by Max Schulz

About the author: Max Schulz is the managing editor of Forbes MediaCritic, a quarterly magazine covering American journalism.

Don’t drink the water north of the border, either.

That’s the message from Fenton Communications, the public-relations firm that cooked up the alar apple scare in 1989. Working with a savvy environmental research group, Fenton has been waging a new campaign claiming the nation’s tap water is laced with dangerous levels of cancer-causing pesticides. The point, as one water treatment specialist in the Midwest put it, is “to scare the hell out of people.” Fenton appears to be achieving that end, thanks to a docile news media.

Sounding Alarms

On August 17, 1995, the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a non-profit environmental research organization, convened a press...