"Matt Barrow" wrote in message
...


Unfortunately, I can't disagree. I studied Journalism at OSU under an
two-time Pulizer prize winner who required all J students to have a
science minor because he was tired of hearing about bigfoot, killer bees,
Alar and other cyclical and nonsensical media phenomena. (My senior
thesis was to interpret scientific data on the dietary benefits of oat
fiber versus wheat bran, back when everybody was reporting that one or
the other prevented hear disease. Turns out there's not a signifcant
difference.)

Hell, see what they did with the "Nutrition Pyramid" even as little as a
couple years ago, or the "Eight glasses of water a day" tripe :~)

Exactly. It takes just one newspaper, and then somebody can say "according
to..." It only took one newspaper to report a "UFO crash" at Roswell, New
Mexico to launch a conspiracy theory that continues even now. The problem
is, journalist pay is right there with flight instructors. You can barely
make a living doing it, so they get the young and unworldly doing much of
the gruntwork. The only reason I'm not a newspaper reporter or editor is
because the pay is terrible.

What's unfortunate in this case is that now the Time article can be used as
an information source.
-c