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23Oct94 60 Minutes broadcast, The Ugly Face of Freedom:
The irony is that Hewitt - the creator of the TV show famous for
unveiling corruption and hypocrisy among the powerful - has been
accused of worse deeds than any of the sexual charges leveled at
Clinton.
In 1991, reporter Mark Hertsgaard, author of "On Bended Knee: The
Press and the Reagan Presidency," wrote an article for Rolling Stone
magazine in which he documented Hewitt's own serious problems with
impulse control. Women who worked in the "60 Minutes" offices
described to Hertsgaard a sexually charged environment that had more
in common with a drunken frat party than a professional newsroom.
Correspondent Mike Wallace was singled out for bottom slapping, lewd
comments and unsnapping co-workers' bras.
While today no one would hesitate to call such behavior sexual
harassment, Wallace's cheerful willingness to do it in public - even
in front of a stranger - made him seem like a good (albeit
unpleasant) old boy. But the charges against Hewitt make Clinton's
alleged behavior look like clumsy courtship. One woman described to
Hertsgaard how Hewitt slammed her against a wall, pinned her there
and forced his tongue down her throat. Hewitt vehemently denied the
story and all other allegations to Hertsgaard, while Wallace
admitted his own antics and promised they would never happen again.
Rolling Stone eventually published Hertsgaard's article in a
drastically reduced form, although Hertsgaard says Hewitt pulled all
the strings he could to get the story killed. In an interview from
his home in Takoma Park, Md., Hertsgaard spoke to Salon about the
allegations of sexual harassment at "60 Minutes" that never made it
into print - and about how the "men's club" within the media exposes
other sexually reckless men, but still protects its own.
Your story has some pretty explosive accusations against Don
Hewitt. How did you come to write the piece?
Sexual harassment was not the point of the investigation. I
literally witnessed sexual harassment on my first day of interviews
at "60 Minutes" and women began to tell me about it, so it gradually
found its way into the story. But that wasn't the point, it just was
so pervasive at the time that you couldn't miss it.
What did you witness when you were there?
The first day I was in the corridor talking with a female staffer
and I saw out of the corner of my eye Mr. Wallace coming down the
hall. He didn't know me yet because I hadn't interviewed him, so he
had no idea that it was a reporter standing there. I'm sure it
would have changed his mind. Anyway, just before he reached her she
pushed both her hands behind her bottom, like a little kid trying to
ward off a mama's spanking, and got up on her toes and leaned away.
But that didn't stop him. As he went by, he swatted her on the butt
with a rolled up magazine or newspaper or something like that.
That's no big deal, one could say, but I must say it did raise my
eyebrows. I said to her, "God, does that happen all the time?" and
she said, "Are you kidding? That is nothing." And that led to
people telling me how he'd also unsnap your bra strap or snap it for
you. So he had a reputation for that.
Then I also heard about this far-more-worrisome incident with Hewitt
and that one did get into the piece, although in a much censored
form, where he lunges at a woman in a deserted place, pins her
against the wall and sticks his tongue in her mouth. There were
other incidents women told me about Hewitt, and, of course, (former)
Washington Post journalist Sally Quinn was already on the record in
her book "We're Going to Make You a Star" accusing Hewitt of making
an aggressive pass at her and sabotaging her work when she refused
him.
Was the sexual harassment at "60 Minutes" pervasive?
It sure seemed that way. There's a woman quoted in my story saying
that Mike would constantly have his hands on your thigh, or
whatnot. One producer said that basically Mike Wallace and Don
Hewitt felt this was their right. And that's how a lot of men in
television felt for many years. Women were basically hired for
their looks. You had to be competent too, but you damn well better
look good.
I understand that you had a difficult time getting the story
published in Rolling Stone.
The entire piece almost never ran because Don Hewitt tried to kill
it and (Rolling Stone editor and publisher) Jann Wenner almost went
along with him. They did emasculate the piece by taking out a lot
of the damaging material. You'll see in there that there is one
basic episode involving Don. There were four that I had reported.
[...]
So what did you think when you saw Hewitt taking a stand for
Kathleen Willey?
It was odd to me, seeing Don quoted in the New York Times on Friday
and Saturday as he was hyping Sunday's broadcast. He's talking
about what happened and I just thought of that old Dylan song:
"You've got a lot of nerve."
I hoped somebody would call him on it. In today's Times, Patricia
Ireland, head of NOW, is quoted as saying if these charges by Ms.
Willey are true, it has crossed a very important line from sexual
harassment to sexual assault. And if that's the case, we have to be
very serious about it. Well, the situation where Hewitt stuck his
tongue down that women's throat - that's assault. That is assault.
She certainly felt like she was assaulted. She freed herself by
kicking him in the balls - which they also cut out. She runs away
and then the next day, there was a fancy gala event where you have
to come in evening dress and she's there and Hewitt, this son of a
gun - he's like a randy old goat - he just could not take no for an
answer. She was wearing a backless gown and suddenly she feels
someone running his fingers up and down her bare back. She turns
around, obviously jumpy from what had happened the day before, and
sees the object of her horror - Hewitt - saying, "Don't be scared, I
just think you're a very attractive girl." They cut that out of the
article too.
There's a lot of huffing and puffing within the media about
Clinton's alleged behavior, with a lot of journalists complaining
about the public's so-called apathy on the subject. But in the case
of men like Hewitt, it seems pretty hypocritical.
It's absolutely unmistakable - and Hewitt is an extremely good
example - how most of the discourse about this issue involves people
who have no more moral standing than this ball-point pen in my
hand. And that goes not just for Hewitt, but for many of these
clowns both in the media here in Washington and in the Congress.
Anybody who has spent any time around Capitol Hill knows that a
large number of congressmen, both in the House and in the Senate,
fool around with either their young staffers or the young female
staffers of their colleagues. To any reporter who had their eyes
open, this is not news.
Carol Lloyd, A Feel For a Good Story, Mothers Who Think, 17Mar98.
With respect to Carol Lloyd's statement above, I wonder if I could have your answers
to just four questions:
(1) Is 60 Minutes infected with a slackness of integrity? What Carol Lloyd appears to be
describing in the upper echelons of the 60 Minutes administration - I am thinking
particularly of executive producer Don Hewitt and co-editor Mike Wallace - is a
deep-rooted slackness of integrity: the 60 Minutes environment has "more in common
with a drunken frat party than a professional newsroom," the top 60 Minutes staff are
"people who have no more moral standing than this ball-point pen in my hand," and
executive producer Don Hewitt comports himself "like a randy old goat." Might it be
the case, then, that the cause of your failing to satisfy minimal journalistic
standards in your 23Oct94 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom, and of your
failing also in the years since that broadcast to retract any of its many errors, is
that you yourself became infected by the same slackness of integrity that had already
gripped other of the 60 Minutes leadership?
(2) Does female hiring demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice program quality? If the
top 60 Minutes staff require their female employees to be physically attractive and
sexually accessible, then might the resulting inability of 60 Minutes to retain women
of high professional quality have resulted in a degradation in the average competence
of female employees? One may speak of demanding competence together with beauty, but
what woman of high competence would have hesitated to find alternative employment
upon discovering the harassment and assault and career strangulation that threatened
to be her lot if she remained at 60 Minutes? And so, in turn, might this readiness
to lose the brightest women not be symptomatic of a readiness of the 60 Minutes
administration to place extraneous goals - in this case, personal sexual
gratification - above program quality? And might this same policy of demoting
program quality to less than top priority have ultimately resulted in a severe
degradation of the quality of some 60 Minutes broadcasts, as for example your story
The Ugly Face of Freedom?
(3) Does male hiring demonstrate any similar willingness to sacrifice program quality?
One cannot help contemplating that if 60 Minutes is willing to promote goals other
than program quality in its hiring of female employees, that it might be willing to
promote goals other than program quality in its hiring of male employees as well.
