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Furthermore, total cancer deaths from 2002 to 2003 had dropped by only 0.07 percent, a decrease of less than one death in every thousand. The numbers just don’t merit the hype in the ACS announcement, which was diligently reported by media outlets aping one another without investigation or discernment, and which was publicly legitimized by the president. Watching this, I couldn’t help but envy the cancer industry’s control of the media and the bully pulpit of the presidency. What I could do with that kind of PR!

While most of the details of this cancer news item may be technically correct, its presentation is misleading. To say that a decrease in cancer deaths is “big” when it is less than 1 percent is simply wrong. To spend so much time talking about the reasons for this tiny decrease gives it, and its purported causes, far more significance than they deserve.

I know something about cancer. In addition to running my experimental cancer research program for about forty years, I was a member of several expert panels advising on policy concerning cancer causes, and I served on research grant review panels of the ACS, the NCI, the American Institute for Cancer Research, and the World Cancer Research Fund. In fact, I was responsible for organizing a couple of these panels. So when I say that the media is misrepresenting the truth, I speak from experience. Both my research background and my intimate involvement in the real story allow me a perspective that the average media consumer is denied.

The only message of this new ACS report likely to be remembered by the public is this: thanks to all our donations, the search for the cure for cancer is finally starting to pay off. Perhaps you think my concerns about this misleading report on cancer death rates are overstated. I disagree. In this age of information overload, we rely on sound bites like, “We are finally winning the War on Cancer,” to tell us about the world and guide our actions. If winning this war means getting a minuscule change in cancer death rates after thirty-six years of spending tens of billions of dollars on
cancer research (yes, billions, and largely by the U.S. government’s NIH; its 2012 budget for cancer research is $5.9 billion
¹²
), it’s going to be a very long war. This misguided overconfidence is our single biggest obstacle to truly overcoming cancer. Truly winning the war on cancer requires individual responsibility for our food choices; as long as we wait for the next pharmaceutical breakthrough or genetic engineering miracle to save us, we won’t use the considerable power we already possess to end this scourge. In the meantime, the pharmaceutical/medical industry profits from our continued chase of cancer’s cure, and the junk food and factory-farm conglomerates profit by suppressing knowledge about cancer’s cause.

Had I been a reporter tasked with sharing the ACS press release with the public, here are just a few questions I would have asked: How big was the drop in cancer rates? Who chose the word
big?
Who funded the report? Which cancer rates declined, and which, if any, remained constant or even increased? (Not to mention: Why are overall cancer death rates in the United States so high compared to China and many other countries to begin with?)

Why didn’t anyone on
NewsHour
ask these questions? Was it bias? Ignorance? I can’t get inside the heads of the journalists who presented the story, so I can only guess that it was a combination of those sins, along with a relentless news cycle and ever-shrinking budgets that discourage slow and thoughtful consideration in favor of just running with a done-for-them press release.

Shortly after publication of
The China Study,
I was interviewed on the phone by Ann Underwood, an informed and well-established senior editor of
Newsweek.
She told me at the top of the interview that her “senior editor” was
very
interested in the book. Our conversation lasted for almost two hours and she seemed personally interested in the implications of our message. Obviously, I was somewhat hopeful the interview I’d given would see print, although Ms. Underwood told (warned?) me that she first had to pass it by her editorial board for acceptance. From her especially articulate questions and her personal enthusiasm, I got the impression that
I might expect a particularly good article. However, we heard nothing but silence over the next couple of months. I then received in the mail a copy of a
Newsweek
issue titled “Special Edition of the Future of Medicine”—an entire issue on health.
This is it,
I thought.

I opened the magazine to see what they had in store and counted more than twenty articles on various medical topics pointing to the future. Except for a rather superficial item on the relationship between diet and Type 2 diabetes, the articles ignored nutrition completely. They were all about new drugs and surgeries and genetics. Were I still in the experimental laboratory rather than wandering among the public, I could have easily become fascinated with the opportunities presented in this issue. Fundamental research into the workings of the cell is thrilling and mesmerizing. But this special
Newsweek
issue illustrated something far more important for the public. By omitting nutrition, the single most comprehensive contributor to health and well-being,
Newsweek
did its readers, at best, a massive disservice.

