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DHEC deja vu

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By Becci Robbins

Today The State newspaper wrapped up DHEC Under Fire, an “exclusive” series exposing the failure of the state agency charged with protecting South Carolina’s environment. It was oddly familiar. In 1999, the alternative newspaper POINT ran a similar package. I remember it well; I was managing editor and wrote most of the stories. You can read them here.

This was the introduction we ran:

This issue is dedicated to South Carolina’s environment. Seems that while we weren’t looking, this state became the country’s garbage dump. We hope this issue of POINT gives you something to think about and, just maybe, something to fight for.

By way of full disclosure, readers should know that the publisher and editor of POINT have for the past year been working with grassroots groups from across the state on an initiative to restructure DHEC, the state’s environmental agency.

Some will argue that our connection to the project renders us incapable of covering this story without bias. Perhaps.

But we believe our experience lends us a valuable perspective that we could not have as a member of the “straight” media. For many months, we have been meeting with lawyers, legislators, community leaders and environmental activists, some of whom go way back with DHEC. We have heard them talk with the freedom they would not if they were “on record.” While we have not used any quotes from those meetings or discussed what went on in them, the discussions deepened our understanding of how DHEC works — and how it doesn’t.

Finally, we invite anyone at DHEC, including those who declined to be interviewed, to respond to our coverage in this issue. We will gladly publish any written responses in the next POINT.

While it’s good to see The State finally give DHEC the sort of scrutiny it deserves, it’s too bad it took them so long to do it. Frankly, it’s no surprise. The State, ironically, has a long history of doing what it now accuses DHEC of doing: coddling industry and putting the interests of big business above the public interest.

The paper has been unable, or unwilling, to connect the dots that draw the clear picture of systemic problems that allowed DHEC to operate so irresponsibly and with such devastating consequences. There is no excuse. We sent the newspaper the same press releases we sent the rest of the media informing them about our grassroots campaign and legislation designed to reform the environmental agency. They ignored us. No telling how much pollution went unchecked as a result.

The State’s reporters said they interviewed 200 people to write their recent DHEC series. Not one of them was from the SC Progressive Network, the organization that initiated the move to reform the agency and called the first meeting of legislators and activists to explore the issue. That’s shoddy reporting, at best. At worst, it reveals a pettiness unbecoming of the state’s main newspaper.

POINT cover, Winter 1999

Mad science

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Deconstructing Bunk Reporting in Five Easy Steps
By Beth Skwarecki
Bitch Magazine

British scientists have uncovered the truth behind one of modern culture’s greatest mysteries: why little girls play with pink toys. Is it because toy companies flood whole store aisles with the color? Or because well-meaning relatives shower girl babies with pink blankets and clothing? Nope. According to the men in lab coats, it’s purely biological.

Apparently, women are hardwired to like pink because our cavewoman foremothers spent their days gathering red leaves and berries amongst the trees while their husbands were out hunting. Later, women needed to notice red-faced babies and blushing boyfriends. And why do men like blue? Because it’s the color of the sky.

This evolutionary just-so story takes up three pages of a 2007 issue of Current Biology. To back up the assertion that pink is a universal girly preference worth examining, the authors refer to a 1985 study finding that little girls use more pink and red crayons in their drawings than little boys do.

Dig further, however, and the story completely falls apart. British women do prefer pink, but the author’s claim of a “robust, cross-cultural sex difference” turns out to be neither. The scientists compared British natives with Chinese immigrants to Britain, and glossed over the differences. For example: The girliest color in the British results, a purplish-pink, was in fact the Chinese men’s favorite.

Nowhere do scientific findings get more mangled than when they’re about the differences between men and women. According to the science pages, women aren’t just biologically hardwired to prefer pink to blue. We’re also predisposed to backstab one another in the workplace, cry in the boardroom, and have both lower iqs and less of a sense of humor than men.

Some misleading stories come from bad science, where the study authors’ conclusions aren’t supported by their own data. Others are well-conducted studies whose conclusions mutate upon contact with the mainstream media. Newspapers and websites are prone to playing fast and loose with their reports on studies, often neglecting to reveal salient facts about a study’s sample group or methodology.

The fact is that science articles aren’t designed to be read by non-scientists. College and grad students in the sciences are trained in how to do it: They review papers and discuss them in journal clubs; learn how to question methodologies (Is that sample really big enough? Was that the right test to use?); and learn how to be critical of authors’ interpretations (Do the results really mean what they say they mean?). Students also know to look at context for each study, looking up previous papers on the subject, reviewing the authors’ previous work, and searching out any evidence of bias that might color a study’s findings.

Journalists looking for a quick story, however, do little such research. And in an age where news sites, wire services, and blogs pick up stories with lightning-fast speed, bad research gets around. When London’s Sunday Times reported on a 2007 study claiming that men get dumber in the presence of blond women, the paper got the name of the journal wrong, citing the Journal of Experimental Psychology rather than the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Nearly every subsequent news article repeated the error because they were content to simply reword the Times’ version of the story rather than finding and discussing the study itself.

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Congressional Democrats Embrace Equal Pay

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Congressional Democrats are moving rapidly on legislation aimed at overturning a controversial Supreme Court ruling they say eviscerated pay discrimination provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Within weeks of the May 29 court bombshell, Congress held hearings on proposals to restore equal pay provisions in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to the status before the ruling, written by the court’s newest justice, Samuel Alito. On July 31, the House of Representatives voted 225-199 to pass a bill, and a Senate companion bill is expected to get hearings this fall.