Might it be the case, for example, that male employees are sometimes hired not for
competence, but for adherence to a 60 Minutes ideology? Or might it be the case that
men of high professional quality left 60 Minutes, or refused to join 60 Minutes, upon
witnessing the ideological claptrap that they might be asked to read over the air in
violation of journalistic ethics and in violation of rules of evidence? This too
could help explain the low quality of The Ugly Face of Freedom.
(4) Do some 60 Minutes employees feel that malfeasance is their right? Referring to the
harassment and assaulting of female employees, reporter Mark Hertsgaard is quoted as
saying that "One producer said that basically Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt felt this
was their right." This observation leads me to wonder whether there is not on the
part of certain 60 Minutes staff some similar attitude to the effect that
broadcasting their prejudices against Ukraine as facts is their right, and that
enjoying freedom from accountability concerning what they have broadcast about
Ukraine is also their right?
Lubomyr Prytulak
cc: Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney, Lesley Stahl,
Mike Wallace.
HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE SAFER 965 hits since 21Apr99
Morley Safer Letter 7 21Apr99 Does drinking wine promote longevity?
At bottom, then, I see little difference between your French Paradox story of 5Nov95 and
your Ugly Face of Freedom story of 23Oct94 - in each case, you ventured beyond your
depth, giving superficial judgments on topics that you were unqualified to speak on,
discussing questions that your education had given you no grounding in, and causing
damage because your conclusions proved to be false.
April 21, 1999
Morley Safer
60 Minutes, CBS Television
51 W 52nd Street
New York, NY
USA 10019
Morley Safer:
I find your photograph. Recently, I was searching the internet looking for a photograph
of you that I could use on the Ukrainian Archive (UKAR), and I did manage to find an
attractive one, and I did put it on UKAR, as you can see at:
http://www.ukar.org/safer.shtml
I attach to it a caption. Underneath this photograph I selected from the many
ill-considered things that you said in your 23Oct94 60 Minutes broadcast, The Ugly Face
of Freedom, your statement "Western Ukraine also has a long, dark history of blaming its
poverty, its troubles, on others." A moment's reflection upon this statement must
convince any objective observer that it is unlikely to be the case that some historian
that you consulted had recommended to you the conclusion that Western Ukrainians were
more predisposed than other people to blaming their troubles on others. Rather, a
moment's reflection must convince any objective observer that it is likely that this
statement came off the top of your head without the least evidence to support it, and
that you then had the temerity to pass it along to tens of millions of viewers as if it
were a fact. In making this statement, and in making the scores of other erroneous or
unsupported statements that you also made on that broadcast, you were inflicting harm
upon Ukraine, you were lowering the credibility of 60 Minutes, and you were undermining
your standing as a journalist of competence and integrity.
What you are most famous for. The reason that I am writing to you today, however,
concerns The Ugly Face of Freedom only indirectly. What concerns me today is a
surprising discovery that I made while searching for your name on the Internet. The
discovery is that your name seems to be most closely connected to the conclusion that
drinking three to five glasses of wine per day increases longevity, which conclusion you
proposed on a 60 Minutes story broadcast on 5Nov95, apparently under the title The
French Paradox. It seems that you have become famous for this story, and that it may
constitute the pinnacle of your career.
For example, a representative Internet article that is found upon an InfoSeek search for
"Morley Safer, 60 Minutes" is written by Kim Marcus and appears on the Home Wine
Spectator web site. The article's headline announces that 60 Minutes Examines Stronger
Evidence Linking Wine and Good Health, with the comparative "stronger" signifying that
the evidence presented in the 5Nov95 broadcast was better than the evidence presented in
a similar 60 Minutes broadcast four years earlier. This Home Wine Spectator article
viewed your broadcast as demonstrating the existence of a causal connection between
(what some might judge a high volume of) wine consumption and longevity, underlined your
own high credibility and the high authority of your sources, pointed out the vast
audience to which your conclusions had been beamed, and suggested that wine consumption
shot up as a result of at least the first French Paradox broadcast:
The study also found that the benefits of wine drinking extended to
people who drank from three to five glasses of wine per day. "What
surprised us most was that wine intake signified much lower mortality
rates," Safer said to the television show's audience.
Overall, the segment should prove a big boost to the argument that wine
drinking in moderation can be a boon to one's health. The segment was
seen by more than 20 million people. "It isn't just information," said
John De Luca, president of California's Wine Institute, "it's the
credibility that comes with Morley Safer interviewing the scientists."
After the first French Paradox episode aired in November 1991 the
consumption of red wine shot up in the United States, and it has yet to
dip.
The Kim Marcus article underlined your failure to question the conclusion that wine
consumption increases life expectancy:
Throughout the episode, Safer didn't challenge the fact that wine is
linked to longer life; rather, he was interested in what it was about
wine that made it unique. "The central question is what is it about
wine, especially red wine, that promotes coronary health," he said.
Safer came to the conclusion that it is not only alcohol but other
unnamed compounds in wine that contributed to higher levels of
beneficial high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol.
I had already seen that French Paradox broadcast. As a matter of fact, I had watched your
French Paradox story when it was first broadcast on 5Nov95, and even while watching it I
had immediately recognized that your conclusion attributing longer life to wine drinking
was unjustified, and that you were causing harm in passing this conclusion along to a
large audience almost all of whom would accept it as true. At bottom, then, I see
little difference between your French Paradox story of 5Nov95 and your Ugly Face of
Freedom story of 23Oct94 - in each case, you ventured beyond your depth, giving
superficial judgments on topics that you were unqualified to speak on, discussing
questions that your education had given you no grounding in, and causing damage because
your conclusions proved to be false.
In the case of the Ugly Face of Freedom, the number of your errors was large, and the
amount of data that needed to be examined to demonstrate your errors was large as well,
as can be seen by the length of my rebuttal The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes. In the case of
the French Paradox, however, you make only one fundamental error which is to fail to
grasp the difference between experimental and correlational data - and my demonstration
of your error can compactly be contained within the present letter.
The reason that I am able to assert with some confidence that your conclusion that wine
drinking increases longevity is unjustified is as follows. I have a Ph.D. in
experimental psychology from Stanford, I taught in the Department of Psychology at the
University of Western Ontario for eleven years, and my teaching and my interests fell
largely into the areas of statistics, research methodology, and data interpretation.
Everyone with expertise in scientific method will agree with me that your conclusion in
The French Paradox was unwarranted. It is not necessary to read the original research
papers on which you rely to arrive at this same judgment - even the brief review of the
research data in your broadcast, even the briefer review of your broadcast in the Kim
Marcus quotations above - is enough for someone who has studied scientific method to see
that you were wrong. Below is my explanation.
The French Paradox Research
Cannot Have Been Experimental
There are two ways in which data relating wine consumption to longevity could have been
gathered - either in an experiment, or in a correlational study. If the data had been
gathered in an experiment, then it would have been done something like this. A number
of subjects (by which I mean human experimental subjects) would have been randomly
assigned to groups, let us say 11 different groups. The benefit of random assignment is
that it guarantees that the subjects in each group are initially equivalent in every
conceivable respect - equivalent in male-female ratio, in age, in health, in income, in
diet, in smoking, in drug use, and so on. That is the magic of random assignment, and
we cannot pause to discuss it - you will have to take my word for it.
To groups that enjoy pre-treatment equality, the experimenter administers his treatment.
After constituting his random groups, the experimenter would require the subjects in
each group to drink different volumes of wine each day over many years - let us say over
the course of 30 years. Subjects assigned to the zero-glass group would be required to
drink no wine. Subjects assigned to the 1-glass group would be required to drink one
glass of wine each day. Subjects assigned to the 2-glass group would be required to
drink two glasses of wine each day. And so on up to, say, a 10-glass group, which given
that we started with a zero-glass group gives us the 11 groups that I started out
positing that we would need. As the experiment progressed, the number dying in each
group as well as the cause of death, and the health of those still alive, would be
monitored periodically.
There are many ways in which this simplest of all experiments could be refined or
elaborated, but we need not pause to discuss such complications here what I have
outlined above constitutes a simple experiment which in many circumstances would be all
that is required to determine the effect of wine consumption on longevity.
