Accurate reporting on chemicals and health is more important than ever before. While science clearly links chemical exposures to many health harms, this issue has become increasingly politicized. Petrochemical corporations often fuel the confusion and proactively manufacture doubt about the science.
In this webinar, award-winning chemical pollution reporters Sharon Lerner of ProPublica and Stéphane Horel of Le Monde will discuss the importance of accurate local reporting on toxic chemicals. Focusing on PFAS “forever chemicals” as an example, the speakers will explore the critical role of journalists in covering chemical health hazards, public decision-making, and industry strategies to influence both policy and science.
Stéphane Horel will discuss learnings from the Forever Pollution project in Europe, a pioneering cross-border, interdisciplinary collaboration bringing together journalists and experts to document PFAS contamination across the continent. She will also discuss the Forever Lobbying project, a related effort which published an investigation in January 2025 describing industry’s disinformation campaign to counter a EU proposal to ban all PFAS.
Sharon Lerner will discuss her award-winning reporting on PFAS in the US, including observations on how lobbyists from the PFAS and plastics industries work to influence policymaking. Both speakers will also highlight examples of industry suppression or manipulation of scientific research, and how journalists can recognize these efforts.
Featured Speakers
Sharon Lerner joined ProPublica in 2022 after seven years as an investigative reporter at The Intercept. She covers issues at the intersection of health, science, and the environment, shining light on corporate malfeasance and lapses in government oversight. In particular, she has covered how failures of the environmental regulatory process affect ordinary Americans. Lerner’s first work for The Intercept, a three-part series about the chemical PFOA called “The Teflon Toxin,” was a finalist for a National Magazine Award and featured in the documentary “The Devil We Know.” She went on to cover PFAS, the class of chemicals to which PFOA belongs, in extraordinary depth in her ongoing series “Bad Chemistry. Sharon has received numerous local and national awards for her reporting, including eight awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists and five from the Newswomen’s Club of New York, which named her its journalist of the year in 2021.
Stéphane Horel is an investigative journalist at Le Monde, specialising in corporate harm, toxic industries and scientific disinformation. In her former life, she has written several books, and has directed a dozen documentaries. In 2023, she supervised the European map of PFAS contamination of the "Forever Pollution Project". Her investigations into corporate lobbying won the Louise Weiss Prize for European Journalism (2017) and the European Press Prize for Investigation ("Monsanto papers", with Stéphane Foucart, 2018). Since her first participation in a cross-border project in 2018, the ICIJ Implant Files, she has become a passionate practitioner of cross-border journalism, developing innovative investigation methodologies. She coordinated the awarded "Forever Pollution Project", which revealed the extent of PFAS contamination in Europe (2023) and the “Forever Lobbying Project” (2025). She received the European Science Journalist of the Year award in 2024.