Category: Rule: Cover The Topic

Categories
campaigns Rule: Cite The Basis Rule: Cover The Topic Rule: False Choice Rule: Focus Issues Not Politics Rule: Mischaracterization Rule: Mountain Out of Molehill Rule: Sin of Omission

Election 2020 (& General) Pet Peeves

The third Democratic debate is coming up, so it’s a good time to weigh in on some of my long-standing campaign and political news coverage pet peeves, many of which have been driving me crazy for years.  (Apologies for not precisely citing the basis for each one–calling myself out, shame on me!)

“When you’re ‘explaining’, you’re losing.”
This refers to politicians who are correcting or clarifying a position or statement of theirs, usually after it has come under attack from an opponent, or the press.  

News Hour, July 8, 2019 – Politics Monday (video)

Amy Walter (News Hour) invoked it in July when assessing Joe Biden’s explanation of his own comments about working with segregationists to get bills passed, and his ensuing clash with Kamala Harris over busing policy in the first Democratic debate.  Walter referred to the phrase as a “classic line in politics”.  It’s definitely not the first time I’ve heard it.  Certainly, excessive ‘splainin’ by a candidate can take on a pleading quality and grow old quickly–a case of ‘methinks thou dost protest too much’–especially if the explanation is unconvincing.  But the critique can come too quickly or, as in this case, after the media itself has been hammering on the issue, forcing more response by ‘keeping it alive in the news cycle’ which is unfair.  In fierce elections, where attacks are the weapon of choice and the media has a habit of capitalizing on them, how is a candidate supposed to respond? By letting the mischaracterization or inaccuracy go unchallenged?  Methinks not.  Media: Focus on clarifying the issue involved, and let us decide who’s right.  I’m calling this a Mountain Out of a Molehill.  (For more on Kamala & Joe, see my [intlink id=”2248″ type=”post”]previous blog[/intlink].)

“No overarching message.”
I last heard this one from David Brooks (also News Hour).  It is yet another overworked trope of the punditry and concerns a candidate’s lack of concision or ‘branding’ in their messaging on what they stand for.  As above, it is primarily about campaign style, so does not, technically, break the Focus on Issues, Not Politics Rule since it is okay to comment on politics.  But given the media’s predominant ‘cover-the-horse-race’ DNA, I think we’re justified in at least paring down some of the (what seems like incessant) drivel.  Sure, messaging is important, but, for the amount of play this gets, not at the expense of content.  We are long past the point of needing to reduce the many massive, and massively complex, issues we face, to pithy soundbites.  Let’s trade that for a deeper examination of things that really matter.  That is the only way we will be able to shape policy to improve our lives.  I’m calling this out as an OverSimplification and Mountain Out of Molehill.

“message hardened” & “window closed”
Both of these were used in reference to the Special Prosecutor Investigation on Russian interference in the 2016 election, and possible Trump connections to it.  The first phrase was offered as the reason for concluding that there is no recourse to Attorney General William Barr’s pronouncement that Robert Mueller “found no wrongdoing on the part of Trump” in his (Mueller’s) report on the investigation, despite substantial evidence (in the report) to the contrary and multiple, available paths for pursuing that evidence, because Barr’s “message had hardened [in the public’s mind]” and, so, continuing would not be politically viable.  That assessment was repeated by many news outlets as laid out in Margaret Sullivan’s Washington Post piece, which critiqued it. 

The second phrase was used by Bill Maher on his political satire show, Real Time.  Maher, though not a journalist, echoed the oft-used sentiment by others when he said: ~“Mueller failed to be decisive, so the window closed [on getting the true findings of the report].”

This particular type of False Choice really sticks in my craw because it clearly prioritizes a veneer of ‘political viability’ of the issue (unsupportive polls) over its’ underlying substance and importance–in this case, getting to the bottom of potential serious wrongdoing via real, existing legal paths.  The result?  A press short-circuiting the Democratic process, de facto anointing itself as the ultimate arbiter of the decision, rather than the public!

This continues the insidious trend of slowly, incrementally stripping the electorate of their power, ‘dumbing them down’, by sending a message that there is nothing they can do, when, in fact, there is (several congressional & other investigations continue).  It is particularly confounding coming from a press and punditry that relentlessly exposes Trump’s (and others’) lies, digging the public out from under them, only to heap misleading notions like these back on.  Arrgh–have we gone mad?  Call Outs: False Choice (decide quickly, or opportunity is gone) and Focus on Issues, Not Politics.