Such an experiment has never been conducted
And so you can see from my outline of what an experiment would be like that such an
experiment could never have been conducted. We know this without doing a review of the
literature, without having read a single paper on wine consumption and health.
Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment is impracticable. We know it
because, in the first place, it would be impossible to get experimental subjects to
comply with the particular wine-drinking regimen to which the experimenter had assigned
them. For example, many of the subjects who found themselves in the zero-glass
condition would refuse to pass the next 30 years without drinking a drop of wine. There
is no conceivable inducement within the power of the experimenter to offer that would
tempt these experimental subjects to become teetotallers for what could be the rest of
their lives. The same at the other end of the scale - most people requested to drink
large volumes of wine each day would refuse, and the experimenter would find that he had
no resources available to him by means of which he could win compliance.
And even if the experimenter were able to offer such vast sums of money to his subjects
that every last one of them agreed to comply with the required drinking regimen - and no
experimenter has such resources - then two things would happen: (1) the subjects would
cheat, as by many in the zero-glass group sneaking drinks whenever they could, and many
in the many-glass groups drinking less than was required of them; and (2) subjects who
found their drinking regimens uncomfortable would quit the experiment. Subjects
quitting the experiment constitutes a fatal blow to experimental validity because it
transforms groups that started out randomly constituted (and thus equivalent in every
conceivable respect) into groups that are naturally constituted (and which must be
assumed to be probably different in many conceivable respects) - a conclusion that I
will not pause to explain in detail.
Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment is unethical. And we know
that no such experiment has ever been conducted because it would be unethical to conduct
it, and would inevitably lead to the experimenter being sued. That is, it is unethical
in scientific research to transform people's lives in possibly harmful ways. Most
specifically, it is unethical to transform people's lives by inducing them to drink
substantial amounts of alcohol every day for several decades. The potential harm is
readily evident.
For example, drinking 10 glasses of wine per day, or even several glasses, will
predispose a person to accidents. A single experimental subject who consumed several
glasses of wine and then was incapacitated in an automobile accident would be all that
it would take to bring such research to a halt forever. The accident victim might
readily argue that the experiment requiring him to drink wine was responsible for his
accident, and that the experimenter - and the university at which he worked, and the
granting agency that funded his research - were liable for millions of dollars. In
anticipation of no more than the possibility of such a law suit, no granting agency
would fund such research, and no university or research institution would allow it to be
conducted under its roof.
Consuming substantial amounts of alcohol can not only cause accidents, but it can also
ruin health, destroy careers, distort personalities, break up marriages - for which
reason no experiment will ever require subjects to consume substantial amounts of
alcohol over extended periods of time. The possibility of harm, and thus of law suits,
can even be conceived at the low end of the alcohol-consumption continuum. That is, a
subject prohibited from drinking any alcohol might argue that this for him unnatural and
unaccustomed regimen changed his personality, undermined his career, and ruined his
marriage, and with this claim in hand, could readily find a lawyer willing to help him
sue for damages.
And if such an experiment had ever been conducted, it would
be invalid
Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment would fail to meet the
double-blind requirement. And although we are certain that an experiment manipulating
alcohol consumption over an extended period has never been conducted, even if it were
conducted, it would nevertheless contain inescapable flaws which would stand in the way
of permitting cause-effect conclusions. For example, you may be aware that the best
experiments are ones that are "double-blind." A "blind" experiment is one in which the
subjects do not know what experimental condition they are in - they might not know, for
example, whether the pill they are swallowing contains a curative drug, or only a
placebo. In our alcohol experiment, they would not know whether the liquid they were
drinking was wine, or only some wine-colored and wine-flavored water that had been
sealed in wine bottles. Already, we see the impossibility of our wine experiment being
even so much as blind. Just about every subject in our wine experiment would
immediately realize what it was that he was drinking. Tinted water is clearly
distinguishable by its appearance and taste and effect from wine. A blind wine
experiment, then, is an utter impossibility. Most subjects would be able to quickly
infer approximately what experimental condition they had been placed into.
A "double-blind" experiment would be one in which neither the subject nor the
experimenter knew what experimental condition any particular subject was in. For
example, the experimenter hands the subject a capsule, but does not himself know until
the experiment is over whether that capsule contains a curative drug or only a placebo.
In our alcohol experiment, a double-blind experiment would involve the experimenter
monitoring the life and health of each subject, but only after the experiment was over
opening up the sealed envelope to find out how much alcohol that subject had been
consuming over the past 30 years. Utterly impossible as well.
The reason that the double-blind requirement is essential is that without it,
confounding factors appear that might be responsible for any observed longevity
effects. For example, subjects aware that they are in a large-alcohol-consumption group
would also tend to realize that such alcohol consumption might harm them, and so they
might attempt to compensate by taking vitamin pills, not smoking, upgrading their diets,
exercising, and so on. Or, they might start eating fats prior to drinking alcohol, in
order to coat their stomachs and slow the absorption of the alcohol. They might do a
large number of things. What is important is that the knowledge of one's experimental
treatment can lead to one or more changes in behavior, and that it is these unintended
changes, and not the wine consumption itself, that could affect longevity, either in one
direction or the other.
Or, here is a particularly plausible confounding that might appear. Imagine that the
experiment attempts to control wine drinking, and no more than that, and that subjects
do faithfully follow the wine regimen that is imposed on them. Nevertheless, the less
wine that they were allowed to drink, the more beer and hard alcohol they would probably
end up drinking, but which would make the initially equal groups unequal on beer and
hard-alcohol consumption. And so then it would be impossible to tell if differences in
longevity should be attributed to differences in wine consumption, or to differences in
beer consumption, or to differences in hard-alcohol consumption.
But while we may choose to pause and speculate as to what confounding variables may
appear, scientific method does not obligate us to do so. We know that confounding
variables are possible in non-double-blind experiments, and the number that we are able
to imagine is limited only by the time that we allocate to trying. If I cared to spend
a few hours thinking about it, I could write several pages of possibilities. If I chose
to spend a few months thinking about it, I could write a book of possibilities. I am
able to imagine confounding variables either improving health or impairing it at the low
end of the alcohol-consumption continuum, and as well either improving or impairing
health at the high end of the alcohol-consumption continuum. Scientific method does not
require us to know for certain what and how many confounding variables may appear to
destroy the validity of an experiment which is not double-blind; rather, scientific
method assures us that it is so likely that one or more confounding variables will make
their appearance in a non-double-blind experiment, that such an experiment must be
considered to be fatally defective, and that no cause-effect conclusion can ever be
drawn from it with confidence.
Thus, no valid experiment exists. In short, we can be sure that no experiment has ever
been conducted to ascertain the effect of long-term alcohol consumption on longevity,
and that if such an experiment had ever been conducted, the impossibility of its being
double-blind, or even blind, would render it inconclusive.
The French Paradox Research
Must Have Been Correlational
But if the data featured in your 60 Minutes broadcast was not experimental, then what
was it? It must, by default, have been correlational. That is, rather than subjects
being assigned randomly to groups and being required to drink a given volume of alcohol
each day, it must have been merely observed what volume of alcohol they chose to drink
each day.
Alcohol consumption would be measured by self-report. Well, it is not quite true that
the experimenter would observe what volume of alcohol his subjects drank daily. It
would be impractical to follow subjects around and actually see how much alcohol they
consumed in restaurants, in bars, in their homes. Much more likely is that every once
in a long while, the subjects would be mailed a questionnaire asking them to report how
much alcohol they had been drinking lately. The inability to measure alcohol
consumption directly is already a weakness - subjects might not remember accurately how
much they had been drinking, or they might experience some pressure to distort how much
they had been drinking either upward or downward. However, this is not at all the big
weakness that I want to bring out, so let us get to that without further delay.
