Jon Entine

Jon Entine
Born	April 30, 1952 (1952-04-30) Philadelphia
Nationality	United States
Occupation	author, TV News producer, business & sustainability consultant

Jon Entine is an author, journalist, think tank scholar and consultant. He is a senior research fellow at the Center for Health & Risk Communication at George Mason University and a senior fellow at GMU's STATS (Statistical Assessment Service), where he is founder and director of the Genetic Literacy Project. He has been a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C since 2002. He writes a column (since 2001) for the British-based international magazine Ethical Corporation, for Forbes.com, and contributes to newspapers and magazines around the world. Entine is also the founder of ESG MediaMetrics, which offers crisis management and sustainability consulting in environmental, social and governance areas, and he advises organizations on brand reputation and strategic communications.

Entine is known for an independent and distinctive public identity, often taking contrarian or controversial stands but not strictly ideological ones. He is a speaker at universities and civic organizations, and is a frequent guest on national news and political commentary television and radio shows in the United States and Europe. He lives in Cincinnati.

Biography

Entine was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on April 30, 1952 and later relocated with his family to the suburb of Cheltenham. He graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in 1974 with a B.A. in philosophy. Entine had briefly dropped out of college in 1972 to run the presidential primary campaign for Senator George McGovern in Sullivan County in New Hampshire. After graduation, he became the assistant director for the re-election campaign of Father Robert Drinan, a liberal Democratic Congressman from suburban Boston.

Television Journalism

Entine began his journalism career in high school, when he worked as a weekend copyboy for the CBS owned-and-operated TV station then known as WCAU. During his freshman year of college, he edited and produced the 11 p.m. news for the local NBC affiliate in West Hartford/New Britain. After the 1974 Congressional campaign, in January 1975, Entine was hired as a writer by the ABC News program AM America, which was renamed Good Morning America the following year. Entine worked for ABC News as a writer, assignment desk editor, and producer in New York City and Chicago from 1975-1983 for various ABC News programs, including the ABC Evening News, 20/20 and Nightline. He took a leave of absence from ABC News in 1981-1982 to study at the University of Michigan under a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in journalism.

Entine joined NBC News in New York in 1984 as a special segment producer for NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, where he worked until 1990. He became Brokaw’s long-time producer. In 1989, Entine and Brokaw collaborated to write and produce Black Athletes: Fact and Fiction, named Best International Sports Film of 1989. Entine was later named the executive in charge of documentaries at NBC News (1989–1990). He rejoined ABC News in 1991 as an investigative producer for Primetime (TV series). In 1993 Entine produced a story with reporter Sam Donaldson on eye surgery clinics that led to a lawsuit against them and Primetime alleging trespass and defamation due to the use of "test patients". The case was mostly dismissed in January 1995 and a defamation suit was dismissed in 2000. He produced a prime time special on the Miss America Pageant, "Miss America: Beyond the Crown" for NBC Entertainment in 1994 before transitioning to book writing and print journalism.

Awards

Entine has won 19 journalism awards, including Emmys for specials on the reform movements in China and the Soviet Union and a National Press Club award in Consumer Journalism.

The Body Shop Controversy

Entine's first print piece, the September 1994 investigative article, "Shattered Image: Is The Body Shop Too Good to Be True?," in Business Ethics magazine, created an international brouhaha and led to hundreds of stories in the international media, including articles in The New York Times and a report on ABC World News Tonight. The flurry of news stories led to a temporary 50% drop in the market value of the stock of The Body Shop, a British-based international cosmetics company, which until that point had been considered a model "socially responsible" company.

Entine reported that Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, in 1976, had stolen the name, store design, marketing concept and most product line ideas from a different cosmetic chain with the same name, The Body Shop, founded in 1970 in San Francisco by two California women, and subsequently fabricated her story of traveling around the world discovering exotic beauty ingredients. (In 1989, Roddick purchased the U.S. and Israeli rights to The Body Shop name from the original Body Shop founders, and the San Francisco based chain of five stores renamed itself Body Time). He reported that Roddick's "natural" products contained extensive amounts of artificial colorings, scents and preservatives. Despite Roddick's claims and unverified reports in popular articles and even some university case studies that Roddick and The Body Shop "gave most of its profits to charity," as Roddick had proclaimed, documents from Britain's Charity Commission showed that the company gave nothing to charity over its first 11 years and was penurious in its philanthropy thereafter, despite Roddick's claims. The Body Shop also faced millions of dollars in claims by disenchanted franchisees, who believed they had been enticed to buy franchises by misrepresenting its potential revenue.