Campaign strategy: Attack Trump or focus on issues?
This question, posed by The New York Times on 2020 Democratic campaign strategy, is yet another familiar False Choice the press routinely offers up in their parlor game of ‘horse race’ politics. Suggesting the candidates must choose one strategy or the other, but not both, is an OverSimplification.  To be fair, the article uses the question as a ‘jumping off point’ to examine Trump’s divisive racial rhetoric, and how (or whether) it plays in primary vs. general election Democratic strategies, plus, it is answered by strategists and candidates who say: ‘do both’.  (Yea!)  Certainly, Trump’s rhetoric, its affect and importance, are well understood at this point and merit covering. But, again, not at the expense of issues, which continue to get short shrift in our ever increasingly complex world.  I’m just really tired of this emphasis, but we’re going to be seeing a lot more of it, I’m afraid.  Call Outs: False Choice, OverSimplification and Focus on Issues, Not Politics.

Exclusive MSNBC coverage of SC Democratic Convention
The South Carolina Democratic Party granted exclusive rights for video coverage of their June convention to MSNBC over the protestations of 5 other major networks, according to the AP.  The reason given: the candidates would get equal time since their full speeches would be aired.  More than 150 journalists were also credentialed, but–whoa! Is this legal?  It doesn’t seem like it should be.  Call Outs: MSNBC, in the name of journalistic integrity and fairness, you should have refused the offer of exclusive rights and allowed the other networks to Cover the Topic of the SC Democratic convention, along with yourself.

 

Categories
carbon emissions climate change Rule: Ask The Question Rule: Cover The Topic solutions

5 Years Later: ABC, CBS & NBC Climate Solutions Reporting Still Dismal

Maybe Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate activist who gained attention with her “school strike for climate” outside Swedish parliament last year, will finally be the one to sound the alarm on the rocketing rate of climate change, and the dire need and diminishing window for action on it. The ‘big 3’ broadcast networks, ABC, CBS & NBC, certainly aren’t doing it.

www.spiked-online.com

Thunberg, fearless and becoming ever more prominent, unabashedly rebuked ~200 attendees at the COP24 Climate Conference in Poland last December for their subpar record on global warming. 

“You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake. You are not mature enough to tell it like it is,” she said.

At Davos this year she told billionaire entrepreneurs and global leaders:  ~“According to the IPCC, we are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes. Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.” 

Davos speech: speaking truth to power (watch it!)

Even with all the media attention she is getting, it hasn’t done the broadcast network’s nightly news viewers any good, there’s been nary a mention of her on their newscasts—sadly unsurprising, given the pittance of climate reporting by them, in general. “On climate change, we have failed, … and the media has failed to create broad public awareness,” she admonished them.

Five years ago, I took a look at the big 3’s reporting on global warming solutions on those news shows for the preceding 5 years. It wasn’t good. From July 2009 – July 2014, searching TV News Archive I found 0 reports on “taxing carbon” and “carbon sequestration”, and 1 report (CBS) on “cap and trade”.  Within a smaller 1.5 year window (2013 – July 2014), and searching more general terms (“carbon emissions”, “greenhouse gases”, “global warming” & “climate change”), I got 4-6 hits of any substance, for each of the 3 networks.

Now, 5 years later, assessing their record again for the 5 years prior, it is little improved. Aside from “Paris Climate Agreement”, the number of news segments for all other ‘climate solution’ search terms, combined, maxed out at 6 for CBS (only 1 in-depth), with 3 each for ABC (all minor refs), and NBC (2 in-depth).  (See [intlink id=”2099″ type=”page” anchor=”Clim_Sol_Data_2014-19″]Climate Solutions Data[/intlink], and Search Terms List & TV News Archive Notes, below.) 

In their coverage of the “Paris Climate Agreement”, the networks followed expected patterns, each with clusters of reports around the 2015 PCA negotiations & signing (terms, adequacy) and 2017 Trump pullout (jobs, fallout out from leaders & CEO’s) events, with a smattering of PCA references throughout the period, each varying from the others in number and degree.  For in-depth reports, the tally was: ABC–1, NBC–2, CBS–4, with a mix of climate-related stories linked in, such as: coal vs. renewables jobs (ABC & NBC), Norway’s climate success with subsidies and incentives (CBS), Glacier National Park’s diminished 26 out of 150 glaciers remaining (NBC), and the cost of extreme weather (CBS). 

Good, where it was, but not all that one would hope for. 