We have already seen that random assignment guarantees pre-treatment equality on all
dimensions. I first recapitulate that in the case of the random assignment of subjects
to groups in an experiment, we were guaranteed that the subjects in each group would be
initially equivalent on every conceivable dimension. The larger the random groups, the
closer to being precisely equal on every conceivable dimension would they become. Thus,
in a properly designed and executed double-blind experiment, any differences that
subsequently arose between groups would have to be attributed to the different
treatments that the experiment had administered to them - for example, if some groups
lived longer than others, nothing else would be able to explain this except that some
groups had consumed a different volume of wine than others.
Natural assignment guarantees pre-treatment inequality on many dimensions. But in a
correlational study, subjects are not assigned to groups randomly, they assign
themselves to groups naturally. A subject who is in a no-wine group, for example, is
one who has himself decided that he does not drink wine. Thus, the groups are referred
to not as randomly constituted, but as naturally constituted, as if nature had come
along and assigned each subject to one of the groups. Now here comes the really
important part. It is that experience teaches us that naturally-constituted groups are
capable of differing from each other on every conceivable dimension, and are highly
likely to differ from each other substantially on a number of dimensions. In other
words, people who drink no wine are likely to differ from people who drink several
glasses of wine in many ways. Perhaps the non-drinkers will have more females, and the
drinkers will have more males - or perhaps the opposite. Perhaps the drinkers will be
older or younger. Perhaps the drinkers will be richer or poorer. Perhaps the drinkers
will tend to be single and the teetotallers tend to be married, or vice versa.
Differences may readily be discovered in height, in weight, in education. Differences
could quite plausibly be discovered in smoking, in drug use, in exposure to industrial
pollutants, in diet. People who drink will tend to live in different parts of the city
from people who don't drink. People who drink may watch more television, use microwave
ovens more, spend more time breathing automobile exhaust - or less. As people of
different ethnic backgrounds, or religions, or races drink different amounts, it follows
that people who drink different amounts will differ in ethnic background, in religion,
and in race.
One can speculate about thousands of ways in which drinkers could differ from
teetotallers, and if one actually examined two such groups, one would find a few
dimensions on which such extraneous differences were large, several dimensions on which
such extraneous differences were moderate, and a large number of dimensions on which
such extraneous differences were present but small. The hurdle that the correlational
researcher is never able to overleap is that given that he is unable to look for every
conceivable difference, he will never know all the ways in which his
naturally-constituted groups did indeed differ from each other.
Natural groups may eat different amounts of broccoli. And so then, no cause-effect
conclusion will ever be possible from a correlational study. If the moderate drinkers
happen to live longer, we will never be able to conclude that this is caused by their
moderate drinking, because it might be caused by how close they live to high-voltage
lines or how often they wash their hands or how far they drive to work or how much
toothpaste they swallow or how much they salt their food or how close they sit to their
televisions or how many pets they keep or whether they sleep with their windows open or
whether they finish their broccoli. In an experiment, random assignment of subjects to
groups guarantees equality on all such extraneous dimensions, and this makes
cause-effect conclusions possible. In a correlational study, natural assignment of
subjects to groups guarantees inequality on many such extraneous dimensions, and this
makes cause-effect conclusions impossible.
Correlation does not imply causality. Every textbook on statistics or research
methodology underlines this same caveat, captured in the expression "correlation does
not imply causality," which warns that from correlational data, it is impossible to tell
what caused what. Science has developed only a single method for determining what
caused what - and that method is the experiment. No experiment, no cause effect
conclusion - it's that simple. Given correlational data, furthermore, there is no way
of extracting cause-effect conclusions by more subtle or more advanced analyses - no way
of equating the groups statistically, no way of matching subjects to achieve
statistically the pre-treatment equality that is needed to arrive at cause-effect
conclusions. Advanced methods of analyzing correlational data do exist, and are used by
naive researchers, and to the layman may appear to be effective, but the reality is that
all are fatally flawed, all have been demonstrated in the literature to be ineffective
and to lead to inconclusive results. The bottom line is that there is no way to extract
cause-effect conclusions from correlational data.
You overlooked that the causal direction might be reversed. In the case of The French
Paradox finding, I can readily see a plausible alternative interpretation as to how the
observed data could have arisen. The data do seem to show that as drinking declines
from a high to a moderate level, longevity increases. This accords with the notion that
alcohol is toxic, and that its effects are deleterious. What constitutes The French
Paradox, however, is that when one goes even farther along the drinking continuum from
moderate drinking all the way down to no drinking at all, instead of longevity
increasing still higher, the opposite happens - longevity shrinks.
What distinguishes the scientifically-trained mind from that of the layman in this case
is that the layman thinks of a single interpretation, and seizing on that as the only
one possible, stops thinking. That is, the layman thinks "Drinking not at all is
unhealthy, therefore I can improve my health by drinking." The scientifically-trained
mind, in contrast, recognizes that in correlational data a large number of
interpretations is possible, acknowledges the first interpretation that springs to mind
as one among the many that are possible, and keeps looking, and keeps finding, a number
of alternative interpretations, and ultimately acknowledges the impossibility of
choosing among them.
As illustrated in my own case. Specifically, I happen to find myself in a
naturally-constituted zero-alcohol group. That is, I drink not at all, or very close to
not at all. There is a reason for this, and that is that the effects of alcohol upon me
are toxic. Mainly, I get splitting headaches, even from the ingestion of small amounts
of alcohol, particularly if the alcohol comes in the form of wine. I take this to mean
that my constitution is weak, that I am unable to process alcohol efficiently, that I am
unable to detoxify my body of alcohol the way that others can, that my body chemistry is
not up to par. In other words, I am unwell, and as a result I do not drink.
Please mark well what I have just done - I have reversed the cause-effect conclusion
that you had come to. You concluded that not drinking causes deteriorated health, but
what I am proposing to you at the moment is that deteriorated health can cause not
drinking. The insight that I offer you is that when we observe a correlation, we don't
know what caused what, and one of the possibilities to be considered is that the causal
direction may be the opposite of our first impression, that a situation in which we
first conjectured that A causes B may prove upon more thoughtful examination to be a
situation in which B really causes A. In short, it may be the case that people who are
destined not to live as long as others tend to find themselves unable to drink alcohol.
That's all that the French Paradox may have discovered, and that's not a very good
reason for anybody to follow your recommendation to go out and start drinking.
Common sense alone invalidates The French Paradox conclusion. In other contexts, a
correlation being misinterpreted to mean that drinking promotes either health or
longevity will be obviously laughable. For example, a researcher who observes that
hospitalized patients don't drink will not conclude that teetotalling causes
hospitalization. Or, a researcher who visits death row and discovers that the inmates
don't drink and do have short life expectancies will not conclude that teetotalling
shortens life. In such examples, anyone with a modicum of common sense instantly
recognizes that a correlation between zero wine intake and either poor health or short
life does not mean that zero wine intake causes either poor health or short life. All
that is required to recognize the invalidity of your conclusion in The French Paradox is
to apply this same common sense to an only slightly more subtle case.
Are there not other studies? Undoubtedly there exist in the literature a large number of
studies that have some less direct bearing on the question that we are discussing, and
many of these studies will be genuine experiments which do permit cause effect
conclusions. I am thinking in particular of experiments that may demonstrate that
ingredients found either in grapes or in wine have a certain physiological effect. With
respect to such other studies, I make the following observations: (1) Your chief
conclusion was based not on such experiments, but on one or more correlational studies.
(2) An experiment in which subjects ingest an ingredient of grapes or of wine may
witness a certain effect, even while actually eating grapes or drinking wine produce a
different or an opposite effect. This could happen because in whole grapes or in real
wine, the ingredient with the beneficial effect could be offset by some other ingredient
which has a harmful effect, as by pesticides or nitrates that might be found in wine, or by the alcohol itself in wine. Unless an experiment actually has subjects drinking
wine, no conclusions concerning drinking wine are possible. (3) An experiment
demonstrating a physiological effect of something ingested is likely to be of short
duration, and is not likely to measure the effect on longevity. However, demonstrating
a physiological effect that appears to be beneficial (say a heightened level of HDL, as
mentioned by Kim Marcus above) is not the same as demonstrating increased longevity,
since the relation between the observed effect and longevity is speculative.
