---
title: The Alar campaign:an advocacy report, a TV exclusive and a planned echo
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/alar-apple-campaign-1989/
description: an environmental group's report on pesticide residues in children's food was launched through a CBS "60 Minutes" exclusive, followed by a…
section: Case studies
---

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[Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/)

# The Alar campaign:an advocacy report, a TV exclusive and a planned echo

At a glance

An environmental group's report on pesticide residues in children's food was launched through a CBS "60 Minutes" exclusive, followed by a celebrity-fronted parents' group and wide press coverage…

- **When:** February 26, 1989
- **Actor:** Natural Resources Defense Council…
- **Target:** U.S. parents and consumers…
- **Source:** Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures
- **Techniques:** [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/) [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/) [Flooding the zone](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/flooding-the-zone/)

Full details

- **Actor:** Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), with the public relations firm Fenton Communications; Mothers and Others for Pesticide Limits (chaired by Meryl Streep)
- **Target:** U.S. parents and consumers; school boards, Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency as secondary audiences

On this page

- [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/alar-apple-campaign-1989/#what-happened)
- [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/alar-apple-campaign-1989/#how-it-works)
- [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/alar-apple-campaign-1989/#then-and-now)
- [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/alar-apple-campaign-1989/#positions-on-the-record)
- [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/alar-apple-campaign-1989/#same-method-test)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/alar-apple-campaign-1989/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/alar-apple-campaign-1989/#images)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/alar-apple-campaign-1989/#sources)

On this page

**In one line:** an environmental group's report on pesticide residues in children's food was launched through a CBS "60 Minutes" exclusive, followed by a celebrity-fronted parents' group and wide press coverage, in a rollout that its public relations adviser later described in a memo as designed so that consumers "could not avoid hearing it". This page scores the rollout, not whether Alar was dangerous.

![Diagram: NRDC's report goes to Fenton Communications, which arranges a 60 Minutes exclusive, then a celebrity-led parents' group and follow-up coverage; schools, shoppers, the manufacturer and EPA act, and a later lawsuit by apple growers fails on falsity](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/alar-apple-campaign-1989-diagram.svg)

## What happened

- **Background.** Daminozide, sold as Alar by Uniroyal Chemical, was a growth regulator sprayed on apples to keep fruit on the tree longer and improve its colour and storage life. When heated, as in making juice or sauce, it breaks down into unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH), which caused tumours in laboratory mice.
- **1 February 1989.** EPA's acting administrator, John A. Moore, wrote to the International Apple Institute on the agency's Alar decision. He said: "There is an inescapable and direct correlation between exposure to UDMH and the development of life-threatening tumors in mice." EPA chose a phase-out rather than an immediate suspension; its estimate of lifetime cancer risk from Alar was reported as about 45 in a million.
- **26 February 1989.** CBS "60 Minutes" broadcasts "'A' is for Apple". According to the Ninth Circuit's later opinion, Ed Bradley opened with: "The most potent cancer-causing agent in our food supply is a substance sprayed on apples to keep them on the trees longer and make them look better." The segment focused on the risk to children and on the slow pace of government action.
- **27 February 1989.** NRDC publicly releases its report, *Intolerable Risk: Pesticides in Our Children's Food*, the day after the broadcast. It assessed 23 agricultural chemicals in foods eaten by children under six and put Alar and UDMH at the top of its cancer-risk list. The report estimated that as many as 5,300 children might develop cancer from preschool exposure to UDMH. NRDC describes the report as peer-reviewed.
- **Late February to March 1989.** The story runs across television, newspapers and magazines. Actress Meryl Streep leads a new group, Mothers and Others for Pesticide Limits, formed after she read the NRDC report. Accounts including the American Council on Science and Health's (ACSH) describe her appearing on national television, including *The Phil Donahue Show*.
- **March 1989.** School systems including New York and Los Angeles remove apples or apple products from their food programmes, as reported at the time by *Education Week* and others. Shops pull apple products.
- **16 March 1989.** EPA, the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture issue a joint statement: "The federal government believes that it is safe for Americans to eat apples", and "there is not an imminent hazard posed to children in the consumption of apples at this time, despite claims to the contrary." The same day Streep tells a Senate subcommittee that Alar should be suspended until testing is finished (UPI).
- **May 1989.** EPA issues a preliminary determination to cancel food uses of daminozide, citing evidence that UDMH causes tumours in laboratory animals and that lifetime dietary exposure "may result in an unacceptable risk to public health" (EPA fact sheet).
- **June 1989.** Uniroyal stops selling daminozide for food uses in the United States and agrees to buy back existing stocks.
- **3 October 1989.** The *Wall Street Journal* publishes "How a PR Firm Executed the Alar Scare", including a memo by David Fenton of Fenton Communications. Fenton wrote that the goal was "to create so many repetitions of NRDC's message that average American consumers ... could not avoid hearing it", and that "The idea was for the 'story' to achieve a life of its own, and continue for weeks and months to affect policy and consumer habits." The article reports that Fenton arranged the "60 Minutes" exclusive for NRDC.
- **7 November 1989.** EPA announces it will approve Uniroyal's request to cancel all food-use registrations voluntarily, and will prohibit sale, distribution and use of food-crop products, including existing stocks. In secondary accounts, EPA's reason is given as "long-term exposure to Alar poses unacceptable risks to public health."
- **Losses.** Estimates vary. A Washington State University agricultural economist put Washington growers' losses attributable to the publicity at about $130 million (reported by the *Lewiston Tribune*). Other accounts give national figures of $100 million to $120 million and note that the apple market was already oversupplied before the broadcast.
- **November 1990 to 1995.** Washington apple growers Grady and Lillie Auvil, for a class of growers, sue CBS and two local affiliates for product disparagement. The district court (E.D. Wash., 1993) grants CBS summary judgment. The Ninth Circuit affirms in *Auvil v. CBS "60 Minutes"*, 67 F.3d 816 (1995): the growers "failed to raise a genuine issue of material fact as to the falsity of the broadcast."