Actually, rather abysmal given the acceleration of shocking reports on the environment that seem to come flying at us, almost nonstop, from print media.  From recent readings of 84o F arctic temps, and 415 parts/million carbon levels (the highest in human history, and rising, with ~1,300 tons of carbon dioxide/second spewing into the air from fossil fuels, which still comprise 81% of the world’s energy use), to the staggering implications of the 25-years long and, until recently, underestimated by 60%(!) warming of oceans (90% of trapped atmospheric energy is absorbed–8 times the annual global energy consumption), to the “18 of the 19 warmest years on record occurring since 2000” stat–the hits just keep on coming.

Against that steady drumbeat of bad news, a parade of equally unrelenting climate policy reversals continues to issue forth from the Trump Administration, adding insult to injury, as in some hideously demented comic parody, run amok. The latest reversals include: rolling back of emissions rules for coal plants, relaxation of automobile mileage standards, and the easing of rules for oil and gas leaks, to name a few. The New York Times just reported a tally of 49 rollbacks, completed, with 34 more in progress, for a total of 83.

I have pledged to keep this site bias and snark free, but the above scenario couldn’t help but conjure up another standoff in nature I recently encountered while hiking.

 Turkeys vs. deer; looks like the turkeys are winning.

In January of this year, the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (HR 763) was introduced in the House. The bipartisan bill (D-58, R-1) is geared to “reduce greenhouse gas emissions with a steadily rising fee on fossil fuels” and is backed by 3,500 U.S. economists, including Nobel laureates, former presidential advisers and Federal Reserve chairs. ~“A carbon tax offers the most cost-effective way to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed necessary, and will harness the marketplace to steer us toward a low-carbon future,” they declared in a joint statement. In his Op-Ed reporting this, Jonathan Marshall, of Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL), touts the benefits of the bill–90% emissions reduction by 2050, creation of ~2.1M jobs, GDP growth (citing Sweden’s 60%), and even cost-compensation in the form of monthly dividends to the public.

Monthly dividends to the public.  What a deal!  Now, if we could only get the TV news media to report on it. Thus far, it has turned up on just CSPAN, and FOX News (in a 5-minute discussion with Mark Reynolds of CCL; see Featured Video, bottom, Home page).

Will shaming the major networks to report on climate solutions make any difference, even if they do relent?

The NYT’s David Leonhardt gives his view on why promoting climate solutions using technical terms (e.g. “carbon tax”) instead of human benefit terms (e.g. “cleaner energy”, “better health”) fails, citing examples and outcomes for each approach. The ‘human connection’, and anecdotes of its political benefits have become ubiquitous to the point of broad acceptance in recent years and, for sure, there is merit to it. But couching issues strictly in human terms falls short and can never preclude the need for straight-up, dispassionate and accurate information, consistently delivered. To argue so is a false choice and one that subordinates rational thinking, a distinguishing characteristic of humans, to emotion–a devolutionary proposition, to be sure.

Fortunately for us, an unnecessary one, as well. For just as people aspire to make a human connection and ‘do the right thing morally’, so do they seek edification through knowledge. They just don’t like having ‘answers’ and ‘solutions’ rammed down their throat. It is because of this distinction that I believe in the goal of ATD–the widespread dissemination, across the board, of a higher level of reporting, directed, in part, by the public themselves. Further, I would say, putting tools in the hands of people to direct their own edification is the human connection. It empowers them by increasing their personal stake in Democracy, and fosters engagement, both with the media and their fellow citizens.

Since my last 5-year survey, both the broadcast and cable networks’ nightly news viewerships have grown to 23.75M (average, ABC, CBS & NBC, combined) and 4.76M (average, CNN, MSNBC & FOX News, combined), respectively. (See PEW 2016 data.)  Though cable’s viewership grew faster than the broadcast networks’, the networks still get, on average, ~5 times more eyeballs than cable, per night.  When you consider that elections are won or lost by margins that are far smaller than the networks nightly viewership (9.5M for Obama in 2008, the biggest win going back 8 elections, vs. 23.75M network viewership), the case can be made that broadcast network reporting could have significant impact on voters (though causality cannot be proven, either way; nor is this an apples to apples comparison).

For myself, my bias and snark breach and the fact that I identify as Democrat, notwithstanding, I simply see the world as one that is governed by the real-life forces that govern it, and not by ideology. So, I just simply always want to know what the facts of issues are. All of them. And all of the time. And if we all come into better and more regular possession of those facts, we can launch our debates from an even playing field and, then, really begin to solve problems.

Here are my Rule break calls for the media.

  • ABC, CBS & NBC:  Cover the Topic of carbon tax–it’s time!

