DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

Eugene McCarthy said that reporters are like blackbirds sitting on a telephone wire. One flies away, they all fly away. One flies back, they all fly back.

You see this behavior time and again -- one reporter says there's a school violence epidemic, they all say so, falsely.

Newsweek publishes a claim that crack cocaine is "almost instantly addicting," soon every media entity is publishing the same bogus claim.

"Fads come fast and furious in our viral age, and the reactions to them can be equally ferocious," wrote Roger Cohen in the New York Times last week "That's what we're seeing right now with biofuels, which everyone loved until everyone decided they were the worst thing since the Black Death."

You've probably heard the story by now - so much ethanol is being produced that food is becoming scarce, driving up food prices and causing starvation here and there.

This has become conventional wisdom very fast, a conservative fable designed to discredit renewable fuels. Texas Gov. Rick Perry jumped on the bandwagon, saying that the federal renewable fuel standard requirement "is significantly affecting Texans' family food bill."

Canada's conservative National Post ran a piece headlined "Biofuels may cause more harm than good" and its level of substantiation can be adjudged by its use of the term "enviroweenies" (if a writer has evidence, there's no reason to use ad hominem attacks).

Worse, the claim has become so widely accepted that it is being reported without being checked and without providing an alternative viewpoint. In the Chicago Tribune, Robert Bryce wrote, "It is now beyond dispute that congressional mandates on ethanol use are having a number of deleterious effects, soaring food prices chief among them." In fact, it is very much disputed.

For instance, Cohen wrote in the New York Times, "Where fuel distilled from plant matter was once hailed as an answer to everything from global warming to the geo-strategic power shift favoring repressive one-pipeline oil states, its now a 'scam' and 'part of the problem,' according to Time magazine. Ethanol has turned awful. The supposed crimes of biofuels are manifold. ... Most of this, to borrow a farm image, is hogwash and bilge. ... If Asian rice prices are soaring, along with the global prices of wheat and maize, it's not principally because John Doe in Iowa or Jean Dupont in Picardy has decided to turn yummy corn and beet into un-yummy ethanol feedstock. Much larger trends are at work. They dwarf the still tiny biofuel industry (roughly a $40 billion annual business, or the equivalent of Exxon Mobil's $40.6 billion profits in 2007)."

He offered alternative explanations for food prices and shortages: "I refer to the rise of more than one-third of humanity in China and India, the disintegrating dollar and soaring oil prices. Hundreds of millions of people have moved from poverty into the global economy over the past decade in Asia. They're eating twice a day, instead of once, and propelling rapid urbanization. Their demand for food staples and once unthinkable luxuries like meat is pushing up prices."

In Brazil, the second largest producer of biofuels (ethanol there is produced with sugar instead of corn), President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has angrily said, "Those who criticize biofuels have never criticized the price of oil. The developed world imports oil with no tariffs, yet they place an absurd tariff on Brazilian ethanol."

I'm not saying the claims of conservatives that biofuels are leading to starvation should not be reported. But it should be reported along with competing claims. When Cohen's article appeared in the Times on the morning of April 24, one of the television networks that evening reported the conservative claim with no opposing view.

Nor should the conservative claim about biofuels be reported with no subtlety or shades of grey. The New York Times ran one piece referring to "the need for affordable food versus the need for renewable energy." That's a simplistic black and white view, akin to Time magazine's allegation that biofuels are "dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it."

The evidence right now is conflicting, and the news coverage should show that.