My colleague Suemedha Sood at The Washington Independent reports on how Dow Chemical maintains a clean image even as it strong-arms environmental regulators to avoid cleaning up the dioxin that’s spread from its Midland headquarters.

As manufacturer of the pesticide DDT and supplier of napalm for the U.S. war in Vietnam, Dow has sparked protest movements and received some serious bad press over the years. But in the case of the company’s decades-long contamination of Michigan’s largest watershed with dioxin, outrage and action have been slow to develop, in part because of slick corporate PR.

“Dioxin has been called ‘the deadliest chemical made by man,’ by The New York Times, among others,” Sood writes, “Usually a byproduct of combustion processes, dioxin has been linked with health effects including cancer, liver damage, severe skin diseases and reproductive health problems.”

“[Dow] ran a disinformation campaign saying [dioxin is] not a problem, and if it is a problem, it’s someone else’s problem,” Great Lakes historian and blogger Dave Dempsey told Sood. “Twenty years later, and they’re still debating what they’re going to do about the dioxin.”

Continued – Dow is indeed waging an information war over dioxin, said Rita Jack of the Michigan Sierra Club, in part by playing on economic fears in a state with high unemployment.

“Every time I turn on public radio, I hear underwriting messages from Dow,” Jack told Michigan Messenger, “and they say how many employees they have in the state. It is a thinly veiled threat.”

Meanwhile, Jack said, news about highly contaminated sites just blends in with all the other news about contamination and people tune it out. “This is a Great Lakes issue; the Tittabawassee and Saginaw rivers are the greatest contributor to dioxin in Lake Huron. People are not as angry as they should be.”