## How it works

- [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/): the central message paired cancer with children and an everyday food ("the most potent cancer-causing agent in our food supply"). The harm at issue was a projected lifetime risk from long-term exposure, and EPA and NRDC put different numbers on it. The campaign's remedy was specific: stop using Alar and ban it now rather than on EPA's phase-out timetable. A message that stages a disputed long-term risk as an urgent threat to children, with one remedy on offer, fits the taxonomy's definition of a fear appeal whether or not the underlying estimate was right.
- [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/): Meryl Streep, a well-known actress, spoke as a mother and chaired a parents' group formed after the report. Her standing came from fame and parenthood, not toxicology. Her Senate testimony asked for a ban pending tests. The vouch works by trust in the person, which is the definition's mechanism. It is scored the same way as the industry side's use of a famous voice (see Same-method test).
- [Flooding the zone](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/flooding-the-zone/): Fenton's memo, in his own words, set out a plan for "so many repetitions of NRDC's message" that consumers "could not avoid hearing it", across many outlets in a short time, so that the story would "achieve a life of its own". The timeline shows the effect the definition describes: school districts and shops acted in the three weeks between the broadcast and the federal agencies' joint statement of 16 March. That the saturation crowded out slower checking is this archive's inference from the sequence; the memo documents the intent to saturate.

**Considered and not tagged.** [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/): critics say the report and broadcast overstated the risk, and the NRDC and EPA estimates differed in assumptions (early-life exposure, children's consumption data, how much UDMH comes from daminozide). That is a dispute over method, not a documented case of facts being hidden, and in court the growers could not show that the broadcast was false. [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/): the broadcast named NRDC as its source, so the origin was not hidden, although Fenton's role in arranging the exclusive was reported only later, in the *Wall Street Journal* of October 1989.

## Then and now

![The Real Cost, "Your Skin" (2014)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/real-cost-your-skin-2014.png)

*[The Real Cost — "Your Skin"](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/real-cost-your-skin-2014/), U.S. Food and Drug Administration anti-smoking advertisement, 2014. Public domain.*

The FDA spot and the Alar broadcast share a structure: a documented or estimated long-term harm is staged as an immediate threat to a young person, with one remedy on offer. The differences are real. The FDA ran a paid advertisement under its own name; NRDC's message reached viewers as a news segment. The smoking harm is settled science; the size of the Alar risk was disputed in 1989 and still is by some commentators.

