Search Google for “egg safety” and the first link that comes up is for the Egg Safety Center.
Seems like a logical place to look for information about the largest egg recall in the nation’s history. That’s what The Washington Post and a handful of other media outlets apparently thought when they provided a link to the website for their readers and viewers.
What they didn’t tell their audiences was that the site was the work of United Egg Producers, a cooperative of many of the nation’s egg producers. That’s because they apparently didn’t know.
Several readers contacted Andrew Alexander, the ombudsman for the Post, to ask why they were being directed to an egg industry site to get tips on how to safely purchase and prepare eggs during the recall. More than a half-billion eggs have been recalled nationally because of a salmonella outbreak connected to two farms in Iowa. The outbreak has caused almost 1,500 reported illnesses, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Why would the Washington Post provide an unpaid promotional announcement to the egg industry in the middle of the largest ever recall of eggs?” one reader wrote to Alexander. “Shouldn’t we rely on the food safety experts in the government rather than the self-serving information from the food industry?”
Alexander, in a blog post, agreed. He wrote that government sites such as one by the U.S. Food and Drug Adminstration are better choices for wary consumers. “They’re run by agencies operating on behalf of the public,” Alexander wrote.
The reporter on one of the stories told Alexander the link was a “last-minute add” to a story written on a tight deadline. Another Post reporter told Alexander he picked up the link out of the earlier story.
“I don’t think deadline is an excuse,” Alexander told me in an interview. “Whenever you link to any site, you need to take the time to find out what it really is.”
The Post wasn’t alone in its mistake. A quick search of the Web found articles by the Associated Press, The Sun News of Myrtle Beach, S.C., and WTAP-TV in Parkersburg, W. Va., that also linked to eggsafety.org without noting that it was an industry site. Cathleen Moxley, a reporter for WTAP, told me the story was provided by NBC as part of a “video on demand” service.
At first glance, it’s hard to tell that eggsafety.org is connected to the egg industry, as the words “United Egg Producers” appear only at the bottom right of the home page. The words “Egg Safety Center” are prominent at the top of the page. At one point during the recall, the site highlighted what appeared to be an alert from the FDA. The site welcomes readers with this:
Sounds reasonable, right?
Alexander said much of the site’s information seemed legitimate and even helpful. But he noted that the site put the industry’s spin on the latest news. The “alert,” for example, read, “FDA Announces No Additional Egg Recalls: Less Than One Percent Of All U.S. Eggs Affected.”
“That’s true,” Alexander told me, “but another headline might be, ‘Largest Egg Safety Recall In American History.’ “
The website for the “Egg Safety Center” looks like it may have been created in response to the recent recall, but the public relations firm that created it says the site has been around since the early 1990s. There is not a lot of content on the site, but a lot of it is related to the recall. Interestingly, the center’s site is not listed in a collection of links found on the website for United Egg Producers. The center’s Twitter account had only 88 followers as of Thursday. The first tweet went out a few weeks ago.
I never heard directly from anyone with United Egg Producers, but did receive an e-mail from Jewanna Porter with GolinHarris, the PR firm that says it was responsible for the website’s design. Porter said the website was redesigned early this year.
“The Egg Safety Center is an industry-funded, informational resource for consumers on properly handling, cooking and storing egg products in an effort to reduce the incidence of food-borne illness,” Porter wrote, echoing the site’s welcome message. “And no, it was not created for the egg recall (but to be a resource for both consumers and the food industry).”
But she said the egg recall has raised the site’s profile. Before the recall, she said, the website received about 1,000 page views a month. During a two-week peak of the recall, the website received about 1.6 million page views.
Dean Miller, director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University, says news consumers should pay attention to what he calls “the APCs” to determine the validity of an online source of news. That stands for Authority, Point of View and Currency (e.g., whether the site has recent information and the links are still live).
Miller noted that the Egg Safety Center site includes the logo for United Egg Producers. “On the one hand, that gives that source of information a fair amount of authority,” Miller told me. “Certainly they should know about eggs. But they have a point of view. You’ve got to take this information with a grain of salt. Maybe there’s an independent source of information on this.”
Miller was surprised media outlets directed their audiences to the site without noting its industry ties.
“When you’re curating the link, you could say here’s the industry’s egg safety information, and you could pair it with other egg safety information sources,” he said. “I don’t want to pass judgment on the scientific validity of what’s there. It may be quite good. But, as a news consumer, you would stop and say the egg industry, at a minimum, might phrase things differently than an independent scientist would. The egg industry has a dog in the fight, as we would say.”
Corby Kummer, who writes about food as a senior editor for The Atlantic, says the food industry routinely hides behind heartwarming images of family farms or an official-sounding research or safety center. “Welcome to the food industry,” Kummer told me. “There is absolutely nothing new about this.”
The Post’s Alexander said he didn’t consider the Post’s link to eggsafety.org “a major journalistic transgression.”
“It’s just a reminder that things like this can erode accountability,” he told me. “By providing any link, you are saying to readers, ‘Here is a credible link for information.’ If readers see self-interest in the site, your credibility suffers just a little bit.”
