On Friday, everyone’s favorite new state propaganda tool Breitbart.com featured as its top story a typically fact-free attack from James Delingpole, everyone’s favorite writer of screeds so deliberately outrageous even courts roll their eyes at him.
In this latest nails-on-a-chalkboard example of what happens when pompous self-righteousness is left unchecked by any editor with a sense of moral decency or desire for accuracy, Delingpole uses a NY Times op-ed as a news hook to call the EPA’s original Administrator William Ruckelshaus a mass murderer. Yes, you read that right.
Delingpole’s accusation dusts off a classic myth from the world of industry propaganda, deployed originally to tarnish the legacy of Rachel Carson, but also extending to the EPA. It’s fairly simple- Ruckelshaus, by removing DDT from use as a pesticide in the US in 1972, also magically prevented its use in Africa to control malaria-spreading mosquitoes.
Except the 1972 EPA order Delingpole uses as a smoking gun specifically exempts the use of DDT as a public health tool and has no impact on its use overseas.
One would think that the many flaws in the story would mean people would stop telling it. Unfortunately not. In fact, the endurance of the DDT myth made it a case a textbook example of corporate propaganda and revisionist history, featured prominently in Merchants of Doubt. For an interesting, well-written and robust debunking, see David Gorski, who addressed the issue last year when a bunch of anti-vaxxers and industry flunkies suggested we use DDT to fight Zika.
And this probably goes without saying, but if Delingpole actually cared about those afflicted by malaria, he would probably care that climate change is putting more people at risk for malaria and other vector-borne diseases.
But let’s not kid ourselves. As a bastion of bratty British bourgeois white privilege, Delingpole’s “concern” for people in Africa comes across as sincere as he is well-informed.
Which is to say: not at all.
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