![A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers (1954)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/frank-statement-1954.png)

*[A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/frank-statement-1954/), Tobacco Industry Research Committee, drafted with Hill & Knowlton, 1954. Public domain.*

The Frank Statement is the reverse case from the same profession: a PR firm helped an industry place a message in 448 newspapers at once to reassure the public. Fenton's plan used the same repetition logic to warn the public. Scale, direction and legal outcome differ: a federal court later found the tobacco companies' campaign part of a decades-long effort to maintain doubt, while the Alar growers' suit failed on falsity.

## Positions on the record

- **NRDC's stated position:** the report was peer-reviewed and correct to warn that children were exposed to a carcinogen that EPA had been slow to remove. NRDC cites the 1993 National Academy of Sciences report *Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children*, which found children can differ from adults in dietary exposure and susceptibility, and quotes the committee's chair as saying NRDC "was absolutely on the right track when they excoriated the regulatory agencies for having allowed a toxic material such as Alar to stay on the market for 25 years without proper toxicity testing." EPA's own May and November 1989 actions found an unacceptable risk from long-term dietary exposure.
- **Critics' position:** ACSH has called the episode a "scientifically baseless" scare and ran a full-page advertisement in April 1989 saying so (as reported). Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop said at an ACSH press conference in 1992: "if Alar ever posed a health hazard, I would have said so then and would say so now." Critics also quote the UK Advisory Committee on Pesticides as concluding in 1989 that "Even for children consuming the maximum quantities of apples and apple juice, subjected to the maximum treatment with daminozide, there is no risk." Biochemist Bruce Ames argued that the risk was small beside natural carcinogens in food. Apple growers said the broadcast cost them heavily.
- **The courts:** the growers' product-disparagement claim failed because they could not show the broadcast's statements were provably false. That is a finding about the growers' burden of proof, not a scientific finding that Alar was dangerous.
- **This archive's reading:** documented are the broadcast's wording, the release sequence, the Fenton memo's stated goal, the celebrity-fronted group, the school and retail removals, Uniroyal's withdrawal, EPA's cancellation and the court outcome. **Not shown** here is how large the real cancer risk from Alar residues was; regulators and scientists disagreed in 1989, and this page takes no side. Also not shown is how much of the fall in apple sales came from the campaign rather than from an oversupplied market.

![Cover of the National Cancer Institute technical report NCI-CG-TR-83, Bioassay of daminozide for possible carcinogenicity](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/alar-apple-campaign-1989-nci-bioassay.jpg)

*National Cancer Institute, Carcinogenesis Testing Program, technical report NCI-CG-TR-83 on daminozide: one of the U.S. government animal studies in the record that regulators, NRDC and critics argued over. U.S. government work, public domain.*

## Same-method test

Swap the sides and the score is the same. The corporate cases written alongside this one used the same public relations toolkit: [Torches of Freedom: the 1929 Easter Parade cigarette march](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/torches-of-freedom-1929/) used a staged event and press placement to make women smoking in public news; [The tobacco industry's smoking-and-health doubt campaign, 1953 to 1998](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/tobacco-doubt-campaign/) used third-party voices and coordinated placement to keep doubt alive. An industry that gave one television programme an exclusive, followed it with a celebrity testimonial and planned "so many repetitions" that consumers "could not avoid hearing it" would be tagged fear-appeal, testimonial and flooding-the-zone exactly as here. The apple side's own response supplies a documented counterpart for one technique: Koop's 1992 vouch that Alar was safe, given as a former Surgeon General at an ACSH press conference, is a testimonial under the same definition. The technique ids do not change with the cause.

## How to spot it

- Ask who arranged the story. An "exclusive" that breaks the night before a report's release is a launch, not a discovery.
- Look for the risk number and its comparison. "Cancer-causing" without a per-million figure, or without the regulator's own estimate next to it, is a sign to check for a fear appeal, whatever the truth of the claim.
- When a famous person speaks on a technical risk, check what they add besides trust.
- If the same message hits every outlet in the same week, look for the plan behind it; a campaign memo, a press kit or a shared talking point is often published later.
- Keep the method and the merits apart: a well-run campaign can be right or wrong on the facts, and a failed lawsuit is not a verdict on the science.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from the sourced facts on this page (`make_diagrams.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME |
| *The Real Cost*, "Your Skin" (2014) | FRAME gallery, from Wikimedia Commons | Public domain (U.S. government work) |
| *A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers* (1954) | FRAME gallery, from Wikimedia Commons | Public domain (published 1954 without a copyright notice) |
| NCI technical report NCI-CG-TR-83, daminozide bioassay (cover) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bioassay_of_daminozide_for_possible_carcinogenicity_(IA_bioassayofdamino00nati).pdf), National Cancer Institute | Public domain (U.S. government work) |

