Area Customer Service Representative Not Interested in Call.....

Alamogordo, NM-When waiter Art Thriftwhistle called the customer service line for the Alamogordo Daily Inquisitor last week to complain about not having received his copy of the Sunday paper, he expected that his phone call would be considered important. But what Thriftwhistle soon discovered would rock the sleepy New Mexico town to its core and may bring down the local media goliath.

"The customer service lady was totally not interested in my phone call," Thriftwhistle explained. "She put me on hold three times, and when she finally talked to me all she did was try to convince me to subscribe to the full week of papers, as if her only goal was to get more money out of me. I just want the Sunday paper. Don't you understand, I just want the Sunday paper!"

Thriftwhistle is calling for a boycott of the town paper until improvements in customer service are made. "I'd like to know that my call is important to them, is that so wrong? How about having a recording tell me that in a pleasant female voice while I'm on hold? But not just once either. I'd like to be reminded every twenty to thirty seconds. Also, I'd like to have the conversation recorded so that future customer service represenatives might benefit from it as a learning tool."

But company leadership doesn't appear to be concerned. "Frankly I just don't see what the fuss is all about," Daily Inquisitor owner Maynard Hearst explained. "So what if we don't think your call is important? I didn't get to be where I am, running a newspaper in a town of over thirty-five thousand people for nearly eight decades, worrying about customer service."

Hearst, who will turn 97-years-old this month, has lived through a number of minor skirmishes with the readership over the years. "Oooh, what are they going to do? The internet? Let's see them just try and get their news, sports and weather all from the internet. They won't last a week and neither will this internet, whatever that is. It's some kind of telegraph service right?"

Does Local News Coverage of Health and Science Do More Harm Than Good?.....

Tonight I stumbled across yet another unhelpful local news piece on the manufactroversy of the already thoroughly disproven link between childhood immunizations and autism. As expected, it followed beautifully the standard media outline for these types of reports, including the ubiquitous heart-wrenching anecdote of a healthy young child being robbed from his parents by autism caused by evil vaccines. This was followed by a meager discussion of the dangers of not vaccinating, and one very awkward quote from a local pediatrician and vaccine supporter, but the societal damage that I feel comes from these kinds of reports was already done.

The way I found this article was by clicking on the image of a dripping syringe next to the words "Do Childhood Vaccines Do More Harm Than Good?" prominently placed on the home page of the KSHB-TV website. Clearly this was a purposeful attempt at fear mongering to drum up readers. I guess a report titled "Vaccines: They Really Help People and Are Extremely Safe" wouldn't draw too many people in. If these reporters were worth their salt, they would include anecdotes from the parents who didn't lose their children to vaccine preventable illnesses like Haemophilus meningitis or Poliomyelitis, and who were satisfied with their children being vaccinated. There certainly are a heck of a lot more of them out there than the small minority of folks who have drunk the anti-vaccine kool-aid. But maybe just leaving anecdotes out of health and science reporting alltogether would be best.

After reading this report, all that many readers will take home is the sad story about a little boy damaged by vaccines and that vaccines might not be safe for their child. Some of them are the people that don't understand the useless nature of uncontrolled anecdotes or the fallacy of post hoc reasoning, or that are merely looking for powerful stories to support their already deeply held conviction. Some may not even read the entire article or even dismiss the discussion of the benefit of immunizations out of hand. All a conspiracy they'll mutter. It's clear to me that these bullshit pieces of pseudojournalism aren't helping anyone though. They are spreading the contagion of anti-vaccination belief, something which has already led to illness and death that was entirely preventable.

The most telling quote comes from the autistic child's mother. She explains that "The timing was too coincidental to ignore and I definitely believe in my heart the vaccinations triggered his autism,". There isn't anything someone like me, or even Paul Offit himself, could ever tell this woman that would convince her otherwise. At least it isn't very likely. And while I don't blame this poor grieving mother for being ill-equipped to critically wrap her brain around her child's diagnosis, I do blame the media for using her situation for the manipulation of readers via another's loss. Her story isn't news and we don't need to know about it. It serves no purpose other than to mislead and confuse.

More Bigfoot Fluff on the Local News.....

This one stings a little. I love Tennessee, especially the capital city of Nashville. It is a beautiful and vibrant place to live, even for someone like me, an atheist who doesn't particularly care for country music, and I spent three of the best years of my life there. I have nothing but fond memories of the place, and miss it dearly but, alas, I must admit that it fares no better than other cities when it comes to local news reporting of pseudoscience.

Today, WSMV Nashville brings us a brief report and an accompanying video covering the discovery of a "mysterious" footprint by a retired builder from Cookeville, Tennessee. The footprint, which is claimed by owner Harold Jackson to be thousands of years old, is a mess that barely resembles something made by a hominid species. There is the faint outline of what could be toes, and an indentation that appears to be a heal, but the whole thing might very easily be just another example of pareidolia. I think it is of too poor a quality to be a hoax but that is also a consideration. And though the report qualifies Jackson as an amateur archaeologist, he is quoted saying that he doesn't "know anything about archaeology or anything".

