Howard News Service canceled his syndicated column. Afterwards, Fumento published a public appeal for "patron support" for his writing, boasting that some of his published articles "have 50 hyperlinked citations in pieces only 900 words long."

Fumento, who is a lawyer and has no scientific training, has also previously pushed scientific misinformation. In 1990, Fumento wrote The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS; it only sold 12,000 copies, which he attributed to a conspiracy against him that included his own publisher. Despite the sensationalist title, Fumento did notactually argue that heterosexual people cannot get AIDS. Rather, he suggests that because rates of AIDS are low for the white, middle-class heterosexual people who do not use intravenous drugs, the U.S. is spendingtoo much money on the issue. In order to downplay heterosexual transmission rates, Fumento stated in 1992 that former basketball player Magic Johnson, who contracted HIV, would "eventually probably" be "outed," and in any case probably has more opportunities to "have intercourse with inner-city black women than would a promiscuous heterosexual white basketball player."

Conservative media have increasingly turned to charlatans such as Fumento for climate denial as the extensive evidence for man-made climate change only grows stronger.

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cited by vitter bs report

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In March 1996, CEI's Michelle Malkin and Michael Fumento published "Rachel's Folly," which claims that dioxin is good for you.^[6] CEI's Jonathan Tolman (who holds a bachelor's degree in political science), published a study that month titled "Nature's Hormone Factory," claiming that naturally-occurring chemicals produced by plants and other living organisms are as dangerous as industrial chemicals.^[7] In December of that year, CEI submitted comments opposing the EPA's proposed air quality rule to limit particulate emissions, claiming that "the EPA has failed to consider whether the proposed standard may actually increase mortality due to reductions in disposable income that compliance efforts may produce. ... At all times regulation imposes costs that mean less real income to individuals for alternative expenditure. That deprivation of real income itself has adverse health effects, in the form of poorer diet, more heart attacks, more suicides."^[8]

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mashey:

Michael Fumento 448 17 hits “Michael Fumento (…) is a syndicated journalist and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. An earlier version of this art  also tar sands

http://desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/fake.pdf

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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Michael_Fumento

chael Fumento is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C.

Fumento graduated in 1985 from the University of Illinois College of Law. "He has been a legal writer for the Washington Times, editorial writer for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and was the first "National Issues" reporter for Investors' Business Daily. Mr. Fumento was the 1994 Warren T. Brookes Fellow in Environmental Journalism at theCompetitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., a fellow with Consumer Alert in Washington, D.C., and a science correspondent for Reason magazine," according to a biographical note in a report he co-edited. "Fumento has lectured on science and health issues throughout the nation and the world, including Great Britain, France, the Czech Republic, Greece, Austria, Hong Kong, China, and South America," the profile continues. [1]

• Advisory Board, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ^[1]
• :{

}:

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1 Tobacco issues
• 2 Pro-GMO (Which It Pays To Be)
• 3 Anti-Environmentalist
• 4 Books
• 5 Contact Information
• 6 SourceWatch Resources
• 7 External links
• 8 References

Tobacco issues

Fumento no longer works for the Hudson Institute. He is a graduate of the partly tobacco-funded National Journalism Center (NJC),[2][3] although he graduated in 1985 [4] and the tobacco connection dates back only to 1993. [5] According to a 1993 Five year plan written by Thomas J. Borelli of Philip Morris Corporate Scientific Affairs department, PM "Support[s] the efforts of...the National Journalism Center to conduct policy forums and issue papers on junk science and health care reform."[6] He has been a vocal critic of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 1993 Risk Assessment on secondhand smoke.[7] In a July 7, 1996 article in the Rocky Mountain News, Fumento disputed whether the nicotine in cigarettes is addictive, stating "The FDA is using the addiction issue as an excuse to gain the power to regulate tobacco." though he added, "personally I like some of" the proposed regulations.[8] Elsewhere, in distinguishing between active and passive smoking he has written that active smoking is "a terrible killer" [9] and "Smoking – real smoking – is both vile and deadly." [10]

According the National Journalism Center's profile of him, Fumento attended an NJC course in the fall of 1985 and has subsequently been "National Issues reporter, Investor's Business Daily, legal writer,Washington Times, editorial writer, Rocky Mountain News (CO), U.S. correspondent, A3 Umwelt (Austria)." Fumento has also held a number of positions at conservative think tanks, including being a fellow at theAmerican Enterprise Institute and a science advisor to the Atlantic Legal Institute.

