Reporters and editors are supposed to be cynical questioning people by nature, yet it’s amazing how often many of them take the government’s word as final.

If you read the articles Don Neeper links to (following my previous posting) that have published information about the case involving Lori McGrath’s raw milk, you see that small-town papers or web news sites simply publish the release from New York state authorities as is. I’ve probably read a dozen of these kinds of articles, in small papers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and elsewhere, and I’ve never seen any evidence that the accused farmers are asked for comment.

Journalism 101 teaches would-be reporters that before mentioning any company or individual being accused of wrongdoing, you must at least try to contact a company rep or the individual for comment.

Is it any wonder most people share Steve Bemis’ cynicism about the media? I can see how easy it is to suspect their biases, but in reality it’s likely a simple problem of laziness. Small papers tend to be understaffed to begin with, so as long as no one is questioning you, the editor, about a topic, you keep publishing what the government feeds you to cheaply fill up news holes. And the state agencies have been feeding this stuff about raw milk for a long time.

Speaking of trusting, or mistrusting, government sources, I keep returning to the document produced by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in response to the request from Pete Kennedy of the Weston A. Price Foundation, under the federal Freedom of Information Act. And each time I return to it, I become more confused.

I was prompted to review it yet again when a reader wrote me expressing concern that the more recent numbers for raw milk illness seemed to “not reflect well on raw dairy.” She pointed to statistics for 2002, showing 180 illnesses for raw milk, more than the 178 for pasteurized milk.

I decided to ask Mark McAfee of Organic Pastures Dairy Co. what he makes of such numbers, and he said that he has seen individual CDC reports that sometimes attribute to raw milk illnesses actually caused by milk that was intended for pasteurization but that for any number of reasons—pasteurization equipment failed, or the milk was mistakenly not put through—didn’t get pasteurized and then was consumed by individuals. “There is raw milk intended for human consumption and there is raw milk intended for pasteurization," he said. "They are very different from each other.”

So when I went back to the CDC data for yet another look, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. In the section of the data set aside for raw milk illnesses, the third column, for the “food” type, shows sudden changes beginning in 1998. Rather than saying “raw milk” or “raw goat’s milk” or “raw, unpasteurized milk,” as it does prior to 1998, it switches to “”other milk, unpasteurized,” “1% milk, unpasteurized,” “whole milk, unpasteurized.” Hmmm.

In fact, from 1998 to 2005, there’s not a single mention of “raw milk.” Did the CDC intentionally change its terminology for raw milk, or is it mixing together the two categories Mark refers to?

Is it time for another FOIA request to break down the data more clearly? Or could we even trust that information?