Disappointed, I browsed some of the boilerplate material in the front of the magazine to find this very thoughtful letter from
Newsweek
Chairman and Editor In Chief, Richard M. Smith:

At
Newsweek,
we have a long and distinguished tradition of reporting on issues about science, medicine and health. Now, as biomedical research enters a new period of discovery we are proud to offer this special edition (a bonus issue for our subscribers) on the advances that are rapidly changing the face of medicine in the 21st century.

We are pleased that Johnson & Johnson chose to be the exclusive advertiser for this special issue. As I trust
Newsweek
readers expect, the advertiser had no influence over the editorial content of this magazine.

Johnson & Johnson, one of the biggest medical device companies in the world, was the sole advertiser in the “Future of Medicine” issue of
Newsweek,
and I’m supposed to believe that
Newsweek’s
dependence on Johnson & Johnson’s advertising dollars had absolutely no influence on its full-color ode to reductionist, for-profit, nutrition-ignoring health coverage? While I’m sure that a Johnson & Johnson senior executive wasn’t sitting at
Newsweek’s
editorial meeting giving thumbs up and down to each article, the financially struggling news magazine could ill afford to
displease such a powerful benefactor. (Yes, struggling:
Newsweek’s
revenues dropped 38 percent from 2007 to 2009, and in 2010 it was sold to audio pioneer Sidney Harman for $1, provided he assumed its $47 million debt.
¹³
)

Shortly after the
Newsweek
inquiry, I got a call from Susan Dentzer, who was the health correspondent for the
PBS NewsHour.
The conversation lasted about an hour and was a good exchange. Ms. Dentzer certainly asked good questions and I thought she seemed quite interested, especially when she said she wanted to explore a possible interview for me with Jim Lehrer. She made no promise, but I nonetheless took some encouragement because I had been interviewed on that program before.

My hope eventually evaporated; an interview never came to pass. Why? I don’t know for sure. But I did notice the increasing number of corporate sponsors now underwriting PBS who would not especially care for my views on nutrition. Someone on the
NewsHour
staff must have realized how unpopular my views would be with those big corporate sponsors. Why risk a funding backlash, when there are so many other stories out there that could be safely told?

In recent years, big corporations have gotten smarter about covering their tracks when funding supposedly impartial shows like
NewsHour.
One of the biggest current sponsors of the show is the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, whose President and CEO, Alberto Ibargüen, serves on the board of PepsiCo.
¹⁴
Knight Foundation trustee Anna Spangler Nelson has been since 1988 a general partner of the Wakefield Group,
¹⁵
a North Carolina-based investment company that has a stake in many of the state’s medical and biotech companies.
¹⁶
E. Roe Stamps IV, a Knight Foundation trustee since 2006, is cofounder and managing partner of the Summit Group, an investment company whose portfolio includes specialized molecular diagnostics laboratory ApoCell, Inc., which analyzes the effectiveness of oncology compounds for large pharmaceutical and biotech companies; specialized anatomic pathology laboratory company Aurora Diagnostics, LLC, whose website touts its “immediate access to cutting-edge laboratory procedures,”
¹⁷
including gene rearrangement; and several other medical technology and healthcare companies. Trustee Earl W. Powell endowed the Powell Gene Therapy Center at the University of Miami.
¹⁸

My point here is not to criticize the Knight Foundation or its trustees; any of several other
NewsHour
underwriters, under scrutiny, would have
produced similar results. As far as I’m concerned, the foundation does a lot of good work, and in fact generally supports “the little guy” against corporate interests. Furthermore, it makes sense for a charitable organization to fill its trusteeships with successful and wealthy people who can provide policy direction and aid in fundraising. But I do want to point out the inherent conflicts of interest that go undisclosed, unreported, and unaccounted for when a supposedly impartial news organization relies on a funding source whose trustees and executives are embedded in the very system that needs to be questioned and exposed.

