We thought this article from the
Atlantic may be of interest and shed some light on the story that ran in the
Times.
Aaron Lavallee
Communications Coordinator
Office of Communications
United States Department of Agriculture
(202) 720-6959 (office)
(202) 579-2340 (cell)
aaron.lavallee@xxxxxxxxxxx
How Journalists
Got the Cheese Lobbying Story Wrong
The Atlantic
By James McWilliams
On November 7, The New York Times ran a front-page
story by Michael Moss exposing what appears to be yet another sinister
example of bureaucratic hypocrisy in the tainted world of food regulation. The
USDA, according to Moss, has assumed the contradictory role of warning
Americans against a high-fat diet while, at the same time, promoting the
consumption of heart-clogging cheese products. Worse, as Moss implies, American
taxpayers are the ones funding this corporate-friendly doublespeak.
Michael Moss is an ace reporter. His work on the meat industry for the Times
has been unmatched. I'm a fan. In the case of this cheese story, though,
Moss obscured an important point, one that dampens the outrage you might have felt
if you'd received Michael Pollan's tweet that "our tax dollars [are] at
work promoting Domino's Pizza."
The point of this post is not to impugn Moss's actual reporting, but rather to
clarify a misunderstanding that, due to a single false implication, has taken
hold of the journalistic establishment. If you'd like to stop reading now and
move on to a more savory topic, here's the takeaway: Your tax dollars are not
at work promoting Domino's pizza. (Could somebody tweet that for me?)
Your
tax dollars are not at work promoting Domino's pizza. (Could somebody tweet
that for me?)
At the center of Moss's story is a
marketing outfit known as Dairy Management. Dairy Management, which started in
1994, serves one god: dairy sales. Funding for Dairy Management's domestic
marketing campaign does not come from the USDA, but rather from private
producers who tax themselves to pay for the organization's marketing
strategies. The funds that result are called "checkoff" funds.
The USDA's job with respect to Dairy Management—a job defined by the
Dairy Production and Stabilization Act of 1983—is to make sure all
producers pay the tax, that nobody freeloads, and that marketing campaigns are
legal. Occasionally, the USDA will choose board members for Dairy Management, but
the vast majority of the board is comprised of dairymen. Moss wrote nothing to
directly counteract any of these facts.
The problem with the piece was more subtle. Bill Bishop, author of The
Big Sort, was one of the first to grasp it. Moss, argues
Bishop, produced "a misleading story" by encouraging
"readers (and quite a few journalists) to believe that the U. S.
Department of Agriculture spent your money to promote unhealthy concoctions
containing bushel baskets of cheese."
At the crux of Bishop's thorough vivisection of the Times article is the
claim by Moss that Dairy Management "received several million dollars a
year from the Agriculture Department." Readers could reasonably conclude
from this remark that their tax dollars were at work promoting Dairy
Management-Domino's agreements that led to stuffing a typical pizza with four
times more cheese.
That's
disgusting. But it's not the point. The point is that although Moss is correct
that Dairy Management receives millions from the USDA, his mistake (and the
source of the false implication) came in not noting until several paragraphs
later that those millions (about five) do not fund domestic programs like the
Domino's crust-stuffing gambit. In actuality, those USDA funds are designated
"to promote dairy interests overseas"—in other words, opening
foreign markets to U.S. dairy.
So in the end Moss's story was not about the USDA using taxpayer dollars to
fund a cheesy agreement between Dairy Management and Domino's Pizza. Instead it
was about the dairy industry paying for marketing services—services that
happen to be regulated by the USDA—designed to sell more cheese.
And of course that's not much of a story.
This article
available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/food/archive/2010/11/how-journalists-got-the-cheese-lobbying-story-wrong/66663/
Copyright
© 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
Aaron Lavallee
Communications Coordinator
Office of Communications
United States Department of Agriculture
(202) 720-6959 (office)
(202) 579-2340 (cell)
aaron.lavallee@xxxxxxxxxxx
