In een krant in British Columbia haalt een journaliste, naar aanleiding van een recent, alles behalve objectief onderzoek, fel uit naar de naïviteit waarmee in het verleden de journalistiek de informatie door de tabaksindustrie voor zoete koek aannamen.
Alles was gelogen, beweert ze, en wij journalisten hebben van die tijd geleerd.
Er komt een golf van reacties op het artikel op gang: de journalistiek heeft niets geleerd. Immers, tegenwoordig laten ze zich net zo makkelijk misleiden door de gevestigde belangen in de medische wereld die zich schuldig maken aan precies datgene wat de journaliste de tabaksindustrie verwijt.
De journaliste:
The study shows, without any doubt, that many of us were badly deluded in examining what might considered one of the primary public health topics of the past couple of decades – the health consequences of exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke. The inevitable conclusion from the researchers’ work, in fact, is that tobacco giant Philip Morris went to a huge amount of trouble to influence journalists to present the tobacco industry’s viewpoint on the issue – and met with remarkable success in return.
[…]
The researchers, from such highly-respected institutions as the Mayo Clinic, not only examined the news stories that appeared in the print media on the subject, but also reviewed thousands of previously secret internal tobacco company documents made public as part of the giant lawsuit settlement in the U.S.
Een reactie:
I find strange that Big Anti tobacco is calling the kettle black, For over a decade the public funded self appointed “constituents” of taxpayer funds have been the most deveious, dishonest,and illegal lobbyists that the United states has ever had the misfortune to deal with. The whole anti smoking and second hand smoke canard is based on the most fallacious and political scientific studies that could be bought with public funds, Dr.Richard Hurt from the Mayo Clinic nicotine dependancy Center leads the pack of rsacals as nothing more than a professional public grant recipient that plays tobacco politics with cancer researc funds from the NIH. Check out his study funding in the JAMA. His studies have nothing to do with cancer and everything to do with the politics of tobacco raiding parties in collusion with states and Attorneys generals. Is there any wonder why president Bush wants his OMB to have legitimate scientists peer review every study paid for by the public to make sure that citizens are paying for sound science and Not the scientific junk now being paid for by citizens and then have the junk science used against citizens by Big Anti Tobacco. It is ludacrist to say that Big tobacco usees the media as mercinaries when billions of anti smoking advertising has been divvied up between the networks who in turn broadcast every anti tobacco pr newswire press release that big anti tobacco can conjure up.