All news media: Ask the Questions: 

  • What are the methods and costs of putting a price on carbon? 
  • What are the methods and costs of removing carbon from the atmosphere? 
  • What is the cost of failing to meet the PCA goal of 1.5o temp raise? 

 

Oh, and thank you, Greta.

 

Search Terms List:

(Notes: Multiple permutations of search terms were used, as warranted. Also, the need for quotes is deceiving since ‘hits’ occurred if any of the main terms within quotes were found in a TV newscast, not just the full quote.)

  • “carbon tax”, ”tax on carbon”, ”taxing carbon”, ”price on carbon”, ”carbon surcharge”, ”price on emissions”, ”emissions tax”
  • “fossil fuels fee”, “fossil-fuels fee”, “fee on fossil fuels”
  • “Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act”
  • “H.R. 763”, “HR 763”, “HR-763”, “HR bill 763”
  • “Green New Deal”
  • “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”, “IPCC”
  • “Paris Climate Agreement”
  • “United States Climate Alliance”
  • “U.S. Climate Alliance”
  • “Greta Thunberg”

 

TV News Archive Notes:

I noticed, anecdotally, the closed caption text that is used for searches has more gaps than it seemed to 5 years ago.  From experience, however, overall patterns emerge to tell the story and I believe there is value in this tool. See other [intlink id=”1347″ type=”page” anchor=”TVNewsArch_CCGaps”]TV News Archive Notes[/intlink] on my contact with archive.org on this subject.

 

Additional Links – Articles that give (what I consider to be) a ‘full’ picture of the topic, representing opposing opinions & data fairly.

Scientific American:  2019 U.S. Power-Sector Trends –> Rise in Emissions

New York Times:  EPA Finalizes Coal Rules Rollback

New York Times:  Problem with Carbon Tax

Bloomberg:  Half World’s Power from Wind, Solar by 2050

Categories
immigration income inequality Rule: Cover The Topic solutions

Houston, Texas: Another Urban Success Story Unreported

I recently came across another story—the third in a few months—on economic turn around of disadvantaged who live in cities. Rather than add it to the other two in my [intlink id=”1402″ type=”post”]May 2015 blog[/intlink], I decided it deserved its own.

09kirp-master675

The NYT opinion piece is about the successful Houston nonprofit Neighborhood Centers, and its ‘bottom up’ approach to helping people lift themselves out of poverty. The author, David L. Kirp, writes that Neighborhood Centers “has enabled hundreds of thousands of poor residents, many of them immigrants, to move up the ladder of economic and educational opportunity each year. It’s a strategy that can — and should — be implemented nationwide.”

Though the nonprofit has been around for a long time, its growth in the last two decades has been “exponential”, and is largely attributed to the efforts of CEO Angela Blanchard. She sums up the orgs philosophy, saying “The people are the asset, the source of potential solutions, not the problem.”

The process is involved. “Hundreds of hours” are spent conducting community meetings and interviewing residents to identify priorities and community leaders, then funds are “cobbled together from 37 federal, state and local programs, with grants or contracts from the Departments of Education, Agriculture, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development and the Treasury.”

The payoff has been big. Houston, one of the fastest-growing and most diverse cities in the nation, now has over 70 Neighborhood Centers across the city and surrounding suburbs, an annual budget of $270 million, and serves over 500,000 people.

And the results are concrete. Last year, jobs were secured for 110,000 people, 5,600 were trained for careers in welding and pipe-fitting—skills needed at the Port of Houston, and women were taught how to turn baking into a small business and to run a thrift store.

According to Kirp, “the organization also operates 14 high-caliber pre-kindergartens and charter schools. In every grade, charter students’ test scores were higher than in the neighborhood public schools.”

Other of its missions include free tax preparation, and teaching local leaders how to work the political system. The latter helped some “residents persuade the City Council to operate a new bus line”, giving them better access to grocery shopping and health clinics. It also encouraged two others to run for City Council, and enabled a group of 10th-grade boys to design, lobby for, and get a $400,000 skateboard park.

While it is gratifying to hear success stories like these from 3 different cities, they should be still more widely reported. A search of the trusty TVNews Archive* produced a few hits for “Houston Neighborhood Centers”, more than for either the Minneapolis or Atlanta stories (respectively, a sprinkling on CSPAN; none), though none on major networks.  Most of these reports are set in the context of an ‘urban renaissance’, which many experts claim has been happening for some time. I’ve included video of a few, along with their highlights, below.