Pro-GMO (Which It Pays To Be)

"Scripps Howard News Service announced Jan. 13 that it's severing its business relationship with columnist Michael Fumento, who's also a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute," reported BusinessWeek in 2006. "The move comes after inquiries from BusinessWeek Online about payments Fumento received from agribusiness giant Monsanto -- a frequent subject of praise in Fumento's opinion columns and a book." Scripps Howard general manager Peter Copeland said Fumento "did not tell SHNS editors, and therefore we did not tell our readers, that in 1999 Hudson received a $60,000 grant from Monsanto." The grant was for Fumento's book BioEvolution published by Encounter Books. [11]

Fumento called himself "extremely pro-biotech" and said that, as he was soliciting financial support from "everybody" for his then-unwritten book BioEvolution, he told Monsanto, "The biotech industry is going to look really good, and you should contribute." Fumento said his recent columns, including a January 5, 2006 piece praising new Monsanto products, were not "quid pro quo." He added, "I think there's a statue of limitations on that." [12]

Fumento insists that there was nothing ethically wrong with his failure to disclose Monsanto's contribution to his book. "I acted completely ethically, and within a month or two nobody will doubt that," Fumento wrote in an e-mail to Businessweek.

Anti-Environmentalist

In a December 1998 article published in the Idaho Statesman, Fumento complained of "environmentalists' never-ending campaign against pesticides." His ire had been provoked by a Natural Resources Defense Council report titled, "Trouble on the Farm: Growing up with Pesticides in Agricultural Communities." He referred to NRDC as "a group of suit-wearing city slickers who rarely get closer to a farm than watching 'Green Acres' reruns." [13]

Fumento claimed, "Ultimately the NRDC does not want safe use of pesticides; it wants no use." He warned that, if NRDC were to have its way, Americans would be "forced to eat expensive, ugly, shriveled-looking organic produce and foreign competitors will have our farmers foreclosing at rates not seen since the dust bowl days." [14]

Books

Books Fumento has authored include: [15]

• BioEvolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World
• Science Under Siege
• The Fat of The Land
• Polluted Science
• The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS

• BioHype a critique of Fumento's Bioevolution from American Scientist Online

Contact Information

Michael Fumento

Hudson Institute

1015 15th Street NW (the Examiner Building (Washington DC), home to numerous conservative organizations)

Suite 300

Washington, DC 20005

Phone: 202-974-2406

Website: http://fumento.com

Email: fumento AT pobox.com

SourceWatch Resources

• Hudson Institute
• Pundit payola
• Monsanto

External links

• Deltoid on Fumento
• "Biography of Michael Fumento", accessed January 2006.
• "City slickers off target in pesticide report", The Idaho Statesman, December 15, 1998.
• Bonner Cohen, et al., ed., "The Fear Profiteers: Do 'Socially Responsible' Businesses Sow Health Scares to Reap Monetary Rewards?", February 2002, page 79.
• National Journalism Center, "Michael Fumento", accessed November 27, 2003.
• Eamon Javers, "A Columnist Backed by Monsanto: Michael Fumento's failure to disclose payments to him in 1999 from the agribusiness giant have now caused Scripps Howard to sever its ties to him,"BusinessWeek Online, January 13, 2006.
• Howard Kurtz, "Monsanto's Man?", Washington Post, January 15, 2006.

Deltoid on Fumento

"Biography of Michael Fumento", accessed January 2006.

"City slickers off target in pesticide report", The Idaho Statesman, December 15, 1998.

Bonner Cohen, et al., ed., "The Fear Profiteers: Do 'Socially Responsible' Businesses Sow Health Scares to Reap Monetary Rewards?", February 2002, page 79.

National Journalism Center, "Michael Fumento", accessed November 27, 2003.

Eamon Javers, "A Columnist Backed by Monsanto: Michael Fumento's failure to disclose payments to him in 1999 from the agribusiness giant have now caused Scripps Howard to sever its ties to him," BusinessWeek Online, January 13, 2006.

Howard Kurtz, "Monsanto's Man?", Washington Post, January 15, 2006.

References

1. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:↑ Advisory Board, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, accessed September 19, 2008.

This article may include information from Tobacco Documents Online.

Categories: 

• Tobaccowiki
• Tobacco documents biographies
• Think tanks/personnel

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Mo D  wrote for scripps Howard on pesticides