The warning--uttered on prime-time network television, against a backdrop of a giant apple marked with a skull and crossbones--was indeed ominous:
"The most potent cancer-causing agent in our food supply is a substance sprayed on apples to keep them on the trees longer and make them look better."
So said Ed Bradley on "60 Minutes" on Feb. 26, 1989, and so began a nationwide panic, fed by other media, which quickly followed "60 Minutes" 's lead with their own stories on the killer chemical daminozide (better known by its trade name--Alar).
Young children, the media reported, were especially vulnerable, because they tended to drink a lot of apple juice and because their digestive and immune systems were not fully developed.
But at the time of the "60 Minutes" broadcast--which was viewed by an estimated 40 million Americans--industry was already moving away from Alar, and the nation's three major baby-food makers said they were using non-Alar apples.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, an activist environmental group, wanted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to ban Alar and several other pesticides. When the group produced a report ("Intolerable Risk: Pesticides in Our Children's Food") condemning Alar, Newsweek rushed into print with the story before the report was officially released.
The report, Newsweek said, would "almost certainly generate frightening headlines."
Indeed it did--three weeks later, right after "60 Minutes" aired its story. News media throughout the country--effectively manipulated by the Natural Resources Defense Council and aided by public appeals and congressional testimony from that well-known molecular biologist Meryl Streep--almost made it seem that one bite of an Alar-treated apple or one swig of juice made from Alar-treated apples would mean instant death.
Coverage of the Alar scare was "outrageous . . . completely alarmist," says Marla Cone, who writes about the environment for the Los Angeles Times.
But Alar was a made-to-order media story. It had apples, kids and cancer. "A lot of (media) people were suckered in," Cone says.
The media coverage produced a nationwide hysteria.
School boards in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Atlanta and many other cities banned apples and apple products from their cafeterias. Some parents raced after their children's school buses to yank apples from their lunch boxes. Supermarkets came under intense pressure to remove apples form their shelves. Uniroyal, the manufacturer of Alar, pulled the product off the market. Sales of apples plummeted, forcing many farmers to dump their crops or give them away--costing the industry more than $100 million, according to economists' estimates.
Reaction to the Alar scare "set a troubling precedent," the Washington Post editorialized several weeks later. "A complicated scientific issue was allowed to be decided not by officials charged with protecting the public, on the basis of hard evidence, but by a frightened public acting on incomplete and often erroneous press reports."
The EPA had expressed concern about the safety of Alar for many years before Newsweek and "60 Minutes" jumped on the story. But the agency had decided that test results were either flawed, contradictory or insufficiently conclusive to warrant an immediate ban and formal action was delayed, pending hearings in late 1990.
David Gelber, the producer of the "60 Minutes" Alar story and now the executive producer for ABC's "Peter Jennings Reporting," says EPA and scientific criticism of Alar convinced him the story was worth doing at the time.
Dr. John A. Moore, then acting administrator of the EPA, said on "60 Minutes" that Alar "should come off the market" because of what he had earlier described as "an inescapable and direct correlation" between exposure to Alar and "the development of life-threatening tumors."
"The public had a right to know that was their view," Gelber says.
Al Meyerhoff, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Fund, also defends the Alar story.
He says the apple industry launched a "concerted disinformation campaign" in an effort to persuade the media and consumers alike that Alar was not dangerous.
The media have a "tremendous problem," Meyerhoff says, in trying to accurately and responsibly communicate risk. To be credible, they must avoid crying wolf too often. But to protect the public, they must also avoid what he calls "crying sheep"--falling prey to timidity and self-censorship when they're criticized.
There have been conflicting reports on Alar since the initial controversy. In 1992, the EPA said its research showed that "long-term exposure to Alar poses unacceptable risks to public health . . . food use of daminozide posed an unreasonable risk of cancer to the public" (although Uniroyal's withdrawal of Alar from the market had rendered moot the question of a ban on it).