The business community has lined up against the measure, however, and President George W. Bush pledged a veto if it passes Congress. That could make the issue part of the 2008 presidential campaign.

So far, votes are mostly along party lines: only two House Republicans voted for it, Representatives Chris Shays of Connecticut and Don Young of Alaska. All but six House Democrats voted for it. Two powerhouse Republicans are lead sponsors in the Senate, however: Senators Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Olympia Snowe of Maine, leading Marcia Greenberger of the National Women’s Law Center to predict a more bipartisan prospect there.

“The leadership in both the House and Senate are committed to move this very quickly because the decision has caused an unacceptable gaping hole in civil rights laws,” she said.

House sponsors named their proposal the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007 to honor the Alabama woman who sued Goodyear Tire Company after belatedly discovering she had been paid far less than virtually all her male factory co-workers. A jury found Goodyear’s bias to be so pervasive it awarded $3 million to Ledbetter, who had gotten a top performance award from the company in 1996. Because of a 1991 law capping damage awards, that $3 million was reduced to $300,000.

Then the Supreme Court, now under Bush appointee Chief Justice John Roberts, ruled against her, agreeing with a Bush administration argument that she had filed her lawsuit too late; she would have had to file charges within 180 days of the first discriminatory paycheck she got from Goodyear. The Ledbetter legislation would restore the traditional standard, enunciated by most federal courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, that pay discrimination claims had to be filed within 180 days of any discriminatory paycheck – including the last one.

When Ledbetter testified before the House Committee on Education and Labor, she said it would have been impossible for her to meet the Alito-Roberts criteria. She had been hired in 1979 as a line supervisor and said she worked hard for 19 years, did every job the men did, but had no clue she got much less money for the same work.

In her final years at Goodyear, “I got the feeling I was being paid less than the men but there was no way to know. Pay levels were kept strictly confidential.” An anonymous note told her the brutal truth. “I found out I was making $3,700 a month and all the men were earning $4,300 to $5,200 a month.”

The business community was thrilled at the ruling, one of the most favorable they have gotten so far from the Roberts court, but their opposition to the Ledbetter bill is proving to be a tricky sell. The labor policy chief for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Michael Eastman, told the Washington Post that it is a tough issue, since “everyone is opposed to unequal pay for equal work.” So far, business – and the bulk of congressional Republicans – are making a more technical argument: that the Democratic bills would lift the statute of limitations and subject businesses to frivolous claims filed decades after a problem.

The American Bar Association debunked that notion. ABA President Karen J. Mathis said in a June 1 op-ed that the ruling would make Title VII “almost useless in combating pay discrimination in the workforce” because “it is difficult, if not impossible, for an employee to know within six months that pay bias has cheated him or her of a fair paycheck.”

In an Aug. 14 policy position, the ABA urged Congress to overturn the Supreme Court ruling “to ensure that in claims involving discrimination in pay, the statute of limitations runs from each paycheck reflecting an improper disparity.” It said the Supreme Court’s reading of the law “will engender confusion and unfairness. It will deny remedies to many victims of discrimination, encourage subterfuge by employers, precipitate unwarranted claims and generally frustrate the purposes underlying Title VII.”

What happens next depends partly on whether Lilly Ledbetter becomes a household name – and whether grass roots groups connect with the issue. A DakotaWomen site posted a blog recently that criticized Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) for saying if the bill passed, corporations wouldn’t hire women out of fear they would be sued 40 years from now.

Ledbetter’s House committee testimony was posted on YouTube. People for the American Way posted another of her statements on a separate YouTube site, gambling that the blatant pay disparities she suffered will resonate with many people.

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Ledbetter says her own experience confirms that connection. “Since the court decision, everywhere I go, women come up to me in the grocery stores, in church, just out in the park and they tell me they understand how I feel. They’ve been there. The same thing happened to them. Because of their sex, they did not get paid equally as the males.”

Peggy Simpson, The Women’s Media Center
12 Sept. 2007

Fear and Loathing in Slick Pages

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In the July issue of Jolie, a magazine insert The State newspaper markets to women, Editor Sarah Gilbert Fox writes in her letter to readers, “This month everyone will celebrate the 4th of July, gather at the beach, have BBQ’s, knock back margaritas, and, well, worry about their weight. Which makes me wonder how much independence do we really have? I’m beginning to think we don’t much like freedom, because when we have it we just end up subjugating ourselves to something else, such as the perfect-body image. So what if we’re a size 12, which used to be an average size. If we can’t fit into a size 4, we’re doomed.”

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“It’s all rather shocking,” she writes, “this need to obtain a skinnier self at the expense of a happier self. And it’s a shame to know that these women’s children are constantly exposed to this talk. These daughters hardly have a chance to live a life of self-acceptance.”

She vows to “make a difference” by getting women to stop judging their bodies so harshly or to shut up about it if they can’t.

“I’m a former 82-pound anorexic,” she confides, “and it’s taken me 35 years to get to where I am right now: less boney for sure, but happier, more relaxed, and with enough energy to realize how much I’m really worthy, large or small. Don’t get me wrong – I’m still neurotic and out of touch with most things, but at least body image is not one of them.”

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