AP Photo

When Raymond Donovan, President Reagan’s labor secretary, was finally found innocent of all charges in a three-year, multimillion-dollar prosecution brought by a politically motivated district attorney in New York City, he famously asked the court, “What office do I go to now to get my reputation back?”

The same question could be asked in the ideologically driven campaign to malign the essential chemical inputs of our modern industrial and agricultural economy. Every half-baked study with inadequate controls or publicity-seeking scientists making unsupportable claims gets front-page headlines, especially if their conclusions are scary enough and contain the word “cancer.”