6/27/2014
The Problem with Facts …
Chris Beytes
… is that they’re often blurred by misinformation.
In April, I sent out my annual April Fools edition of
Acres Online and, as usual, a pretty good handful of industry folks fell for at least one of my stories. You’ve seen them: Titanic begonias, geraniums crossed with crayons, greenhouse heat from lava, Leftunias and Right Wing begonias, the Van Wingerdens sell out to a Russian billionaire …
What I’ve learned from perpetrating these myths is that I can mislead otherwise-intelligent people simply by surrounding a lie with lots of truths.
I was thinking on this while working with Jen Zurko on the study of the whole bee/neonics controversy, and I came to the conclusion that the opposite holds true, too: If you surround the truth with falsehoods, the truth gets lost … or at least muddied enough so that it can’t be believed either or it never has a chance to be heard.
This phenomenon is hurting the search for objective facts in the bee/neonics controversy, because any rational discussion based on evidence gets lost in a sea of emotion, misinformation and even outright lies.
Case in point: An article on the Friends of the Earth (FOTE) bee/neonics press release in the
Minneapolis Star Tribune last fall, as well as the comments section afterwards.
The author takes the FOTE research (which, while thin on its own, is at least a jumping-off spot for more detailed study) and immediately went for the sensationalistic headline, “Many bee-friendly plants are toxic bee killers.”
This is when I loathe my brethren in the mass media.
Anyway, the usual stuff about the research, and quotes from Friends of the Earth, and a quote from Home Depot, showing the reporter, covered the other side. Then they talked to the owner of Landscape Alternative, a native plant suppler. He said:
“That’s one of the advantages of native plants. They don’t have all the pests and diseases that fancy cultivated plants can get.”
Oh, so now natives don’t get pests and diseases, and cultivated plants are “fancy” and do get pests and diseases? Yes, we can argue that maybe some natives are less prone to certain pests and diseases. But we can’t make that blanket statement.
Lastly, the comment section, where too many uninformed people share their opinions with no vetting or oversight whatsoever (and you know what they say opinions are like):
Here’s the best/worst one:
Doesn’t surprise me that XXX are treated with this. XXX is a division of YYY, which is a huge GMO factory. Will never buy a XXX (or a ZZZ product) again. It’s really frightening that it’s an “industry standard.” Be better than the industry!
I didn’t even want to repeat this crock of fudge here, which is why I left out the names of the companies mentioned. Suffice it to say, they’re big players in our industry. I shared it with one of the companies mentioned so they could see the ridiculous lies being spread about them. (The comments have since been disabled or taken down).
Unfortunately, the damage has been done and some will now accept this as truth.
Here’s the first sentence from another article, also from the
Star Tribune:
“The pesticides that are now synonymous with the demise of honey bees … .”
The definition of synonymous? “Closely associated with or suggestive of something.” So now, despite minimal evidence or research, this reporter has decided neonics warrant this classification. Again, most readers will accept it as fact—“Hey, it was in the paper, it has to be true.”
It’s comments like these that will prevent rational evaluation of any studies. Of course, I’m sure the other side feels the same way when someone on the chemical side blows off their arguments about the potential hazards of pesticides.
Unfortunately, once bad information gets out there, it’s hard to undo it—think poisonous poinsettias. That’s the long-term damage caused by extremists.
Of course, if you happen to lean towards their point of view, you can excuse their tactics, as long as the desired goal is reached. That, too, applies to both sides.
GT