The title of the report, "Scientists Interested In Large Footprint Discovery", hardly counts as news, but in this day and age, where outlets jump at any fluff piece involving pseudoscience or the paranormal, it isn't too suprising. Nor is the fact that the only scientist specifially named as being interested in the discovery is oft quoted Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum, whose skeptical take on the recent Bigfoot corpse hoax was paraded around the news circuit as if it was some kind of unique opinion that required being a "Bigfoot expert" to hold, and whose best evidence for the existence of the creature is the argument ad populi that so many outdoorsmen and hunters can't all be wrong. Yes, Meldrum is a skeptic like Larry King is a skeptic and he employs critical thinking in regards to Bigfoot like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did to fairies. Besides, calling oneself a scientific expert on a fictional entity is dubious at best, even if you have a PhD in anatomy to go along with your doctorate in confirmation bias.

The report sinks even lower into pseudojournalism when it is revealed, as if it is in some way meaningful, that Channel 4 has yet to even speak with Meldrum, or to reach Tennessee state archaeologist Nick Fielder for comment on the footprint. It isn't news that you didn't talk to somebody. You don't get credit for not doing your job when it comes to reporting. I have no doubt that lots of famous and important people are interested in whether or not Bigfoot exists, and many reputable scientists would be qualified to discuss this finding, but just mentioning the name of one is obviously thrown in to lend more credibility to this worthless bit of fluff.

Here We Go Again, Another Chupacabra Sighting in Texas.....

Stop the presses! Somebody sent in another amateur video of a long debunked mystery! This time, a local news station out of Dallas-Fort Worth has released video footage of "the mysterious creature known as the chupacabra" provided by a south Texas Sheriff's Deputy who apparantly doubles as an expert in canine kinesiology.

I watched the video dumbfounded, wondering why these people jumped to the odd conclusion that the creature on film was something that, at least according to Wikipedia, is a "heavy creature, the size of a small bear, with a row of spines reaching from the neck to the base of the tail" that drinks goat blood, may be an alien, and can hop 20 feet at a time. Upon further investigation, I now know that this so-called cryptid, or creature that has been suggested to exist but probably only lives in the cerebrum of lazy minded true believers, has recently been suggested by a minority of chupacabrists to actually be some kind of hairless dog-like reptile.

A year ago, in the small town of Cuero, TX, a woman claimed to have found the head of the "mythical bloodsucking chupacabra" and was keeping it safe in her freezer. She simply wanted to preserve it so that modern science might "get to the bottom of its ancestry through DNA testing" but I'm sure that the 15-minutes of fame and the money she made selling t-shirts to believers all over the world had nothing to do with it. She had to go to the local media to uncover the truth instead of simply contacting a local university's zoology department or similar entity.

But the local media did end up providing a sample to Texas State researchers, who after performing DNA analysis and comparison announced that the "goat sucker" was a coyote, much to the chagrin of the San Antonio news station that financed the testing I'm sure. This information somehow either didn't trickle down to the station broadcasting the new live footage of the "chupacabra" or was just ignored. They act as if the beast is a total mystery and proof of the chupacabra. I guess a coyote with canine scabies (mange) or some other skin disorder wouldn't garner as much attention.

Stuff Believers Like: #4 The Local News.....

While watching the local news one evening a few years back, I sat in disbelief as a bubbly young woman excitedly reported on an amazing occurence. Sadly, the story, though covered as if an accurate and newsworthy description of reality, sounded like one of my own Onionesque satirical posts: Local Man's Beard Stumps Scientists or something along those lines. "When area farmer Billy Bob Jenkins* awoke one cold Fall morning, his life was forever changed," I might have written. "He was shocked to find that his once clean-shaven face was partially covered by hair growth in the shape of a cross on his left cheek. He then basked in the glow of the miraculous sign from God and called the local news station to spread the glorious word."

As I inspected the man's stubbled face during the many close-up views provided by the camera operator, and the perfectly shaped cross there upon it, it was abundantly clear that this was no miracle in the supernatural sense of the word, nor was it even an example of pareidolia, the false perception of a meaningful pattern within what is merely random noise. I guess you could say that Occam's was not the only razor applied to this man's face that morning. Unfortunately, like so many similar credulous fluff pieces on the local news, the claim of supernatural influence on the natural world was met without the slightest hint of critical evaluation.

The absence of rational reporting which dominates most forms of mass media, but particularly with smaller local news outlets, is a frequent source of delight and ammunition to the holder of a variety of beliefs. Rarely does a week go by in most locales where there isn't a report lending credence to some form of pseudoscience or supernatural phenomena, misinterpreting the findings of published scientific studies, or inappropriately announcing findings of preliminary studies which haven't yet undergone peer review. I find it difficult to even refer to the majority of what is out there as actual reporting to be honest, for true journalism has standards far higher than what is being produced in most markets.

The offenders out there that able to cause the most damage due to their reach, the CNNs and Fox News type outlets, are failing miserably these days as less qualified journalists are being assigned the science and health beat and as, in my opinion, the seepage of irrational thinking into mainstream consciousness is becoming more torrential. In the world of print media it is even worse secondary to hemorrhaging budgets. It isn't pretty but all hope is not lost. The recent Time Magazine article on the subect of vaccine safety comes to mind as a stellar example of how journalism can be done right when it comes to controversial scientific topics. Unfortunately, until the situation improves consistently, believers will be able to cite news reports as evidence for their particular brand of irrationality.

*Name changed to protect identity