While the Post deserves credit for its consistently strong reporting on lead poisoning, the asymmetrical rhetoric and uncritical acceptance of scientific claims reinforced the belief that the problems of low-income inner city communities were produced by bad choices of irresponsible individuals, most of whom happened to be black. Evidence that structural factors—like the fact that old housing stock put poor children at risk of lead poisoning—do not sink in as easily. (Even Milloy, who is African-American and whose columns seemed largely aimed at generating action within the black community, unfortunately contributed to this problem. A Lexis-Nexis search shows he did not write a column on lead poisoning until 1993, his tenth year as a columnist for the Post.) This is a reminder that the time to be most critical of data is when it supports easy explanations for difficult problems.

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