ABSTRACT
Companies have often lied about the safety and effectiveness of their products. They’ve told workers their factories, mines, and mills were safe when they weren’t. And they’ve hidden the environmental costs to the communities in which they reside. The press too seldom fought through the spin and marketing to alert the public, even attacking corporate critics themselves. One pervasive kind of disinformation appears when journalists convert scientific consensus into controversy because of a perceived need to inject “balance” into a story, even when the equivalence is not only artificial but wildly misleading.
