I had lunch today with an old media-writer friend I had fallen out of touch with for a number of years. We were reminiscing about the old days more years ago than I want to think about when we worked for competing wire services, and we used to race to the nearest pay phones to call in our stories. We were also updating each other on our careers. He told me what he was up to, I asked him some questions, and then it was my turn. I described the columns I’ve written for BusinessWeek.com about raw milk, and the blog I’ve been updating, focusing heavily on the same subject. When I was done, he looked at me quizically, and asked, "So, how are the kids?"
I’m recounting this story because it isn’t the first time I’ve had this reaction–in fact, it’s actually kind of a pattern. My media friends haven’t quite said it, but I can tell in the looks and the absence of questions or comments that they think I’m a bit loony. I should add that a notable exception to this pattern has been BusinessWeek.com. The editors have been quite supportive of my efforts till now.
But I was reminded again in the last couple days of the difficulties most of the media have with this subject when I saw an article in the Rochester Democrate & Chronicle, with the headline, "Raw Milk Can Pose Health Hazard". The article is done in a Q&A format, with a supposed reader question: "Is raw milk more nutritious than pasteurized milk?" One paragraph is given over to the claims of "proponents" that raw milk is helpful in combating certain medical conditions and that its calcium is absorbed better than from pasteurized milk. Thereafter come five paragraphs slamming raw milk as dangerous (the Russian roulette quote from FDA) and that all benefits claimed for unpasteurized milk are unproven.
I wrote in a previous post Oct. 15 my sense that reporters are often constrained by their training to write a "balanced" story, without appreciating that in the process of quoting government fear mongers, the stories inevitably become unbalanced. There’s something else at work to influence reporters as well, I’ve come to conclude: a disbelief that regulators and law enforcement officials can be as arbitrary and abusive as they’ve turned out to be in California, Michigan, and Ohio, among other places. And when you don’t fully understand the subject yourself, the tendency is to trust the authorities.
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