The morning's e-mail brought news that a respected investigative journalist, Jack Newfield, has passed away. His work on exposing childhood lead poisoning in New York was important. As the author of the e-mail said, "Newfield's complaint became a prediction: as our knowledge of
lead's effects at lower levels of exposure showed that indeed middle class
children were being seriously harmed, lead poisoning garnered unprecedented
political and cultural power, and its victims appeared on the front pages of
major newspapers and magazines." Coincidentally, Governor Granholm of Michigan yesterday signed 5 bills to curb childhood lead poisoning in Michigan. That feat is traceable directly to a series on the lead crisis in the Detroit Free Press a couple of years ago.
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Jack Newfield passed away yesterday. Newfield took up many causes in his long
career as journalist activist, including childhood lead poisoning. In 1969,
the Village Voice published a series of important pieces by Newfield on "The
Silent Epidemic of the Slums." Newfield was shocked at the lack of
awareness--and worse, the lack of action on the part of those who were aware
of the problem (this being in the day when a half-dozen or so NYC kids died
from lead every year--the mere tip of a huge iceberg of crippling plumbism).
In one piece he took on the nation's institutional racism and class biases, as
manifested in the silence of the media: "[I]f lead poisoning affected white,
middle-class children, it would be covered on the front page of the New York
Times....But 30,000 undiagnosed cases of lead poisoning, living in Bed Stuy,
El Barrio, and the South Bronx, is not news."
Of course, Newfield's complaint became a prediction: as our knowledge of
lead's effects at lower levels of exposure showed that indeed middle class
children were being seriously harmed, lead poisoning garnered unprecedented
political and cultural power, and its victims appeared on the front pages of
major newspapers and magazines. Much of the measurable progress in lifting the burden of lead poisoning in the last twenty years derived from this
reconception of environmental lead as a universal threat. Unfortunately, most
of the current resistance to further progress comes from the return to the
notion of lead poisoning as "only" a problem of poverty.
If you use Google's News engine, you can read plenty of the Newfield obits.
Here's one link:
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/editorial/36844.htm
Posted by Dave at December 22, 2004 11:32 AM