The irony is that Hewitt - the creator of the TV show famous for
unveiling corruption and hypocrisy among the powerful - has been
accused of worse deeds than any of the sexual charges leveled at
Clinton.
In 1991, reporter Mark Hertsgaard, author of "On Bended Knee: The
Press and the Reagan Presidency," wrote an article for Rolling Stone
magazine in which he documented Hewitt's own serious problems with
impulse control. Women who worked in the "60 Minutes" offices
described to Hertsgaard a sexually charged environment that had more
in common with a drunken frat party than a professional newsroom.
Correspondent Mike Wallace was singled out for bottom slapping, lewd
comments and unsnapping co-workers' bras.
While today no one would hesitate to call such behavior sexual
harassment, Wallace's cheerful willingness to do it in public - even
in front of a stranger - made him seem like a good (albeit
unpleasant) old boy. But the charges against Hewitt make Clinton's
alleged behavior look like clumsy courtship. One woman described to
Hertsgaard how Hewitt slammed her against a wall, pinned her there
and forced his tongue down her throat. Hewitt vehemently denied the
story and all other allegations to Hertsgaard, while Wallace
admitted his own antics and promised they would never happen again.
Rolling Stone eventually published Hertsgaard's article in a
drastically reduced form, although Hertsgaard says Hewitt pulled all
the strings he could to get the story killed. In an interview from
his home in Takoma Park, Md., Hertsgaard spoke to Salon about the
allegations of sexual harassment at "60 Minutes" that never made it
into print - and about how the "men's club" within the media exposes
other sexually reckless men, but still protects its own.
Your story has some pretty explosive accusations against Don
Hewitt. How did you come to write the piece?
Sexual harassment was not the point of the investigation. I
literally witnessed sexual harassment on my first day of interviews
at "60 Minutes" and women began to tell me about it, so it gradually
found its way into the story. But that wasn't the point, it just was
so pervasive at the time that you couldn't miss it.
What did you witness when you were there?
The first day I was in the corridor talking with a female staffer
and I saw out of the corner of my eye Mr. Wallace coming down the
hall. He didn't know me yet because I hadn't interviewed him, so he
had no idea that it was a reporter standing there. I'm sure it
would have changed his mind. Anyway, just before he reached her she
pushed both her hands behind her bottom, like a little kid trying to
ward off a mama's spanking, and got up on her toes and leaned away.
But that didn't stop him. As he went by, he swatted her on the butt
with a rolled up magazine or newspaper or something like that.
That's no big deal, one could say, but I must say it did raise my
eyebrows. I said to her, "God, does that happen all the time?" and
she said, "Are you kidding? That is nothing." And that led to
people telling me how he'd also unsnap your bra strap or snap it for
you. So he had a reputation for that.
Then I also heard about this far-more-worrisome incident with Hewitt
and that one did get into the piece, although in a much censored
form, where he lunges at a woman in a deserted place, pins her
against the wall and sticks his tongue in her mouth. There were
other incidents women told me about Hewitt, and, of course, (former)
Washington Post journalist Sally Quinn was already on the record in
her book "We're Going to Make You a Star" accusing Hewitt of making
an aggressive pass at her and sabotaging her work when she refused
him.
Was the sexual harassment at "60 Minutes" pervasive?
It sure seemed that way. There's a woman quoted in my story saying
that Mike would constantly have his hands on your thigh, or
whatnot. One producer said that basically Mike Wallace and Don
Hewitt felt this was their right. And that's how a lot of men in
television felt for many years. Women were basically hired for
their looks. You had to be competent too, but you damn well better
look good.
I understand that you had a difficult time getting the story
published in Rolling Stone.
The entire piece almost never ran because Don Hewitt tried to kill
it and (Rolling Stone editor and publisher) Jann Wenner almost went
along with him. They did emasculate the piece by taking out a lot
of the damaging material. You'll see in there that there is one
basic episode involving Don. There were four that I had reported.
[...]
So what did you think when you saw Hewitt taking a stand for
Kathleen Willey?
It was odd to me, seeing Don quoted in the New York Times on Friday
and Saturday as he was hyping Sunday's broadcast. He's talking
about what happened and I just thought of that old Dylan song:
"You've got a lot of nerve."
I hoped somebody would call him on it. In today's Times, Patricia
Ireland, head of NOW, is quoted as saying if these charges by Ms.
Willey are true, it has crossed a very important line from sexual
harassment to sexual assault. And if that's the case, we have to be
very serious about it. Well, the situation where Hewitt stuck his
tongue down that women's throat - that's assault. That is assault.
She certainly felt like she was assaulted. She freed herself by
kicking him in the balls - which they also cut out. She runs away
and then the next day, there was a fancy gala event where you have
to come in evening dress and she's there and Hewitt, this son of a
gun - he's like a randy old goat - he just could not take no for an
answer. She was wearing a backless gown and suddenly she feels
someone running his fingers up and down her bare back. She turns
around, obviously jumpy from what had happened the day before, and
sees the object of her horror - Hewitt - saying, "Don't be scared, I
just think you're a very attractive girl." They cut that out of the
article too.
There's a lot of huffing and puffing within the media about
Clinton's alleged behavior, with a lot of journalists complaining
about the public's so-called apathy on the subject. But in the case
of men like Hewitt, it seems pretty hypocritical.
It's absolutely unmistakable - and Hewitt is an extremely good
example - how most of the discourse about this issue involves people
who have no more moral standing than this ball-point pen in my
hand. And that goes not just for Hewitt, but for many of these
clowns both in the media here in Washington and in the Congress.
Anybody who has spent any time around Capitol Hill knows that a
large number of congressmen, both in the House and in the Senate,
fool around with either their young staffers or the young female
staffers of their colleagues. To any reporter who had their eyes
open, this is not news.
Carol Lloyd, A Feel For a Good Story, Mothers Who Think, 17Mar98.
With respect to Carol Lloyd's statement above, I wonder if I could have your answers
to just four questions:
(1) Is 60 Minutes infected with a slackness of integrity? What Carol Lloyd appears to be
describing in the upper echelons of the 60 Minutes administration - I am thinking
particularly of executive producer Don Hewitt and co-editor Mike Wallace - is a
deep-rooted slackness of integrity: the 60 Minutes environment has "more in common
with a drunken frat party than a professional newsroom," the top 60 Minutes staff are
"people who have no more moral standing than this ball-point pen in my hand," and
executive producer Don Hewitt comports himself "like a randy old goat." Might it be
the case, then, that the cause of your failing to satisfy minimal journalistic
standards in your 23Oct94 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom, and of your
failing also in the years since that broadcast to retract any of its many errors, is
that you yourself became infected by the same slackness of integrity that had already
gripped other of the 60 Minutes leadership?
(2) Does female hiring demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice program quality? If the
top 60 Minutes staff require their female employees to be physically attractive and
sexually accessible, then might the resulting inability of 60 Minutes to retain women
of high professional quality have resulted in a degradation in the average competence
of female employees? One may speak of demanding competence together with beauty, but
what woman of high competence would have hesitated to find alternative employment
upon discovering the harassment and assault and career strangulation that threatened
to be her lot if she remained at 60 Minutes? And so, in turn, might this readiness
to lose the brightest women not be symptomatic of a readiness of the 60 Minutes
administration to place extraneous goals - in this case, personal sexual
gratification - above program quality? And might this same policy of demoting
program quality to less than top priority have ultimately resulted in a severe
degradation of the quality of some 60 Minutes broadcasts, as for example your story
The Ugly Face of Freedom?
(3) Does male hiring demonstrate any similar willingness to sacrifice program quality?
One cannot help contemplating that if 60 Minutes is willing to promote goals other
than program quality in its hiring of female employees, that it might be willing to
promote goals other than program quality in its hiring of male employees as well.
