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| October 1996 | by Jym Dyer |
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| October 1996 | by Jym Dyer |
Once upon a time there was a popular hobby that took the nation by storm: citizens band radio. CB was widely hailed as the only remaining bastion of truly free speech, though in practice it was actually an exercise in enduring inane chatter so as to find out how to avoid speed traps.
These days we have an all-new only remaining bastion of truly free speech: talk radio. This bastion is regarded by some as a major improvement over CB radio, thanks to wise and worldly hosts who keep the inane chatter out. As Rush Limbaugh, surely the wisest and worldliest of them all, once explained, "If we are going to start rewarding no skills and stupid people. I'm serious. Let, let, let the unskilled jobs, let them, let, let, let, the, the, the kinds of jobs that, that, that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do. Let stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work." (An unskilled Mexican talk show host, we can only conclude, wouldn't use the right number of "lets" on the air.)
Alas, there just isn't enough Limbaugh to go around, which is why all-talk radio stations like San Francisco's KSFO have to make do with entire stables of not-quite-even-Limbaugh-quality hosts. And if you were tuned in this summer, you might have noticed some inane chatter about avoiding smog traps.
The talk shows' cause célèbre du jour is a new round of vehicle emission controls in California known as Smog Check II. Hosts from talk shows on KSFO (and, to a lesser extent, KGO) regaled their listeners with lurid tales about the cruel fate that awaits their beloved cars, trucks, sport utility vehicles, and yes, even their chainsaws and lawnmowers.
Like for example: Apparently 60% of the vehicles on the road are going to fail the new smog tests, and 75% of them will be taken off the road over the next five years. The law will ban all vehicles more then ten years old. Did I say ten years old? Make that four years old. (It's hard to tell, since both figures can be found on KSFO's "fact" sheets.)
Also, vehicles that fail an initial screening will have to be taken to a special testing center, which has an incentive to make vehicles fail, because they can then sell pollution credits to big business.
According to KSFO's "fact sheet," by 1998, the government will be able to set its collective and presumably jackbooted foot on private property, without a warrant, to seize all noncompliant vehicles and crush them into little cubes. On the other hand, KSFO talk radio host Melanie Morgan claims that this has already been going on, and 851 Californians have had their cars impounded and scrapped.
The cumulative effect of these factoids inspired one listener to take a greater interest in representative democracy, in the form of calling up his local legislator. Five times. Alas, leaving a death threat each time. The talk radio frenzy culminated on August 21, when 2000 protesters marched on -- or, rather, drove to -- Sacramento. I can recall protests ten times this size getting perhaps a paragraph or two of coverage, but this particular event garnered top story status in newspapers and on the tube.
There's a bit of a problem with these factoids, though: Nobody's sure where KSFO got all these facts and figures, nor has KSFO accounted for them. Morgan can't name a single one of the 851 alleged people with crushed cars, for example, "because of confidentiality."
State legislators disagreed with the claim that Smog Check II would allow the state to seize and scrap vehicles without a warrant. There was a possibility that certain noncompliant vehicles could be seized -- but not scrapped -- through the impoundment processes that already exist. In response to all the brouhaha, though, legislators have made motions to delete the part of the law that makes this possible.
The official statistic is that no more than about 30% of the cars on the road are expected to fail the initial test; and only half of that number, 10%-15%, are expected to fail the second test and be classified as "Gross Polluters." Another official statistic is worth keeping in mind: 18% of the cars on the road failed the old smog tests.
Of course, there's no reason to believe statistics just because they're official, but California's Bureau of Automotive Repair did conduct a dry run of the new tests in Sacramento, and the results were right on the money. And the statistics were originally based on the results of similar tests in other states, which reliably yielded the same figures.
These tests have also indicated that the Gross Polluters are not necessarily old cars; often they are newer models whose emission control systems have been damaged or deliberately altered.
By mid August, talk radio listeners started to write letters to their local papers demanding that they investigate and print the alarming facts they'd been hearing about KSFO and KGO. Some of these letters were rather ill-mannered. The newspapers began rebutting the radio factoids with the official statistics.
Some did this pretty poorly, as in the August 20 San Francisco Chronicle story that read, "Officials predicted that no more than 30 percent of the cars would fail the initial test and expected no more than 10 to 15 percent of vehicles tested to be dubbed gross polluters. But many of the special test centers, set up to handle anywhere from about 10 to 40 cars a day, have been overwhelmed." Meaning what, exactly?
Curiously, all the while, none of the papers reported the talk show hosts' complaints about pollution credits being sold to big businesses, nor did they bother to rebut it. Apparently a populist revolt against the government is newsworthy, but a populist revolt against big business practices is to be ignored.