I may be wrong to suspect such bias for a news program like
NewsHour
that is supported by public money, but a previous occasion with PBS about twenty years earlier turned me into a bit of cynic when it came to PBS’s “journalistic independence.” Back in 1992, a couple of years after the
New York Times, USA Today
, and the
Saturday Evening Post
had written lead articles on our project in China, PBS proposed the interesting idea to do a story comparing the diet and health habits of three rural communities: one in Italy, one in the United States, and one of our villages in rural China. At least, this is what I was told by a film group in Colorado who had been contracted by PBS (in Chicago) to put together footage. They visited Cornell, China, and the University of Oxford in England for the filming, and did a joint interview in China with me and Dr. Junshi Chen, my friend and Beijing counterpart.

Our conversation on camera in Beijing went well, I thought, especially when we talked about the health benefits of the low fat, mostly plant-based diet in rural China when compared with the typical high-fat, mostly animal-based American diet that the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee of the USDA (the group that produces the well-known Food Pyramid) generally favored. I offered then—and would do so with even more vigor now—that I was neither a fan of the typical U.S. diet nor of the Committee’s politically sensitive government recommendations.

All went well, and the Colorado filmmakers kindly alerted us about two weeks prior to the upcoming TV show. They told us that we would like it, especially because the well-known news anchor Judy Woodruff would be providing the voiceover. Our friends and colleagues gathered around the tube at the designated hour, only to see nothing that had been promised. There was no comparison of the diets of the three rural communities, and the more significant discussions on policy had been purged.
Dr. Chen and I were included in the credits at the end of the show, and that was about it. I called my contact in Colorado the next morning to ask what had happened. He said that when the final product was shown to PBS staff, they did not like my criticism of the dietary guidelines and the process by which the USDA constructs them. So those criticisms were simply omitted from the documentary, along with the supporting evidence Dr. Chen and I provided. What remained was a misleading, one-sided narrative that reassured Americans that our diet was fine and our government was protecting our health.

Is it possible that PBS, a celebrated media company known for its impartiality, is not so impartial after all? At the time the documentary aired in 1992, Archer Daniels Midlands (ADM), a company that, as of 2011, generates $70 billion in revenue from its worldwide operations, including sales of ingredients for livestock feed, was prominently featured as a major supporter of the PBS
NewsHour.
I could only wonder whether ADM’s support was a consideration when the PBS senior management intercepted my comments in the documentary. Perhaps I’m wrong; I invite you to decide.
¹⁹
In any event, this early experience with PBS left a scar in my mind, which I could not help but recall when Susan Dentzer later interviewed me about
The China Study.

I file both of these PBS experiences in a file labeled “Misrepresentation by Omission.” When PBS edited out my comments on the U.S. dietary guidelines, it diminished its reporting. And, funnily enough, my comments at that time really were quite mild, compared to my present views!

As a postscript to this narrative, I recently heard from a prominent friend who had taken the T. Colin Campbell Foundation’s online course, who told me about a recent conversation he’d had with a contact at PBS in which he learned that my interview on
The China Study
had in fact been forwarded to the
NewsHour
’s staff with encouragement. I nonetheless was never invited as a guest on Lehrer’s show.

Nothing I’ve written here about the media is particularly dramatic. You couldn’t make a gripping movie about
Newsweek
or PBS ignoring nutrition as part of its health coverage; I doubt Matt Damon is interested in
telling my story on the big screen. Nobody lied, cheated, or conspired. As far as I know, there were no shady back room deals involving suitcases full of hush money. As far as I know, none of the journalists who slanted their stories were even aware of what they were doing, or what pressures they were responding to. These are decent, honest people just trying to fill airtime, entertain and inform an audience, avoid libelous statements, and keep their jobs by not offending those who ultimately underwrite their paychecks. That’s the application of subtle power at its most effective and insidious: no fingerprints, no bruises, no blood, no foul. Just the seemingly innocent reporting of a scientific story as if it were the entire, obvious truth. But the cost of the missing part of the story, as we’ve seen, is nothing less than untold human suffering.