Science, journalism, balance, shills, again

May 3: minor wording

(related to previous posts' exchanges with local "balance" advocates)

Mother Jones has a special project on global warming online, As the world burns. It includes a Chris Mooney article on ExxonMobil's funding of the "skeptics". Excerpts:

Tech Central Station (link)...received $95,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003
...
In 1998, the New York Times exposed an API [American Petroleum Institute] memo... The document stated: "Victory will be achieved when...recognition of uncertainty becomes part of the 'conventional wisdom.'" It’s hard to resist a comparison with a famous Brown and Williamson tobacco company memo from the late 1960s, which observed: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy."

From Snowed by Ross Gelbspan:

Why the lack of major media attention to one of the biggest stories of this century? The reasons have to do with the culture of newsrooms, the misguided application of journalistic balance, the very human tendency to deny the magnitude of so overwhelming a threat, and, last though not least, a decade-long campaign of deception, disinformation, and, at times, intimidation by the fossil fuel lobby to keep this issue off the public radar screen.
...a prime tactic of the fossil fuel lobby [has] centered on a clever manipulation of the ethic of journalistic balance.

Quote from Upton Sinclair:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.*

Related, It is a bit like farming - Effect Measure on Adriane Fugh-Berman's article (PDF) exposing pharmaceutical companies' "ghost authorship" of medical articles and other such strategies. They're planning way ahead. Includes this nugget from A.F-B:

Companies regularly fund articles and talks that never mention the targeted drug, but are meant to disadvantage the competition. One of my colleagues was paid handsomely by a drug company to give a hundred talks a year presenting negative data on alternative therapies, a competitor for an infinitesimal share of the market dominated by the company’s blockbuster drug....there would be no reason for the audience to suspect that a talk that mentioned no pharmaceuticals was funded by a pharmaceutical company.

And the punch line -

These efforts may begin years before a pharmaceutical is approved for sale. It is a bit like farming; weeds are removed, the soil prepared, perhaps a cover crop planted, to be tilled under before seeds are sown in the receptive soil...

We'd like to award last week's halo (they improve with age, and we're late) to Adriane Fugh-Berman for bringing these industry practices to light. "Sunlight is...the best of disinfectants" - thank you, Dr. Fugh-Berman, for your contributions toward disinfecting medicine.