I must confess, I have no stomach for broadcast news. Let's get back to the print media: the kind you read on the sides of grocery bags.
No, I'm not talking about those plastic bags that have things like "Pick me -- I'm recyclable, at least in theory!" printed on the side; I'm referring to the brown paper bags at the Cheaper! grocery stores, which have editorials printed all over them.
I've always found these "bagatorials" pretty amusing. There's nothing quite like taking home the groceries while reading about a world much like ours, except that the air quality is improving year after year, thanks to cars, which by the way you should drive more often, because that's the world's best measure of freedom; in which California never has droughts; and where copies of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged can be had for a modest price at the local grocery store.
Cheaper!'s owners have just put out a book, Bagatorials, collecting the greatest hits from their grocery bags. Apparently it's selling pretty well. The Chron's economics editor thought the book worthy of plugging on the front page of that paper's August 22 Business section, describing the essays as "high-brow screeds." I guess this means the Chron is positioning itself as middlebrow?
"If you love the forest," proclaims one of the bags, "Cut Timber Freely!" It should come as no surprise that these bags contain no discernable recycled content. My advice to Cheaper! shoppers is to pick up a nice reusable hemp or canvas bag at the Ecology Center Bookstore; perhaps one with "Save The Trees" or other similarly lowbrow sentiment printed on it.
Incidentally, the Chron managed to put the exclamation point on Cheaper! throughout. Perhaps someday they'll figure out how to do the same with Earth First!.
As long as we're dealing with highbrow media here, we might as well mention the New York Times, everyone's favorite local newspaper. Since it has a national audience, the Times does a brisk business in "advertorials." Companies like Mobil Oil and R. J. Reynolds can afford to put their advertorials in dozens of publications, but many organizations in search of a national audience can scrape enough money together to take out an ad in the Times.
Sometimes these ads take issue with the reporting in the Times itself. The Environmental Information Center bought an ad to do just that, on May 29. The ad copy that appeared read, "Times reporter Gina Kolata, in two articles on March 19 regarding the book Our Stolen Future, reports the widespread worries about endocrine disruption as the concerns of 'some enviromentalists' and 'several biologists.'"
The media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting notes that the Times actually edited this ad. The EIC's original copy read that reporter Kolata "dismisses the widespread worries." "It seems that accurate criticism wasn't fit to print," FAIR remarked, "even in a paid ad."
It's ironic that the campaign against Smog Check II was led by San Francisco radio stations, because the air in the Bay Area is at least clean enough to exempt its residents from the toughest provisions of that law.
That could change, though. This summer and last summer have been the smoggiest on record since 1987. Also, smog advisories were issued at the beginning of August and duly reported. For some reason, though, none of the papers thought to mention these facts during the Smog Check II fracas.
Last but not least, we have here an Op-Ed piece by John Shanahan entitled "Stop the Confiscation Game," which the San Jose Mercury News printed on August 14. It tells the tale of a man in Redding whose sold property which was "later deemed a 'wetland,' making it practically worthless commercially." Shanahan portrays this as but one example of a "common practice," and followed his portrayal with a pitch for the Omnibus Property Rights Act -- the latest Congressional attempt to override environmental laws.
If the Redding man's story is being told accurately, it's certainly a sad situation, but it doesn't exemplify common practice in the slightest. The last major study of the impact of the ESA was conducted by the World Wildlife Fund in 1994. It found 96,830 government consultations on human activities may threaten endangered species. Of these, 352 activities were found to be a threat. 298 of these activities were adapted to protect the species; and only 54 activities were halted.
The Merc didn't consider it worth mentioning, but Shanahan works for the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank with a penchant for apocryphal tales about the evils of environmental regulations.
In less than a year since this article was published, Bay Area air quality has degraded to the point where its residents are no longer exempt from the toughest provisions of the law.
KSFO's Melanie Morgan (or perhaps somebody at westradio@aol.com claiming to be her) took exception to my doubts about the 851 alleged car confiscations:
So you assume that poverty[-]stricken people of color have the media savvy to contact their local talk radio station, newspaper, or other media outlet with their sad tales?
Most folks are just trying to get by -- and in point of fact, Jym, we've had any number of corroraborative [sic] stories about just this sort of thing. IF you were listening, you would have heard about dozens of people whom we had on the air with these stories of confiscation.
My point remains unaddressed: out of KSFO's alleged 851 such victims, poverty-stricken or otherwise, couldn't even a single one of them provide a shred of actual evidence?
Mark Dowie wrote an excellent article for The Nation about Gina Kolata, What's Wrong With the New York Times's Science Reporting?. It describes, in great detail, what the Times deemed unfit to even print the merest suggestion of.
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