Might it be the case, for example, that male employees are sometimes hired not for
competence, but for adherence to a 60 Minutes ideology? Or might it be the case that
men of high professional quality left 60 Minutes, or refused to join 60 Minutes, upon
witnessing the ideological claptrap that they might be asked to read over the air in
violation of journalistic ethics and in violation of rules of evidence? This too
could help explain the low quality of The Ugly Face of Freedom.
(4) Do some 60 Minutes employees feel that malfeasance is their right? Referring to the
harassment and assaulting of female employees, reporter Mark Hertsgaard is quoted as
saying that "One producer said that basically Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt felt this
was their right." This observation leads me to wonder whether there is not on the
part of certain 60 Minutes staff some similar attitude to the effect that
broadcasting their prejudices against Ukraine as facts is their right, and that
enjoying freedom from accountability concerning what they have broadcast about
Ukraine is also their right?
Lubomyr Prytulak
cc: Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney, Lesley Stahl,
Mike Wallace.
HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE SAFER 965 hits since 21Apr99
Morley Safer Letter 7 21Apr99 Does drinking wine promote longevity?
At bottom, then, I see little difference between your French Paradox story of 5Nov95 and
your Ugly Face of Freedom story of 23Oct94 - in each case, you ventured beyond your
depth, giving superficial judgments on topics that you were unqualified to speak on,
discussing questions that your education had given you no grounding in, and causing
damage because your conclusions proved to be false.
April 21, 1999
Morley Safer
60 Minutes, CBS Television
51 W 52nd Street
New York, NY
USA 10019
Morley Safer:
I find your photograph. Recently, I was searching the internet looking for a photograph
of you that I could use on the Ukrainian Archive (UKAR), and I did manage to find an
attractive one, and I did put it on UKAR, as you can see at:
http://www.ukar.org/safer.shtml
I attach to it a caption. Underneath this photograph I selected from the many
ill-considered things that you said in your 23Oct94 60 Minutes broadcast, The Ugly Face
of Freedom, your statement "Western Ukraine also has a long, dark history of blaming its
poverty, its troubles, on others." A moment's reflection upon this statement must
convince any objective observer that it is unlikely to be the case that some historian
that you consulted had recommended to you the conclusion that Western Ukrainians were
more predisposed than other people to blaming their troubles on others. Rather, a
moment's reflection must convince any objective observer that it is likely that this
statement came off the top of your head without the least evidence to support it, and
that you then had the temerity to pass it along to tens of millions of viewers as if it
were a fact. In making this statement, and in making the scores of other erroneous or
unsupported statements that you also made on that broadcast, you were inflicting harm
upon Ukraine, you were lowering the credibility of 60 Minutes, and you were undermining
your standing as a journalist of competence and integrity.
What you are most famous for. The reason that I am writing to you today, however,
concerns The Ugly Face of Freedom only indirectly. What concerns me today is a
surprising discovery that I made while searching for your name on the Internet. The
discovery is that your name seems to be most closely connected to the conclusion that
drinking three to five glasses of wine per day increases longevity, which conclusion you
proposed on a 60 Minutes story broadcast on 5Nov95, apparently under the title The
French Paradox. It seems that you have become famous for this story, and that it may
constitute the pinnacle of your career.
For example, a representative Internet article that is found upon an InfoSeek search for
"Morley Safer, 60 Minutes" is written by Kim Marcus and appears on the Home Wine
Spectator web site. The article's headline announces that 60 Minutes Examines Stronger
Evidence Linking Wine and Good Health, with the comparative "stronger" signifying that
the evidence presented in the 5Nov95 broadcast was better than the evidence presented in
a similar 60 Minutes broadcast four years earlier. This Home Wine Spectator article
viewed your broadcast as demonstrating the existence of a causal connection between
(what some might judge a high volume of) wine consumption and longevity, underlined your
own high credibility and the high authority of your sources, pointed out the vast
audience to which your conclusions had been beamed, and suggested that wine consumption
shot up as a result of at least the first French Paradox broadcast:
The study also found that the benefits of wine drinking extended to
people who drank from three to five glasses of wine per day. "What
surprised us most was that wine intake signified much lower mortality
rates," Safer said to the television show's audience.
Overall, the segment should prove a big boost to the argument that wine
drinking in moderation can be a boon to one's health. The segment was
seen by more than 20 million people. "It isn't just information," said
John De Luca, president of California's Wine Institute, "it's the
credibility that comes with Morley Safer interviewing the scientists."
After the first French Paradox episode aired in November 1991 the
consumption of red wine shot up in the United States, and it has yet to
dip.
The Kim Marcus article underlined your failure to question the conclusion that wine
consumption increases life expectancy:
Throughout the episode, Safer didn't challenge the fact that wine is
linked to longer life; rather, he was interested in what it was about
wine that made it unique. "The central question is what is it about
wine, especially red wine, that promotes coronary health," he said.
Safer came to the conclusion that it is not only alcohol but other
unnamed compounds in wine that contributed to higher levels of
beneficial high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol.
I had already seen that French Paradox broadcast. As a matter of fact, I had watched your
French Paradox story when it was first broadcast on 5Nov95, and even while watching it I
had immediately recognized that your conclusion attributing longer life to wine drinking
was unjustified, and that you were causing harm in passing this conclusion along to a
large audience almost all of whom would accept it as true. At bottom, then, I see
little difference between your French Paradox story of 5Nov95 and your Ugly Face of
Freedom story of 23Oct94 - in each case, you ventured beyond your depth, giving
superficial judgments on topics that you were unqualified to speak on, discussing
questions that your education had given you no grounding in, and causing damage because
your conclusions proved to be false.
In the case of the Ugly Face of Freedom, the number of your errors was large, and the
amount of data that needed to be examined to demonstrate your errors was large as well,
as can be seen by the length of my rebuttal The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes. In the case of
the French Paradox, however, you make only one fundamental error which is to fail to
grasp the difference between experimental and correlational data - and my demonstration
of your error can compactly be contained within the present letter.
The reason that I am able to assert with some confidence that your conclusion that wine
drinking increases longevity is unjustified is as follows. I have a Ph.D. in
experimental psychology from Stanford, I taught in the Department of Psychology at the
University of Western Ontario for eleven years, and my teaching and my interests fell
largely into the areas of statistics, research methodology, and data interpretation.
Everyone with expertise in scientific method will agree with me that your conclusion in
The French Paradox was unwarranted. It is not necessary to read the original research
papers on which you rely to arrive at this same judgment - even the brief review of the
research data in your broadcast, even the briefer review of your broadcast in the Kim
Marcus quotations above - is enough for someone who has studied scientific method to see
that you were wrong. Below is my explanation.
The French Paradox Research
Cannot Have Been Experimental
There are two ways in which data relating wine consumption to longevity could have been
gathered - either in an experiment, or in a correlational study. If the data had been
gathered in an experiment, then it would have been done something like this. A number
of subjects (by which I mean human experimental subjects) would have been randomly
assigned to groups, let us say 11 different groups. The benefit of random assignment is
that it guarantees that the subjects in each group are initially equivalent in every
conceivable respect - equivalent in male-female ratio, in age, in health, in income, in
diet, in smoking, in drug use, and so on. That is the magic of random assignment, and
we cannot pause to discuss it - you will have to take my word for it.
To groups that enjoy pre-treatment equality, the experimenter administers his treatment.
After constituting his random groups, the experimenter would require the subjects in
each group to drink different volumes of wine each day over many years - let us say over
the course of 30 years. Subjects assigned to the zero-glass group would be required to
drink no wine. Subjects assigned to the 1-glass group would be required to drink one
glass of wine each day. Subjects assigned to the 2-glass group would be required to
drink two glasses of wine each day. And so on up to, say, a 10-glass group, which given
that we started with a zero-glass group gives us the 11 groups that I started out
positing that we would need. As the experiment progressed, the number dying in each
group as well as the cause of death, and the health of those still alive, would be
monitored periodically.
There are many ways in which this simplest of all experiments could be refined or
elaborated, but we need not pause to discuss such complications here what I have
outlined above constitutes a simple experiment which in many circumstances would be all
that is required to determine the effect of wine consumption on longevity.
