Cut to the Chase -- The News is Missing from the News

By Blake Hurst

I haven’t a clue when the submissions for the Pulitzer Prize are due, but I imagine the judges will gather soon. Why? Because The Kansas City Star has just finished publishing a series on the beef industry that can only be seen as the newspaper’s pitch for this year’s prize. It certainly didn’t contain any news, and the only reason a struggling paper would devote so many resources to such a nothingburger of a story has to be vanity. The Star has taken on the beef industry with a passion, but with almost no new information.

To say this series is derivative is to practice understatement on the same level Star journalism practices hyperbole. Michael Pollan should send a bouquet, although I imagine he would settle for attribution. Forty-year-old heart studies, five-year-old documentaries and books published a decade ago, all contributed anonymously to the Star’s mighty effort, but original reporting was sorely lacking. In fact, only two conclusions can be drawn from original reporting: beef should be thoroughly cooked and invasive injuries caused by an F5 tornado are extraordinarily nasty and tragic injuries. 

Although, most everyone reading the articles, if there was anyone who read the whole series, probably knew both things.

What else? Nobody can be trusted. Dieticians are bought by beef producers, and the Federal Drug Administration is a totally owned subsidiary of the drug industry. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s dietary recommendations are for sale, or can at least be rented. The industry can’t be trusted to market a safe product, and the government can’t be trusted to regulate the industry. The only institution in society that can be trusted, one supposes, is the press. Except at Pulitzer time, it seems to me.

We learned that slaughterhouses smell bad and are nasty places to work—a fact Upton Sinclair made clear a century ago. Of course, job security at slaughterhouses is better than at the average newspaper, and who knows what injuries come to journalists from repetitive cutting and pasting. 

The series tells us more about the state of journalism than it does the meat industry. There is only one goal of the average journalist, and it isn’t to sell newspapers or inform readers. No, the only goal of the average reporter is to get a job at The New York Times. The best way to get noticed by the Times is to win one of those awards chosen by, well, people who work at the Times. They recognize journalistic courage, courage that can only be exhibited by attacking local industry with the kind of “investigative” reporting that resulted in this article. The fact the series contained little that was original or news doesn’t matter.

What one might not know, if one read the series, is that the incidence of most food borne illnesses has been in decline, particularly illnesses caused by E. coli. The incidence of listeria, however, is increasing. Listeria is a particularly nasty bacteria, the leading cause of miscarriages and often occurs in foods that are normally eaten uncooked. The bacteria is also associated with cats.  Now, that would be true journalistic courage—a series that takes on sprout-eating cat lovers.

(Blake Hurst, of Westboro, Mo., is the president of Missouri Farm Bureau, the state’s largest farm organization.)