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

[rkathren@tricity.wsu.edu (Ron L. Kathren)]

And yet another example:  The series of articles that Ruth refers to is well
known to me.  The author, who incredibly won a Pulitzer Prize for the
series, misquoted me and in the process indicated that I had identified by
name one of the Pu injection cases.  I had not done so for a number of
reasons, including ethical and legal (state law prohibits researchers from
so doing and the penalties are quite severe if convicted).  When I call the
reporter and asked her for a letter indicating that she had erred in
attributing the statement to me, she went on the attack, attempting to
elicit from me a statement re the immorality of the experiments, and
accusing me of being unethical, callous etc.  It was only after an oral
threat of a lawsuit that she finally stated that it was her editor who had
changed her story and inserted the offending passage and ultimately did send
me a one line letter absolving me of the unethical and illegal release of
names.  I guess what floors me in all this is that she was awarded a Pulitzer.

But there is an important message in what Ruth says, and it has been
butressed by my own experience: some but by no means all members of the
media cannot be trusted to be objective and honest.  Regrettably, there is
little that can be done to repair the damage that these irresponsible and
unprofessional media persons have done.

Ron Kathren

   f At 09:45 AM 8/17/98 -0500, Ruth Weiner wrote:
>
>     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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