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: Lawbeat

Retailers panic while consumer reporters snooze

By Mark Obbie

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Major newspapers have largely dropped the ball -- at least twice -- on an important piece of consumer and health news. Barely three weeks before a new law takes effect imposing strict safety and testing standards on products for children, handicraft makers and second-hand retailers are panicking over the law's broad -- and possibly unintended -- swipes at their businesses. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, passed by Congress last summer after health scares centered on Chinese imports, will set new limits on lead and other harmful substances and require expensive tests on all retail products aimed at children. With groups like the National Association of Retail & Thrift Shops sounding the alarm, the Consumer Product Safety Commission earlier this month scrambled to soften and clarify its enforcement rules. But confusion reigns, in part because the new proposed rules were reported by some as an exemption for thrift shops when in fact they are still liable for selling tainted products (but they'd be exempt from the expensive tests that would show if their products are legal). So where are reporters in all of this? Mainly missing in action, from what I can tell. Coverage of last summer's debate seems to have failed to inform retailers of the potential fallout (I base that on an admittedly quickie news search, but think back: This wasn't exactly front-page news last summer). And, as the deadline approaches, the only major-paper report I've been able to find is this one two days ago by the LA Times' Alana Semuels, who also covered the rules-change debate a week ago. Local stories are starting to pop up -- here's one today in the Arizona Republic and even one in my little local daily (which is what tipped me off to this under-the-radar firestorm). The most complete summary I've found is this one by Overlawyered's Walter Olson two days ago on Forbes.com, where he wrote of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act:

CPSIA is now shaping up as a calamity for businesses and an epic failure of regulation, threatening to wipe out tens of thousands of small makers of children's items from coast to coast, and taking a particular toll on the handcrafted and creative, the small-production-run and sideline at-home business, not to mention struggling retailers. . . .In recent weeks, as thousands of crafters and retailers began to compare notes and realize that they would soon be left with stocks of unsalable merchandise, forced out of business or both, the protests have begun to mount: alarm-raising at hundreds of blogs and forums, a torrent of Twitter discussion, YouTube videos, endangered-products lists, Facebook groups and so forth. . . . This was not some enactment slipped through in the dead of night: It was one of the most highly publicized pieces of legislation to pass Congress last year.And yet now it appears precious few lawmakers took the time to check what was in the bill, while precious few in the press (which ran countless let's-pass-a-law articles) cared to raise even the most basic questions about what the law was going to require.Yes, something's being exposed as systematically defective here. But it's not the contents of our kids' toy chests. It's the way we make public policy.

That's a debate worth having -- about policymaking, and the news coverage of it -- but I wish that we readers could count on more neutral, reported journalism rather than advocacy pieces to inform us of what really happened and where the fight is headed next.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on January 18, 2009 (boomark / email).