by Michael Fumento

he forced resignation of foreign correspondent Jack Kelley from USA Today for fabricating information, along with its January 29 appointment of an outside panel to review every article he has written since 1982, is a step in the right direction for a newspaper with a reputation for being long on circulation and short on credibility. Certainly it beats the paper’s reaction to my own investigation, five years ago, of a scandal concerning a reporter who was vital to the development of the myth of Gulf War Syndrome (GWS). 

That reporter was John Hanchette. He worked for the Gannett News Service; Gannett owns USA Today, and everything he wrote for the news service ended up in the newspaper’s pages. Jack Kelley was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, but Hanchette actually won the award, in 1980. Both alone and with his colleague Norm Brewer, Hanchette wrote more than a hundred articles on GWS—more than any other reporter.

When I first wrote about Hanchette’s GWS involvement, I had no idea that he had also been a central figure in fomenting one of the nation’s most damaging environmental mass hysterias, that of the Love Canal. As I documented in my 1993 book, Science Under Siege, nobody at Love Canal complained of any exceptional illnesses until an environmentalist reporter for the local paper, the Niagara Falls Gazette, began a series of articles telling people that they were sitting on a horrific toxic waste site. Lo and behold, from then on every illness in the town was blamed on the ghastly ingredients brewing beneath the surface of the town. The story even made national news when one family’s dog, Pugsley, began “inexplicably” vomiting.

The editor of the newspaper at that time was—you guessed it—John Hanchette.

As the Buffalo News later related in a puff piece on Hanchette, “While there, he noticed a number of letters from readers complaining that their dogs and cats were getting sick. ‘I sent a reporter out to investigate,’ Hanchette said. ‘I drove out there and I saw all these signs in the neighborhood, “Deaf Children at Play.” I just had this feeling something wasn’t right.’” As the Buffalo paper correctly stated, “That was the genesis of the story of Niagara Falls’ Love Canal, one of this country’s most infamous hazardous waste sites.”

Once Hanchette’s reporter Michael Brown got the ball rolling, the national media descended on the town like the biblical plague of locusts and relayed to the outside world every sneeze, cough, pimple, ache, and pain experienced by any Michael Fumento is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. His latest book is BioEvolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World (Encounter Books).

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