Re[2]: FW: News Media and How to Deceive

[Ruth Weiner <rfweine@sandia.gov>]

     Another example:  remember the Albuquerque Tribune insert in 1994 
     about the plutonium injections into putatively terminally ill 
     patients?  As it happened, I had the original Rowland and Durham 
     paper, and two of us sat down with the Tribune reporter and pointed 
     out that the doses were calculated completely wrong in her article and 
     what the correctly calculated doses should be.  She actually agreed 
     with us, but no correction was ever published.
     
     Incidentally, a clear conclusion that one could draw from the 
     plutonium injection studies was that indeed the injected plutonium did 
     not appear to have an adverse effect.  Those who turned out not to be 
     terminally ill lived many  more years and eventually died of something 
     else entirely.
     
     Clearly my own opinion
     Ruth Weiner
     rfweine@sandia.gov


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: FW: News Media and How to Deceive
Author:  blc+@pitt.edu at hubsmtp
Date:    8/12/98 8:07 AM


     Things get much worse in cases where reporters are not regular
employees of the paper or magazine, and earn a living as free-lance 
writers. These two examples are from my personal experience:
     
1. There was an article in a magazine about the horrible dangers from 
plutonium toxicity. Having just published a paper on that subject, I 
called the writer in an effort to explain to him how he had gone wrong. He 
was very knowledgeable about the subject and even was familiar with my 
paper. Realizing this, I asked him how he could write such a deceptive 
article. He answered: "If I had written it your way, I could not have 
gotten it published".
     
2. A reporter I had known personally had page 1 articles in The New York 
Times on how the Chernobyl reactor had a containment equivalent to those 
on U.S. reactors and on how more radiocesium had been emitted from 
Chernobyl than from all nuclear tests combined. When I called him, I found 
that he was quite familiar with the facts. I asked how he could write such 
stories and he replied "I don't tell you how to do scientific research, so 
you don't tell me how to do journalism"
     
     There are lots of other examples of media sins in my book "Before
It's Too Late".
     
Bernard L. Cohen
Physics Dept.
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Tel: (412)624-9245
Fax: (412)624-9163
e-mail: blc+@pitt.edu
     
     
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