About The Body Shop Story from Encyclopedia of Leadership, Volume 4 [1]

Article in the Berkeley Daily about Body Time (The original Body Shop) [2]

How The Body Shop tried to stop this information from getting mainstream:[3] The article in Business Ethics (now defunct), which was cited with a National Press Club Award for Consumer Journalism in 1994, is widely used in university business ethics classes and is generally credited with prompting companies claiming to be socially responsible to match their claims with operational practices and to increase transparency.

"Shattered Image" had originally been scheduled to be published as a 10,000 word feature in Vanity Fair earlier in 1994 but was dropped after legal threats by The Body Shop, which threatened to litigate under British libel law, which requires proof of innocence by defendants rather than proof of guilt by the prosecution. The original article was eventually published in 2004 by The Nation Books in Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print, edited by David Wallis. Business Ethics, which had featured Roddick on its cover just the year before, printed a much shorter version of the exposé commissioned for Vanity Fair. "Shattered Image" and subsequent writings by Entine on the emerging "socially responsible" business movement challenged the belief that companies that promote themselves as socially conscious necessarily operate with a higher degree of ethics or social responsibility than conventional companies. Entine's writing focused on what he called "reality rather than rhetoric" of ethical business. He is often credited for coining the term "green washing", which refers to the deceptive marketing exploits of self-professed "green" companies.

Genetics

Entine's first book, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It was inspired by the documentary on black athletes written with Brokaw in 1989. It was favorably reviewed by The New York Times and numerous other publications. There were some critical reviews, claiming that the subject was inappropriate as it could encourage a racialist view of human relations.

In 2007, Entine published Abraham's Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People, which examined the shared ancestry of Jews, Christians and Muslims, and addressed the question "Who is a Jew?" as seen through the prism of DNA. Harry Ostrer in Nature Genetics said that "His understanding of the genetics is limited and uncritical, but his broad, well-documented sweep of Jewish history will inform even the most knowledgeable of readers". In the book, he reviews the controversial issue of why Jews are disproportionately successful, reviews studies that show that Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQ test scores than other population groups, writing that IQ is mostly heritable. Entine is a public speaker on genetics and identity for the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Federations of North America.

Think Tank Affiliations

In 2011, Entine joined the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) at George Mason University as a senior fellow and executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, which focuses on the nexus of genetics--human and agricultural--with the media and public policy. He is also a senior research fellow at GMU's Center for Health & Risk Communication. Entine joined the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research as an adjunct scholar in 2002, and is now a visiting scholar. His research focuses on science and society and corporate responsibility/sustainability. AEI Press has published three books written and edited by Entine: Crop Chemophobia: Will Precaution Kill the Green Revolution? (February 2011), which analyzes the impact of chemicals in agriculture; Pension Fund Politics: The Dangers of Socially Responsible Investing (2005) on the growing influence of social investing in pension funds and Let Them Eat Precaution: How Politics Is Undermining the Genetic Revolution in Agriculture (January 2006), which examined the debate over genetic modification (GMOs), food, and farming. He has also contributed to numerous academic books on a variety of subjects, including sports, genetics, leadership, and sustainability.

Books

• Crop Chemophobia: Will Precaution Kill the Green Revolution? 2011, ISBN 9780844743615
• Scared to Death: How Chemophobia Threatens Public Health, 2011, ISBN 9780578075617
• No Crime But Prejudice: Fischer Homes, the Immigration Fiasco, and Extrajudicial Prosecution, 2009, ISBN 9780692002827
• Abraham's Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People, 2008, ISBN 0446580635
• Let Them Eat Precaution: How Politics is Undermining the Genetic Revolution, 2006, ISBN 0844742007
• Pension Fund Politics: The Dangers of Socially Responsible Investing, 2005, ISBN 084474218X
• Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It, 2001, ISBN 158648026X

External links

• Jon Entine's home page
• Genetic Literacy Project home page
• Abraham's Children's website
• ESG MediaMetrics.com website