### Image gaps

- **Frames from "'A' is for Apple" (CBS, 1989).** Not included: the broadcast is CBS's copyright. It can be described and cited but not hosted.
- **The cover of *Intolerable Risk* and the Fenton memo as printed in the *Wall Street Journal*.** Not included: both are copyrighted (NRDC; Dow Jones). The memo's wording is quoted above for commentary.
- **Photos of Meryl Streep's 1989 Senate testimony or of school cafeterias removing apples.** Not included: no openly licensed photo from these events was found. Later photos of Streep exist on Wikimedia Commons but are not from this period and would not show the method.
- **EPA's 1989 Alar documents and the May 1989 preliminary determination.** These are U.S. government works and so public domain. **This gap can be filled** with a scan of the November 1989 EPA release or the technical support document.

## Sources

- [*Auvil v. CBS "60 Minutes"*, 67 F.3d 816 (9th Cir. 1995), Justia](https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/67/816/584521/)
- [*Auvil v. CBS "60 Minutes"*, 836 F. Supp. 740 (E.D. Wash. 1993), Justia](https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/836/740/1949442/)
- [*Auvil v. CBS "60 Minutes"*, 800 F. Supp. 928 (E.D. Wash. 1992), Justia](https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/800/928/1393578/)
- [EPA, 7 November 1989: Daminozide (Alar) Pesticide Canceled for Food Uses](https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/daminozide-alar-pesticide-canceled-food-uses.html)
- [EPA, Daminozide reregistration fact sheet (EPA-738-F-93-007, 1993)](https://www3.epa.gov/pesticides/chem_search/reg_actions/reregistration/fs_PC-035101_1-Sep-93.pdf)
- [UPI, 16 March 1989: Controversy over apples and Alar](https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/03/16/Controversy-over-apples-and-Alar/4153606027600/)
- [*Education Week*, March 1989: As Bans Widen, U.S. Agencies Say Apples Pose Little Threat to Young](https://www.edweek.org/education/as-bans-widen-u-s-agencies-say-apples-pose-little-threat-to-young/1989/03)
- [NRDC: All About Alar (NRDC's account and defence of the report)](https://www.nrdc.org/stories/all-about-alar)
- [National Research Council, *Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children* (1993)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236275/)
- [ACSH, 1999: An Unhappy Anniversary: The Alar 'Scare' Ten Years Later](https://www.acsh.org/news/1999/02/01/an-unhappy-anniversary-the-alar-scare-ten-years-later)
- [ACSH, 2022: From the Archives: Apples, Alar, NRDC and Meryl Streep](https://www.acsh.org/news/2022/11/07/archives-apples-alar-nrdc-and-meryl-streep-16642)
- [PBS *Trade Secrets* document: "The Alar 'Scare' Was for Real"](https://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/docs/alarscarenegin.html)
- [Beth Rosenberg, "The Story of the Alar Ban: Politics and Unforeseen Consequences", *New Solutions* (1996)](https://doi.org/10.2190/ns6.2.d)
- [University of California Extension Toxicology Network newsletter on the NRDC and EPA estimates (1989)](http://extoxnet.orst.edu/newsletters/n92_89.htm)
- [*Lewiston Tribune*: Alar scare cost Washington $130 million](https://www.lmtribune.com/northwest/alar-scare-cost-washington-130-million-bec8e908)
- [*Lewiston Tribune*: There's another view on the Alar issue (quotes the UK Advisory Committee on Pesticides)](https://www.lmtribune.com/northwest/theres-another-view-on-the-alar-issue-1d8835c3)
- [Hansard, House of Commons, 7 June 1989: Alar](https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1989/jun/07/alar)
- [Fenton Communications (summary of the October 1989 *Wall Street Journal* article and memo)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenton_Communications)
- [Simply Streep archive: Mothers and Others for Pesticide Limits (1989)](https://www.simplystreep.com/projects/1989-mothers-and-others-for-pesticide-limits/)