Fareed Zacharia aired an 8 minute segment about Houston on his CNN show in June of 2014.  Only a 2 minute excerpt was available on the website (below), but the full report can be found on TVNews Archive, here, in 1 minute segments.

(short ad)

In it, Zacharia starts with big picture brushstrokes: “Houston was the first city to regain all of the jobs it lost in the 2008 recession. It actually created more than two jobs for every one it lost.”  Touching on immigration, Neighborhood Centers’ CEO Angela Blanchard relates how, during a time when the issue was politically heated, she had to refute misinformation from the media on a daily basis in order to raise funds, and, in the end, Houston came together and solved its problems.  With video of Neighborhood Centers as a backdrop, she suggests its long term benefits: “This is the world they (children) will remember. That is a powerful way to make a community safer. Belonging is the most powerful medicine.”

On his show about cities, after a brief introduction, Charlie Rose interviews co-authors Jennifer Bradley and Bruce Katz on their book “The Metropolitan Revolution” (10 min. long).  Though the scope of the discussion is cities in general, Houston is singled out as an example.

(short ad)

 

Some quotes—

Bruce Katz: “The real power is in cities and metropolitan areas because they are the engines of the economy.”,  “[The] top 100 metros sit on 1/8 of the land mass, [and represent] 2/3 of the population and 3/4 of GDP.”

Jennifer Bradley: “Metro’s are not just governments, they are networks (of companies, philanthropic groups and individuals); they can fund things in a more creative or interesting way, … a whole lot of resources open up.”, “Cities need to come together and demand change in Washington.”

Following their segment, Mr. Rose interviews Columbia’s Center for Urban Real Estate director and “A Country of Cities” author, Vishaan Chakrabarti (15 min.), who says “Cities are a silver bullet to solve most of the major problems we have in this country, and by extension, the world.” He goes on from there.

All interviews inspire hope.

What is particularly interesting about the Houston story is how its model contrasts with those of Minneapolis and Atlanta.  In those two cities, there was some backslide from the initial success of their models which had been imposed, top down, on the communities, rather than organically grown, bottom up, as in Houston.

In this recent News Hour report (7 min. long), Harvard’s Raj Chetty discusses his study on urban areas and the high correlation between where a child grows up, and their chances of upward mobility.  He states (paraphrasing): “We can’t move everyone out of poor cities like Baltimore. We have to fix the cities.”

(no ads)

On the question of how to fix them, Houston has clearly added more, and important, data to that of Atlanta and Minneapolis.  Now, let’s get the media to report it.

ATD Rule break: Cover The Topic.

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*Note: The TVNews Archive database may have data gaps, though none were uncovered in the use of it for this blog.  [intlink id=”1347″ type=”page” anchor=”TVNewsArch_CCGaps”](more info)[/intlink]

Additional References:
[intlink id=”1347″ type=”page” anchor=”TVNewsArch_NW2014″]TVNews Archive Network List[/intlink]

Categories
healthcare Rule: Ask The Question Rule: Cite The Basis Rule: Correct Inaccuracies Rule: Cover The Topic Rule: Mountain Out of Molehill Rule: Out of Context Rule: Sin of Omission vaccine autism link

Toxic Vaccines? : Frank Bruni vs. Robert Kennedy Jr.

There is nothing more exasperating than seeing a news report on an important but esoteric subject that includes controversy and competing facts, and having no better sense at the end of it, what the truth is. Such describes the media coverage of vaccine safety which was recently elevated in the news after California made vaccination mandatory for children attending public or private schools.

I am not an expert in medicine, economics, the environment, or any other such field, any more than I am a journalist, and I can’t take time to become any of these just to prove that the media is falling down on the job. This is the whole point of Advance The Dialog–neither I, nor the public, have the time or imperative to get to the bottom of complex issues on our own. We are too busy living our lives. The media, however, does, and their failure to do so puts the public in an untenable position.

A review of my through-the-looking-glass quest for the truth on toxic vaccines proves the point.

The weekend following CA’s new vaccination law, I came across 3 articles that touched on it. Two of them were in the San Jose Mercury News– 1 profiling a CA state senator & pediatrician’s fight for the bill; the other, an editorial by a university professor & health org VP who declared mandatory vaccination a “moral choice”.

The first article discusses sensationalist aspects of the vaccine controversy, including “anonymous death threats” the senator received, his “coolness under fire”, accusations of his taking bribes, and more. The second one asserts that the benefits outweigh the risks, and cites a discredited 1998 study linking mumps vaccine to autism as the main justification used by vaccine-choice advocates. It also cites the book “Deadly Choices” as clarifying the misunderstandings and “flawed science” that fuel the vac-choice movement.

