My father used to counsel me not to believe anything I read in the papers. I always took this as hyperbole, but this week’s City File by Harold Henderson [August 16] makes me wonder. Of his seven points, I have concerns about four. The first and most egregious is his quote from the Peoria Journal Star concerning House Bill 5793, that the bill would “prohibit state inspectors [of factory farms] from taking pictures to document their investigations.” What HB5793 says is “No person shall, without the effective consent of the owner and with the intent to damage the enterprise conducted at the animal facility…enter an animal facility to take pictures by photograph, video camera, or by any other means.” Elsewhere in the act it states that “consent is not deemed to be effective if induced by force or threat.”
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Unless legal experts (something I am not) think that owners of factory farms can claim that legally required inspections constitute “force or threat,” inspectors are not affected by this law. It seems to me to forbid only unauthorized entry to take pictures with the intent of damaging the enterprise. What the act does prohibit is a number of trespassing and property-damage kinds of things that are already illegal. I suspect, without having researched it, that the associated penalties are a lot stiffer than they would otherwise be. All in all, it looks like a shameful kowtowing to a group of industries that have been annoyed by animal-rights activists and environmentalists and have the bucks to buy better protection from the law than most of us get. Junk like this should be exposed, but misstatements of facts are not the way to do it.
But even if it’s not a Libertarian speaking, don’t call it a fact if you haven’t verified it. And smoking data from a doctor in a tobacco company’s employ doesn’t count as verification.
