I traded emails with producer Solly Granatstein during the original November 2008 broadcast. I had been background sourced prior to the episode and did not know what CBS was going to say or claim. For that reason, the year before after the original broadcast, I only blogged about the actual buyers of the CRT monitors CBS aired claims were dumped for primitive recycling. But after being ghosted by Granstein for months, I published the blog above directly taking them on.
It is not too late to learn about the Charitable-Industrial Complex and Collateral Damage.
Now the CRT reuse business is long expired. CRT glass is found in pending superfund sites in Phoenix AZ and Columbus OH, not in Guiyu China. And it has been a decade since BAN's Jim Puckett tried to deny his role in the E-Waste Hoax - evidence enough that Granastein's source needed to be cross-interviewed.
So I found a Wikipedia Bio on Solly Granatstein, and did not publicly alter it in any way, but left the comments below in the Editor Talk section. It's a hail Mary pass. Could Mr. Granatstein consider an Ira Glass turnaround (Mike Daisy episode) now that Spain has arrested 40+ African dyaspora workers in the Canary Islands, citing the false claims CBS first gave credence?
Here's my Wikipedia Editor Talk post below. I will post now but update links later
Sorting chips for re-manufacturing reuse - what Guiyu does.
Below is my Wikipedia Editor Talk appeal to anyone interested in datajournalism. While I said "I wouldn't post this publicly", I was clearly referring to the public Wikipedia page, the Editor Talk is of course visible - as is this blog - but it takes a pretty "deep dive" to find it. By publicly on Wikipedia I meant on Granatstein's personal page. Of course I don't mean I promise not to talk about it. It's all I do.
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I wouldn't post this publicly on Wikipedia, but Mr. Granatstein's first Polk award was for a CBS 60 Minutes story on exports to China. I was interviewed for over an hour by background research after CBS had filmed The Wasteland footage in Hong Kong and Guiyu China. Mr. Granastein emailed me (pre SMS text) during the hour of broadcast.
My concern here is that the key source for the Wasteland coverage, Jim Puckett of Basel Action Network, was already known by EPA and the industry as a fanatic anti-globalist who was making up statistics. Not only was Granatstein's Wasteland crew (Michelle Rey and company) warned about the "80% waste" estimate by Puckett, but I provided them pictures and film disproving Puckett's claims. CBS instead ran Puckett's false claims and Puckett went on for several years to CITE CBS as the "source" of the false claims.
Among the evidence provided to Granatstein's team pre-broadcast were:
1. Film of the SKD Contract Manufacturing factories which purchased the CRT monitors Scott Pelley and Jim Puckett circled by helicopter in Hong Kong.
2. Offers to meet and interview the CRT contract manufacturers who purchased the CRT tubes.
3. Mathematical evidence that the price those contract manufacturers were paying for used CRTs (which last on avverage 22 years, cost on average $110, and were being discarded by Americans, Europeans, Japanese and South Koreans after an average of 4 years of use.
With the evidence above, I consider it recklesss that the CBS team claimed to have "followed the trail" of the Hong Kong CRT mmonitors to Guiyu, China. The factories that purchased the monitors were not in or near Guiyu, and there is not a single CRT monitor to be seen in any of the footage in Guiyu. I was not at that time an expert in Guiyu specifically, but with the help of Bloomberg China columnist and author Adam Minter, found that the source of the river pollution described in the Wasteland episode doubtlessly originated from the textile and tannery factories upstream - the largest textile manufacturing base in the world. And that Guiyu's "e-waste" industry could not have made any money if they had purchased the monitors. What Guiyu purchased was circuit boards, not for "primitive" acid baths (though I don't dispute those existed in Guiyu, just that they were a side business that could not have financed purchase of boards), but for highly skilled chip reuse and purchasing for resale. Adam Minter visited and wrote about the three story marketplace for those chips in Guiyu.
As the son of a journalism professor (my dad was last of three generations of print journalists) I am sympathetic to Granatstein's team. They had big egos to deal with and indisputable footage of Chinese scrap people trying to wrestle the cameras from Scott Pelley's crew. They had an American electronics scrap exporter not only falsely claiming not to export to China, but impugning the very Chinese Tech Sector factories he was exporting to as "primitives" whom he'd never export to. He went to jail - but not for exports, for fraud.
The Executive Director of the Secretariat of Basel Convention in Geneva at that time, Katherina Kummer Peirry, went on to investigate whether used electronics were being dumped or purchased for reuse, which was explicitly legal under the Basel Convention Annex IX B1110, and criticized Jim Puckett for making up statistics and falsely attributing them to sources quoting Puckett.
I've sent tweets and emails to Solly Granatstein intermittently over the years without response. I actually admire and look up to him and had only positive interactions with his background checkers. However, I would love it if he took a page from Ira Glass, producer of This American Life, who was similarly duped by Mike Daisy over allegations around Han Hoi Precision Institute (Foxconn). Mr. Glass re-investigated the Foxconn story and devoted an entire episode to being duped as a do-gooder.
Had Granatstein similarly investigated why Guiyu had no CRT monitors, or where the Foshan China factories that did import the monitors do, or Mr. Adam Minter's follow up visits to those factories and the textile industry pollution upstream of Guiyu, it may have prevented Interpol from launching "Project Eden" in 2010, which resulted in the racial profiling of Accra's city dump as a "primitive fishing village" despoiled by illegal e-waste dumping. "Hurricane Joe Benson" might not have been prosecuted in the UK for exporting upgraded hotel TVs etc. And Katherina Kummer Peirry may not have been forced out under pressure by Jim Puckett for disproving his fake 80% statistic.
I'm using Wikipedia as a meta-historical commentary on how journalism, despite its best intentions, has an obligation (like Ira Glass observed) to correct false impressions and account for collateral damage. Puckett went on to damage my personal reputation, but fortunately 6 universities did research on this and proved my allegations. See articles in Discard Studies by Josh Lepawski et. al., "Criminal Negligence" (p 1 and 2) and "Trading On Distortion".
https://discardstudies.com/2015/06/24/criminal-negligence/
https://discardstudies.com/2016/01/04/trading-on-distortion/
Also of note, Adam Minter's Bloomberg News column exposing Jim Puckett's false claims about the source of the 80% waste quotes made famous by CBS Wasteland, and how Mr. Puckett denied to Bloomberg that he was the source of the statistic.
https://retroworks.blogspot.com/2013/05/basel-action-network-explains-80-or.html
There's really no more CRT export business, the market has long moved on. But there are plenty of people still alive who would greatly appreciate the Solly Granatstein Wasteland story being factchecked by the owners of the Asian factories which actually purchased the monitors Scott Pelley did not "follow the trail" to, or the actual source of 50 year old e-scrap at Accra, etc. This could be a great episode to investigate what Peter Buffett warned us of - The Charitable Industrial Complex.
- Robin Ingenthron
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