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CR's technical policy and public-service director Edward Groth III calls the fda letter to Hansen "hogwash, a propaganda document put out to discredit his report." Groth defends Hansen's expertise and explains CR's position on bst: "The literature shows there is possibly a problem but no conclusive proof. Scientist A says we should be cautious. Scientist B says let's go ahead. Science sometimes carries more weight than it should. Science is good, but in policy you need value judgments too."
But is setting policy, rather than rating products, CR's purpose? Richard Greenhaus, 65, was a testing engineer for the magazine for 18 years; he left in 1990 because, he says, CR had "changed from an interested consumers' group to a bureaucracy behaving like a branch of government." Greenhaus charges that Consumers Union president Rhoda Karpatkin "is a politically active Democrat" and that CR has changed from conducting disinterested research to promoting a consciously liberal agenda. Says Karpatkin, citing a 1986 letter from Ronald Reagan praising Consumers Union's "competence and impartiality": "I do not engage in partisan politics at all."
This back-and-forth sniping suggests that the world has grown more complicated than it was when Consumer Reports made its debut almost 59 years ago. Subscribers still swear by it. Cheryll and Tommy Schechtman, both in their early 40s, recently built a new house in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, and wanted to upgrade all the major appliances on a $10,000 budget. Says Cheryll: "We're pretty trusting about what Consumer Reports recommends." But the exponential growth of new products threatens to swamp the magazine that was established to rank them for the buying public. Hundreds of new computer-software programs and games appeared in the months preceding the last Christmas buying season. "We're not going to test software in the foreseeable future," admits CR's Alan Lefkow. "It is beyond this department."
In the beginning, Consumer Reports and Consumers Union were virtually alone in calling for a fair shake for buyers; now the field is jammed with such advocates-some of whom regularly snipe at the magazine that started the trend in the first place. And with the g.o.p. controlling both houses of Congress, and a move from government-as-watchdog to a deregulated economy, CR's brand of activism may draw increasingly thunderous criticisms. If so, will the noise matter inside a 30-ft. by 30-ft. by 30-ft. echoless chamber?
--Reported by Tom Curry and Stacy Perman/Yonkers and Jane Van Tassel/New York