'Trade Secrets'

Rendering a Guilty Verdict on Corporate America

Neil Genzlinger / New York Times 26mar01

Bill Moyers is no doubt hoping to generate righteous indignation with "Trade Secrets," his exposé of the chemical industry on PBS tonight, but he probably won't. Maybe, though, he'll inadvertently prompt some introspection among viewers, which would be far more valuable.

Mr. Moyers and his producer, Sherry Jones, have gotten hold of a small mountain of documents from the industry's past — confidential memorandums, secret medical reports, minutes of meetings — and use them to show that big chemical companies knew the hazards of vinyl chloride, benzene and other nasty stuff much earlier than they let on.

The program tells horror stories of workers who were exposed to fatal risks without being told. It makes a strong case that companies have conspired for decades to hide information and to thwart government regulation with multimillion-dollar lobbying.

Appalling stuff. And entirely predictable.

Ever since Big Tobacco took us down the same disillusioning road (and probably even before that), it has seemed a given that corporate America knows far more about the dangers of its tires, miracle drugs, synthetic foods, etc. than the public is told. Add recent real-life stories like "A Civil Action" and "Erin Brockovich" and that old numbness takes over; the natural reaction to "Trade Secrets" is a "So what else is new?" shrug.

Which ought to provide viewers with food for thought. Have we perhaps grown up in a perverse sort of way and now accept that spectacular progress like that of the last half- century cannot be achieved without tradeoffs? Nothing good, be it democracy or more durable house paint, comes without a price.

There is food for thought, too, in the places Mr. Moyers doesn't go. His program takes the tried-and-true exposé path: the industry is the easy- target bad guy, and everyone else is the victim. How shameless is he? He wraps up the report by invoking that guaranteed tear-jerker, "the children," even though practically none of the preceding 90 minutes has involved children. ("The laboratory mice in this vast chemical experiment are the children," he says. "They have no idea what is happening to them, and neither do we.")

What he doesn't do — indeed, what no one ever seems to do — is explore the role played by the insatiable have-it-all consumer. At one point, one of Mr. Moyers's experts, speaking of a particularly arrogant industry memo, says, "It tells me that the industry never expected that it would be held accountable to the public." And the industry was right, because the public has never held itself accountable.

All those outraged by Mr. Moyers's findings raise your hands. (Rustle of hands being raised.) All those willing to go back to cloth diapers and spotted apples? (Thunderous rustle of hands being lowered rapidly. Among the first hands down: that of Mr. Moyers, who during the show acknowledges dousing his own yard with malathion.)

All this is not to say that "Trade Secrets" fails. For one thing, it is important to shine a light on questionable industry practices no matter how familiar-sounding. (Mr. Moyers purposely left industry representatives out of the main program, something the industry has denounced. The industry gets its chance in a half-hour panel discussion that is to follow the broadcast.)

And perhaps most important, the program serves as sort of testimonial to the workers who made all our modern comforts possible. Its portraits of people who were sickened or killed doing dangerous grunt work in the nation's chemical plants are haunting.

If the definition of a hero is someone who sacrifices for the benefit of others, then the workers who scrubbed out chemical vats and inhaled dangerous fumes while the rest of us got new and improved products were heroes as much as any soldier in wartime.