RE: 60 minutes - Yucca Mountain

["Stabin, Michael" <michael.g.stabin@vanderbilt.edu>]

> -----Original Message-----

> From: RuthWeiner@AOL.COM 

>

> It's impossible to know what was edited out....

> Because I am very familiar with the project, I recognize the 

> bias and distortion in the program.  It makes me wonder about 

> the 60 minutes and similar programs for which I am not so 

> familiar with the subject matter.  Are they really biased 

> also?  I think they probably are.



For the most part, yes. I stopped watching 60 Minutes in the early

1980's when they did a piece on safety issues and cost overruns at an

Illinois (I think) nuclear plant. Officials from the plant videotaped

along with the 60 Minutes crew, and they later circulated a tape showing

the gross distortions that were due to film left on the cutting room

floor. I realized then that I could not trust anything on that show that

I DIDN'T know about intimately, since something I did know something

about was so badly distorted, for political or entertainment purposes

(or both). I watched a journalists' roundtable some years later in which

a journalism scholar pointed out that these shows are indeed strictly

entertainment, and should not be considered news in any form. Mike

Wallace was surprised and upset by the opinion of a man he obviously

respected, but could not refute his point.



60 Minutes also did a terrible hatchet job on someone I knew personally,

a nuclear medicine physician from Oak Ridge of very high moral character

and professional excellence, during the Clinton/O'Leary investigations

into human uses of radiation in the 1940's and 1950's. The piece was

reprehensible, and I heard several reports from ORAU employees of the

rudeness of the 60 Minutes staff, particularly Leslie Stahl. It was

amusing, however, when they asked employees to duct tape plastic over

the air vents leading into one of the rooms near the old whole body

irradiator at ORAU, in case any "old radiation" was still drifting

around in there.



Mike





Michael G. Stabin, PhD, CHP

Assistant Professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences 

Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences 

Vanderbilt University 

1161 21st Avenue South

Nashville, TN 37232-2675 

Phone (615) 343-0068

Fax   (615) 322-3764

Pager (615) 835-5153

e-mail     michael.g.stabin@vanderbilt.edu 

internet   www.doseinfo-radar.com



 

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