Okay, the first is meant to be just a profile, the second does cite 2 bases to make it’s point. Despite that, science-lite doesn’t cut it since: (a) the issue is too important, and (b) we have no way of verifying what is true (short of reading “Deadly Choices” & other books, thus becoming an expert!). Avoiding the science behind the vaccine controversy over an extended period of time is a Sin of Omission, rife in the media. In addition, mischaracterizing the controversy as ‘safe vaccines vs. no vaccines’ is a False Choice and misleads the public since toxins can be removed from vaccines, making it a ‘safe vaccines vs. unsafe vaccines’ debate.

But the third article was the real whopper. In his July 5, Sunday NYT column, Frank Bruni launched a broadside against Robert Kennedy Jr., and his fight to remove thimerosal (which contains mercury) from vaccines, offering very little substance. In the 1,153 word article, he bestowed a mere 48 words on scientific ‘fact’, writing: “As it happens, aluminum isn’t present in all vaccines and not all mercury is created equal and equally risky”, and “The problem isn’t just that most respectable scientists reject any such connection, but also that thimerosal has been removed from — or reduced to trace amounts in — most childhood vaccines.”

His shortage of facts notwithstanding, Bruni does cite those few things which, if true, sound reasonable, right? Maybe, until you see RFK Jr.’s response, that is.

Kennedy, who is not anti-vaccine, just pro safe-vaccines, writes: “In fact there are massive doses of mercury in some meningitis vaccines – now mandated for all schoolchildren in New York – and in vaccines given to pregnant women, infants, and annually to public school kids.  Mercury remains in mandated pediatric HepB, HIB, and DTap vaccines at double the concentrations deemed safe by EPA.  To [] those vaccines, pharmaceutical companies recently added aluminum adjuvants that [] dramatically amplify the neurotoxicity of the remaining mercury. Finally, pharmaceutical companies merely reduced mercury levels in [] vaccines [for] American children. We continue to send [] pediatric vaccines fully loaded with mercury to children [] in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, a practice that will haunt our country in many dreadful ways.”

He adds: “In defending thimerosal safety, Bruni alludes to the debunked industry canard that the ethylmercury in vaccines is less persistent in the body and therefore less toxic than the heavily regulated methylmercury in fish. However, the best and most recent science shows that ethylmercury is twice as persistent in the brain (Burbacher et al 2005), and 50 times as toxic as methylmercury in fish (Guzzi et al 2012).”

So, far more specific data being cited (and sourced!) than in Bruni’s column. Kennedy takes the lead. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Reading the rest of his rebuttal, plus his Mercury & Vaccines page, he offers a mountain of evidence, all sourced, including for his claim: “thimerosal [is] linked to neurological disorders now epidemic in American children, including ADD, ADHD, low IQ, speech development delays, and tics.” Summing up, Kennedy says he and his team “found no published study proving thimerosal safe.”

Bruni sources his claims and position only indirectly: “I sided with the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention”–a Who’s Who of national health orgs, to be sure. But Kennedy answers, citing 4 Federal studies, which, along with an internal whistleblower, “paint CDC’s vaccine division a cesspool of corruption due to scandalous conflicts with the $30 billion vaccine industry.”

Nevertheless, it is hard to dismiss esteemed national orgs such as these. Presumably, they’ve looked into this and have data supporting their position that vaccines are safe. They would have had to, wouldn’t they? If so, then what is it? In this recent Washington Post article, Kennedy claims: “There are 500 studies that we’ve collected and footnoted [in his book Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak], and not a single one of them shows that thimerosal is safe [] except for the 6 studies funded by CDC and the vaccine industry [] that are fraudulent. And we explain how they created the fraud.” Pretty big claims to go unchallenged if they are wrong, wouldn’t you say?

Ironically, Bruni, a science journalist, disparages the safe-vacciners for using the internet for their research, calling it a “sinkhole for the gullible”. He writes: “The anti-vaccine agitators can always find a renegade researcher or random “study” to back them up, …confusing the presence of a website with the plausibility of an argument.” Yet he, a journalist, refuses to do the spadework–his job–for us. Hmm… physician, heal thyself?

You can see the impossibility of all this. It will take more than just citing this book, or that scientist, or that reputable organization, to get at the truth. It will take getting into the science and having the media interview experts, Ask Questions, Correct Inaccuracies, and call out Oversimplifications, Sins of Omission, Mountain Out of Molehills, and the like.

