It was just another Monday morning. I got up, got my coffee and grabbed my newspaper – the famed Cleveland Plain Dealer – off the front porch. I was skimming through the sections and shaking off the cobwebs of the weekend out of my brain when I came upon the following headline: “Danger in the grass?” As you might imagine, it was yet another condemnation of pesticides – in this case, the ones used on lawns. I’ve seen the same junk in the media a hundred times, but on this occasion, it got personal. Here’s my tale.
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The short version is this: pesticides are bad, they harm children and you should use voodoo potions on your lawn instead of these terrible poisons. The story, by the way, was accompanied by an image of a small child’s feet nestled in nice green grass. The child’s teddy bear also rests in the grass, suggesting that these horrible compounds are being absorbed into the little stuffed animal she sleeps with every night. Nice, huh?
My immediate reaction was to send an e-mail to the reporter asking why she didn’t quote anyone from a chemical company or a traditional lawn care company. I can boil her response down to this direct quote from her e-mail reply:
“In no way would the lawn companies be credible sources of information about the chemicals they use.”
I was, in a word, flabbergasted. The reporter had frankly stated that she was unwilling to even bother to contact experts in our industry to see what they had to say in their defense. She simply didn’t care to hear a viewpoint different than her own.
My exchanges with her consisted of a small-scale, e-mail battle. There were many back-and-forth replies, often copied to her editors and others. But, I soon realized that it was pointless. She was simply against chemical pesticides and nothing was going to change her mind. She wasn’t just mildly inclined against them … she was downright hostile to the entire industry and, by extension, little old me.
I’ve been down this road too many times with reporters. I even had a face-to-face confrontation with the legendary (but a wee bit senile) Paul Harvey years ago when he unilaterally decided that golf course pesticides were killing birds and endangering golfers. Yet, I had never had anyone flat out say that no one in our business was a credible spokesperson for the products we use to control pests. At least they usually pretend and quote an “industry spokesperson” somewhere deep in the article.
I’ve always rejected the broad-stroke idea of the “liberal media.” In my experience, most reporters are reasonable people who want to know the facts. Many reporters seem to understand that they’ve been hornswaggled by environmentalists in the past (e.g., the Alar Scare) and are a bit more receptive to hearing both sides of the story. Yet, I will never forget – and neither should you – that there are still reporters out there who are working every day to put us out of business. It’s scary, but it’s true. They say there’s danger in the grass. I say there’s danger in the news.