Such an experiment has never been conducted
And so you can see from my outline of what an experiment would be like that such an
experiment could never have been conducted. We know this without doing a review of the
literature, without having read a single paper on wine consumption and health.
Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment is impracticable. We know it
because, in the first place, it would be impossible to get experimental subjects to
comply with the particular wine-drinking regimen to which the experimenter had assigned
them. For example, many of the subjects who found themselves in the zero-glass
condition would refuse to pass the next 30 years without drinking a drop of wine. There
is no conceivable inducement within the power of the experimenter to offer that would
tempt these experimental subjects to become teetotallers for what could be the rest of
their lives. The same at the other end of the scale - most people requested to drink
large volumes of wine each day would refuse, and the experimenter would find that he had
no resources available to him by means of which he could win compliance.
And even if the experimenter were able to offer such vast sums of money to his subjects
that every last one of them agreed to comply with the required drinking regimen - and no
experimenter has such resources - then two things would happen: (1) the subjects would
cheat, as by many in the zero-glass group sneaking drinks whenever they could, and many
in the many-glass groups drinking less than was required of them; and (2) subjects who
found their drinking regimens uncomfortable would quit the experiment. Subjects
quitting the experiment constitutes a fatal blow to experimental validity because it
transforms groups that started out randomly constituted (and thus equivalent in every
conceivable respect) into groups that are naturally constituted (and which must be
assumed to be probably different in many conceivable respects) - a conclusion that I
will not pause to explain in detail.
Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment is unethical. And we know
that no such experiment has ever been conducted because it would be unethical to conduct
it, and would inevitably lead to the experimenter being sued. That is, it is unethical
in scientific research to transform people's lives in possibly harmful ways. Most
specifically, it is unethical to transform people's lives by inducing them to drink
substantial amounts of alcohol every day for several decades. The potential harm is
readily evident.
For example, drinking 10 glasses of wine per day, or even several glasses, will
predispose a person to accidents. A single experimental subject who consumed several
glasses of wine and then was incapacitated in an automobile accident would be all that
it would take to bring such research to a halt forever. The accident victim might
readily argue that the experiment requiring him to drink wine was responsible for his
accident, and that the experimenter - and the university at which he worked, and the
granting agency that funded his research - were liable for millions of dollars. In
anticipation of no more than the possibility of such a law suit, no granting agency
would fund such research, and no university or research institution would allow it to be
conducted under its roof.
Consuming substantial amounts of alcohol can not only cause accidents, but it can also
ruin health, destroy careers, distort personalities, break up marriages - for which
reason no experiment will ever require subjects to consume substantial amounts of
alcohol over extended periods of time. The possibility of harm, and thus of law suits,
can even be conceived at the low end of the alcohol-consumption continuum. That is, a
subject prohibited from drinking any alcohol might argue that this for him unnatural and
unaccustomed regimen changed his personality, undermined his career, and ruined his
marriage, and with this claim in hand, could readily find a lawyer willing to help him
sue for damages.
And if such an experiment had ever been conducted, it would
be invalid
Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment would fail to meet the
double-blind requirement. And although we are certain that an experiment manipulating
alcohol consumption over an extended period has never been conducted, even if it were
conducted, it would nevertheless contain inescapable flaws which would stand in the way
of permitting cause-effect conclusions. For example, you may be aware that the best
experiments are ones that are "double-blind." A "blind" experiment is one in which the
subjects do not know what experimental condition they are in - they might not know, for
example, whether the pill they are swallowing contains a curative drug, or only a
placebo. In our alcohol experiment, they would not know whether the liquid they were
drinking was wine, or only some wine-colored and wine-flavored water that had been
sealed in wine bottles. Already, we see the impossibility of our wine experiment being
even so much as blind. Just about every subject in our wine experiment would
immediately realize what it was that he was drinking. Tinted water is clearly
distinguishable by its appearance and taste and effect from wine. A blind wine
experiment, then, is an utter impossibility. Most subjects would be able to quickly
infer approximately what experimental condition they had been placed into.
A "double-blind" experiment would be one in which neither the subject nor the
experimenter knew what experimental condition any particular subject was in. For
example, the experimenter hands the subject a capsule, but does not himself know until
the experiment is over whether that capsule contains a curative drug or only a placebo.
In our alcohol experiment, a double-blind experiment would involve the experimenter
monitoring the life and health of each subject, but only after the experiment was over
opening up the sealed envelope to find out how much alcohol that subject had been
consuming over the past 30 years. Utterly impossible as well.
The reason that the double-blind requirement is essential is that without it,
confounding factors appear that might be responsible for any observed longevity
effects. For example, subjects aware that they are in a large-alcohol-consumption group
would also tend to realize that such alcohol consumption might harm them, and so they
might attempt to compensate by taking vitamin pills, not smoking, upgrading their diets,
exercising, and so on. Or, they might start eating fats prior to drinking alcohol, in
order to coat their stomachs and slow the absorption of the alcohol. They might do a
large number of things. What is important is that the knowledge of one's experimental
treatment can lead to one or more changes in behavior, and that it is these unintended
changes, and not the wine consumption itself, that could affect longevity, either in one
direction or the other.
Or, here is a particularly plausible confounding that might appear. Imagine that the
experiment attempts to control wine drinking, and no more than that, and that subjects
do faithfully follow the wine regimen that is imposed on them. Nevertheless, the less
wine that they were allowed to drink, the more beer and hard alcohol they would probably
end up drinking, but which would make the initially equal groups unequal on beer and
hard-alcohol consumption. And so then it would be impossible to tell if differences in
longevity should be attributed to differences in wine consumption, or to differences in
beer consumption, or to differences in hard-alcohol consumption.
But while we may choose to pause and speculate as to what confounding variables may
appear, scientific method does not obligate us to do so. We know that confounding
variables are possible in non-double-blind experiments, and the number that we are able
to imagine is limited only by the time that we allocate to trying. If I cared to spend
a few hours thinking about it, I could write several pages of possibilities. If I chose
to spend a few months thinking about it, I could write a book of possibilities. I am
able to imagine confounding variables either improving health or impairing it at the low
end of the alcohol-consumption continuum, and as well either improving or impairing
health at the high end of the alcohol-consumption continuum. Scientific method does not
require us to know for certain what and how many confounding variables may appear to
destroy the validity of an experiment which is not double-blind; rather, scientific
method assures us that it is so likely that one or more confounding variables will make
their appearance in a non-double-blind experiment, that such an experiment must be
considered to be fatally defective, and that no cause-effect conclusion can ever be
drawn from it with confidence.
Thus, no valid experiment exists. In short, we can be sure that no experiment has ever
been conducted to ascertain the effect of long-term alcohol consumption on longevity,
and that if such an experiment had ever been conducted, the impossibility of its being
double-blind, or even blind, would render it inconclusive.
The French Paradox Research
Must Have Been Correlational
But if the data featured in your 60 Minutes broadcast was not experimental, then what
was it? It must, by default, have been correlational. That is, rather than subjects
being assigned randomly to groups and being required to drink a given volume of alcohol
each day, it must have been merely observed what volume of alcohol they chose to drink
each day.
Alcohol consumption would be measured by self-report. Well, it is not quite true that
the experimenter would observe what volume of alcohol his subjects drank daily. It
would be impractical to follow subjects around and actually see how much alcohol they
consumed in restaurants, in bars, in their homes. Much more likely is that every once
in a long while, the subjects would be mailed a questionnaire asking them to report how
much alcohol they had been drinking lately. The inability to measure alcohol
consumption directly is already a weakness - subjects might not remember accurately how
much they had been drinking, or they might experience some pressure to distort how much
they had been drinking either upward or downward. However, this is not at all the big
weakness that I want to bring out, so let us get to that without further delay.