If you don’t believe me, do your own research (and become an expert). You can start with The Big Picture’s interview with Kennedy in the 2-part video below. In it, Kennedy lays out the entire uninterrupted history of the presence of thimerosal in vaccines, exposes compromised studies of its safety, and more. Also, check out the links embedded above and at end. I’ve added notes for easy reference, including quotes from Dr. Martha Herbert & Dr. Mark Hyman (both collaborators on Kennedy’s book), as well as the late Dr. Bernadine Healy– “respectable scientists”, all.

This controversy isn’t going away any time soon. Finding the truth is a process and Advance The Dialog provides tools. There is too much at stake here to ignore. When the debate between those tasked with knowing and verifying the science behind health safety (national health orgs, the news media) and advocates for the public (Kennedy, et al.) is this factually lopsided, I smell a rat.

ATD Rule breaks: Cite the (Scientific) Basis, the others mentioned above, plus Cover the Topic.

Additional Ask the Questions:
o What would the cost be to remove or replace the preservative Thimerosal in vaccines?
o What would the cost be for further ‘susceptibility studies’, as Dr. Bernadine Healy suggested?
o Are there other studies linking autism to something besides vaccines?

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Additional References

July 2014 Washington Post profile of RFK Jr.’s fight for vaccine safety:
From Dr. Mark Hyman (physician, founder & medical director of the UltraWellness Center): “The bottom line, we shouldn’t be injecting a neurotoxin into pregnant women and children. … the issue isn’t whether thimerosal is causing these problems [but] whether it is toxic and a potential contributor to neurodevelopmental disorders.”
From Dr. Martha Herbert (pediatric neurologist & autism researcher at Harvard): “We know from the biological literature that extremely low doses [of mercury] are harmful. … To me, it’s a no-brainer. Why would you put a neurotoxin in vaccines?”

April 2015 Sharyl Attkisson, “What the News Isn’t Saying About Vaccine-Autism Studies”:
Sharyl Attkisson: “To be clear: no study to date conclusively proves or disproves a causal link between vaccines and autism.”
Contains long lists of scientists who found possible autism link, the institutions and universities where research was done and some of the specific studies

May 2008 CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson interview of Dr. Bernadine Healy:
Bernadine Healy (former physician, cardiologist, head of NIH, president American Red Cross) quotes:
”We do have the opportunity to understand whether or not there are susceptible children — perhaps medically, perhaps they have a metabolic issue, mitochondrial disorder, medical issue — that makes them more susceptible to vaccines, plural, or to one particular vaccine, or to a component of vaccines, like mercury.”
“An [Institute of Medicine] report from 2004 basically said, ‘Do not pursue susceptibility groups. Don’t look for those children who may be vulnerable.’ I really take issue with that conclusion.”
“If you look at the the research that has been done, … the question has not been answered.”

April 2008 Bernadine Healy, US News & World Report, Health:
Healy: “Population studies are not granular enough to detect individual metabolic, genetic, or immunological variation that might make some children under certain circumstances susceptible to neurological complications after vaccination.”

Focus for Health (vaccine/autism site), 37 scientific papers linking thimerosal to autism

National Health Organizations:
Centers for Disease Control
“CDC, FDA, and the National Institutes of Health [NIH]) have reviewed the published research on thimerosal and found it to be a safe product to use in vaccines.”

Food & Drug Administration
“Lacking definitive data on the comparative toxicities of ethyl (contained in thimerosal)- versus methylmercury, FDA considered ethyl- and methyl-mercury as equivalent in its risk evaluation.”
“Blood levels of mercury did not exceed safety guidelines for methyl mercury for all infants in these studies.”
“The FDA is continuing its efforts to reduce the exposure of infants, children, and pregnant women to mercury from various sources.”
Contains Table of Thimerosal Content of Vaccines Routinely Recommended for Children 6 Years of Age and Younger

National Institute of Health
“Today, routinely recommended licensed pediatric vaccines currently being manufactured for the U.S. market are either thimerosal-free or contain markedly reduced amounts of thimerosal. An exception to this is the influenza vaccine, which is available in a variety of formulations, some of which contain thimerosal, while others do not. Thimerosal remains in some vaccines given to adults and adolescents, as well as some pediatric vaccines not on the Recommended Childhood and Adolescent Immunization Schedule.”

Categories
race Rule: Cover The Topic

Blacks, Police & the Minerva Research Initiative: The Wrong Kind of ‘Solution’ Unreported

This blog is a follow-on to the previous one. The two, together, form a pair of bookends that give a ‘big picture’ clarity to how policies contribute to the deadly confrontations between blacks and the police, and the peril of underreporting them.

The Minneapolis Miracle blog covered the media’s failure to report on solutions to the underlying issues of economic inequality and concentrated poverty, solutions that could, at least in part, preempt crises that lead to police confrontations. This blog covers the equally underreported subject of programs aimed at containing the fallout from those crises once they’ve hit.

Anticipating civil breakdown from economic crises, climate change, resource depletion or some other cause, the Minerva Research Initiative was created in 2008, by the Pentagon, with the overall purpose of studying social unrest, how to detect it, and how to manage it. It consists of a set of Department of Defense programs and university funded projects. Among it’s objectives are: identify regions of potential destabilisation around the world or in the US, track impending threats, and define the line that seperates peaceful activism from political violence or terrorism.

I learned about Minerva from reports on RT’s Breaking The Set in the summer of 2014 when Abby Martin interviewed international security expert, Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, about his Guardian piece, Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown.

One of those reports, in the video below, is from August 22, 2014, two weeks after the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, MO. Though both the RT interviews and The Guardian article focus on Minerva’s research on destabilisation contexts other than excessive police force against blacks, Dr. Ahmed cites the Ferguson protests as an example of “the kind of threats the DoD is looking at.”

(No ads; Minerva report 14:50 minutes in)

Regarding to the line separating protesting and terrorism, the report includes a Dept. of Homeland Security study on the Arizona Occupy movement. Dr. Ahmed says: “DHS looked at Twitter posts from Arizona Occupy to see where the next threat could come from. It wasn’t coming from terrorism, it was coming from civil disobediance.” Citing the inability of any of his sources in the program to differentiate peaceful protestors from terrorists, plus Minerva’s own statement: “A lack of violent rhetoric is insufficient to classify an organization as pacifist.”, Ahmed opines: ”The boundaries have been blurred to the point that this isn’t really about terrorism, it’s about political dissent.”

On Minerva’s funding of university programs, Ahmed identifies a Cornell Univ. researcher who studied “social movement mobilisation and contagions” for the DoD, as the same person who conducted the “Facebook emotional contagion study”. In the Facebook experiment, news feeds to members sites were controlled for positive vs. negative content, then subsequent postings by those members were analyzed to see if they had been affected. The experiment caused an uproar and was stopped. After initial denials of funding, the DoD admitted they had funded it “in part”.

In the RT video below from July 2, 2014, Ahmed expounds on and bemoans the militarization of social research in universties, saying it prevents objective, independent social science scholarship which is important input to policy. This fascinating interview also covers efforts to dilute the findings in the summary of the UN climate change report, more on protestors vs. terrorists, and other topics.

(No ads)

You may think that some of these programs are needed in certain cases, given what’s happening in the world. Maybe they are. But I write about Minerva and the Minneapolis Miracle because they seem to also highlight what is wrong with America: We are not acting responsibly and preventing preventable crises for the general welfare, and then we are making the cold calculations to manage the fallout from that inaction.

In other words, we’re getting it exactly backwards. And the News Media isn’t reporting it. (A TVNews Archive* search of all 24 of its networks produced 0 hits).

Doesn’t the public have the right to decide that policies be made and resources allocated to preempt catastrophes on the front end, rather than engage in damage control on the back end?

Stating the obvious, to the News Media (sans RT): Cover the Topic of programs like Minerva!

Anybody with me?

About RT & Breaking the Set:  Breaking the Set (now defunct) was a half hour show on the RT America channel, which is part of the Russian funded Russia Today network. There has been controversy over the question of whether American journalists working for RT America have true editorial freedom (click on Wikipedia links).  After Russia intervened in the Ukraine, one news anchor resigned claiming she was pressured to tow the line for Russia in her reporting on the invasion. Shortly after, Abby Martin and Tom Hartman (The Big Picture), both of whom had expressed disapproval of Russia’s actions, vehemently asserted that they have total editorial freedom for their shows.

From my viewing experience (mostly Breaking the Set & The Big Picture), RT America has a decidedly progressive/activist bent.  The real value for me, however, is the content.  Both shows rely heavily on interviews with credible experts often seen on other channels, but report stories & points of view that never get covered on those channels.

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*Note: The TVNews Archive database may have data gaps, though none were uncovered in the use of it for this blog.  [intlink id=”1347″ type=”page” anchor=”TVNewsArch_CCGaps”](more info)[/intlink]

Additional References:
[intlink id=”1347″ type=”page” anchor=”TVNewsArch_NW2014″]TVNews Archive Network List[/intlink]