We have already seen that random assignment guarantees pre-treatment equality on all
dimensions. I first recapitulate that in the case of the random assignment of subjects
to groups in an experiment, we were guaranteed that the subjects in each group would be
initially equivalent on every conceivable dimension. The larger the random groups, the
closer to being precisely equal on every conceivable dimension would they become. Thus,
in a properly designed and executed double-blind experiment, any differences that
subsequently arose between groups would have to be attributed to the different
treatments that the experiment had administered to them - for example, if some groups
lived longer than others, nothing else would be able to explain this except that some
groups had consumed a different volume of wine than others.
Natural assignment guarantees pre-treatment inequality on many dimensions. But in a
correlational study, subjects are not assigned to groups randomly, they assign
themselves to groups naturally. A subject who is in a no-wine group, for example, is
one who has himself decided that he does not drink wine. Thus, the groups are referred
to not as randomly constituted, but as naturally constituted, as if nature had come
along and assigned each subject to one of the groups. Now here comes the really
important part. It is that experience teaches us that naturally-constituted groups are
capable of differing from each other on every conceivable dimension, and are highly
likely to differ from each other substantially on a number of dimensions. In other
words, people who drink no wine are likely to differ from people who drink several
glasses of wine in many ways. Perhaps the non-drinkers will have more females, and the
drinkers will have more males - or perhaps the opposite. Perhaps the drinkers will be
older or younger. Perhaps the drinkers will be richer or poorer. Perhaps the drinkers
will tend to be single and the teetotallers tend to be married, or vice versa.
Differences may readily be discovered in height, in weight, in education. Differences
could quite plausibly be discovered in smoking, in drug use, in exposure to industrial
pollutants, in diet. People who drink will tend to live in different parts of the city
from people who don't drink. People who drink may watch more television, use microwave
ovens more, spend more time breathing automobile exhaust - or less. As people of
different ethnic backgrounds, or religions, or races drink different amounts, it follows
that people who drink different amounts will differ in ethnic background, in religion,
and in race.
One can speculate about thousands of ways in which drinkers could differ from
teetotallers, and if one actually examined two such groups, one would find a few
dimensions on which such extraneous differences were large, several dimensions on which
such extraneous differences were moderate, and a large number of dimensions on which
such extraneous differences were present but small. The hurdle that the correlational
researcher is never able to overleap is that given that he is unable to look for every
conceivable difference, he will never know all the ways in which his
naturally-constituted groups did indeed differ from each other.
Natural groups may eat different amounts of broccoli. And so then, no cause-effect
conclusion will ever be possible from a correlational study. If the moderate drinkers
happen to live longer, we will never be able to conclude that this is caused by their
moderate drinking, because it might be caused by how close they live to high-voltage
lines or how often they wash their hands or how far they drive to work or how much
toothpaste they swallow or how much they salt their food or how close they sit to their
televisions or how many pets they keep or whether they sleep with their windows open or
whether they finish their broccoli. In an experiment, random assignment of subjects to
groups guarantees equality on all such extraneous dimensions, and this makes
cause-effect conclusions possible. In a correlational study, natural assignment of
subjects to groups guarantees inequality on many such extraneous dimensions, and this
makes cause-effect conclusions impossible.
Correlation does not imply causality. Every textbook on statistics or research
methodology underlines this same caveat, captured in the expression "correlation does
not imply causality," which warns that from correlational data, it is impossible to tell
what caused what. Science has developed only a single method for determining what
caused what - and that method is the experiment. No experiment, no cause effect
conclusion - it's that simple. Given correlational data, furthermore, there is no way
of extracting cause-effect conclusions by more subtle or more advanced analyses - no way
of equating the groups statistically, no way of matching subjects to achieve
statistically the pre-treatment equality that is needed to arrive at cause-effect
conclusions. Advanced methods of analyzing correlational data do exist, and are used by
naive researchers, and to the layman may appear to be effective, but the reality is that
all are fatally flawed, all have been demonstrated in the literature to be ineffective
and to lead to inconclusive results. The bottom line is that there is no way to extract
cause-effect conclusions from correlational data.
You overlooked that the causal direction might be reversed. In the case of The French
Paradox finding, I can readily see a plausible alternative interpretation as to how the
observed data could have arisen. The data do seem to show that as drinking declines
from a high to a moderate level, longevity increases. This accords with the notion that
alcohol is toxic, and that its effects are deleterious. What constitutes The French
Paradox, however, is that when one goes even farther along the drinking continuum from
moderate drinking all the way down to no drinking at all, instead of longevity
increasing still higher, the opposite happens - longevity shrinks.
What distinguishes the scientifically-trained mind from that of the layman in this case
is that the layman thinks of a single interpretation, and seizing on that as the only
one possible, stops thinking. That is, the layman thinks "Drinking not at all is
unhealthy, therefore I can improve my health by drinking." The scientifically-trained
mind, in contrast, recognizes that in correlational data a large number of
interpretations is possible, acknowledges the first interpretation that springs to mind
as one among the many that are possible, and keeps looking, and keeps finding, a number
of alternative interpretations, and ultimately acknowledges the impossibility of
choosing among them.
As illustrated in my own case. Specifically, I happen to find myself in a
naturally-constituted zero-alcohol group. That is, I drink not at all, or very close to
not at all. There is a reason for this, and that is that the effects of alcohol upon me
are toxic. Mainly, I get splitting headaches, even from the ingestion of small amounts
of alcohol, particularly if the alcohol comes in the form of wine. I take this to mean
that my constitution is weak, that I am unable to process alcohol efficiently, that I am
unable to detoxify my body of alcohol the way that others can, that my body chemistry is
not up to par. In other words, I am unwell, and as a result I do not drink.
Please mark well what I have just done - I have reversed the cause-effect conclusion
that you had come to. You concluded that not drinking causes deteriorated health, but
what I am proposing to you at the moment is that deteriorated health can cause not
drinking. The insight that I offer you is that when we observe a correlation, we don't
know what caused what, and one of the possibilities to be considered is that the causal
direction may be the opposite of our first impression, that a situation in which we
first conjectured that A causes B may prove upon more thoughtful examination to be a
situation in which B really causes A. In short, it may be the case that people who are
destined not to live as long as others tend to find themselves unable to drink alcohol.
That's all that the French Paradox may have discovered, and that's not a very good
reason for anybody to follow your recommendation to go out and start drinking.
Common sense alone invalidates The French Paradox conclusion. In other contexts, a
correlation being misinterpreted to mean that drinking promotes either health or
longevity will be obviously laughable. For example, a researcher who observes that
hospitalized patients don't drink will not conclude that teetotalling causes
hospitalization. Or, a researcher who visits death row and discovers that the inmates
don't drink and do have short life expectancies will not conclude that teetotalling
shortens life. In such examples, anyone with a modicum of common sense instantly
recognizes that a correlation between zero wine intake and either poor health or short
life does not mean that zero wine intake causes either poor health or short life. All
that is required to recognize the invalidity of your conclusion in The French Paradox is
to apply this same common sense to an only slightly more subtle case.
Are there not other studies? Undoubtedly there exist in the literature a large number of
studies that have some less direct bearing on the question that we are discussing, and
many of these studies will be genuine experiments which do permit cause effect
conclusions. I am thinking in particular of experiments that may demonstrate that
ingredients found either in grapes or in wine have a certain physiological effect. With
respect to such other studies, I make the following observations: (1) Your chief
conclusion was based not on such experiments, but on one or more correlational studies.
(2) An experiment in which subjects ingest an ingredient of grapes or of wine may
witness a certain effect, even while actually eating grapes or drinking wine produce a
different or an opposite effect. This could happen because in whole grapes or in real
wine, the ingredient with the beneficial effect could be offset by some other ingredient
which has a harmful effect, as by pesticides or nitrates that might be found in wine, or by the alcohol itself in wine. Unless an experiment actually has subjects drinking
wine, no conclusions concerning drinking wine are possible. (3) An experiment
demonstrating a physiological effect of something ingested is likely to be of short
duration, and is not likely to measure the effect on longevity. However, demonstrating
a physiological effect that appears to be beneficial (say a heightened level of HDL, as
mentioned by Kim Marcus above) is not the same as demonstrating increased longevity,
since the relation between the observed effect and longevity is speculative.