The Jayson Blair Book Tour

Two articles are out by journalists who have interviewed Jayson Blair on his book tour. The first is a NY Newsday article by Brian Lehrer, host of "The Brian Lehrer Show," which airs weekdays at 10 a.m. on WNYC radio. Brian read Jayson's new book and found it "a literary and moral mess". Why then did he interview Blair? It posed an ethical issue - on the one hand, interviewing a legitimate news maker, on the other, publicizing a man who was attempting to capitalize on his journalistic crimes. From the article:

"I came out of the experience less ambivalent than I had gone in. I felt that a public purpose had been served by having Blair on. Unfortunately, it was served mostly by watching a man further sink his reputation, with his words and demeanor. I found Blair too flaky to learn much from him about "how things work at America's most important newspaper," further casting doubt on the value of his book. That was lesson enough for me to have made the interview worth my time. I hoped my listeners agreed."

This is a good article overall for those interested in journalistic ethics. The other article is an interesting look at the personality of Blair from an interview on his book tour by Debra Pickett, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, in which she documents two Blair lies in the interview itself. Says Pickett, "If I could catch him so easily, how could it take the vaunted New York Times editorial staff so long?" Worth a look.  

More on the Washington Press Corps

Salon.com has an opinion article challenging the Washington press corps to start turning a critical eye to Bush like they have done with Kerry. Coverage of the latest disclosures in Richard Clarke's new book has been of criticism from the Bush campaign. Although this is legitimate news, there should be more follow-up with pointed questions to the president regarding his decision to invade Iraq. For example: (from the article) "Condoleezza Rice (on "Meet the Press") and Richard Clarke (in his new book) have said that the war in Iraq was part of your response to 9/11. How do you justify going to war against a country that, according to your own intelligence agencies, had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington?"

Election Update - The Issues

Tired of media coverage of the campaign? Tired of the back-and-forth negative attacks, arguments over whether Condoleeza Rice should testify, same-sex marriage, and missing national guard service? Lost in what the media calls news is a discussion of where the candidates stand on real issues. The fine folks at The Campaign Desk have been watching the candidates closely and provide this article - a snapshot of where the candidates stand on real issues like education, the environment, and social security. They run down the candidates' proposals without editorial, and without fluff. Take a look and bookmark the site if you would like to keep abreast.

Is it Alzheimer's Disease, or Mad Cow Disease?

For whatever reasons, we Americans do not seem to get good information on problems with our food supply. Some information gets out, like the presence of lead in tuna or the random product recall, but other facts remain underreported, like the percentage of Alzheimer diagnoses that are actually Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow disease. A friend of mine pointed out this article from activist Jim Hightower. In the past twenty years, the number of Alzheimer's cases has been on the rise and is now the eighth-leading cause of death. From the Hightower article:

Autopsy studies done at Yale and elsewhere show that some percentage of people diagnosed with Alzheimer's were misdiagnosed. They actually had another brain-wasting disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and thousands of these cases might well be a variety of CJD caused by mad cow disease-infected meat that the victims ate years earlier.

Yes, this means that mad cow disease in humans, which the beef industry has adamantly insisted does not exist at all in America, could actually be widespread and already killing people under a pseudonym.

Hightower is certainly not the only source on this. Whether or not CJD is widespread is not known since our own Center for Disease Control has not been studying the link thoroughly, but this article from United Press International, discusses the latest studies that show that it is indeed possible to acquire CJD from eating infected beef.

There have not been any cases of vCJD linked to consumption of meat from U.S. cattle, but there have been clusters of cases of sporadic CJD in certain areas of the country in recent years: southern New Jersey, 2000-2003; Lehigh, Pa., 1986-90; Allentown, Pa., 1989-92; Tampa, Fla., 1996-97; Oregon, 2001-02; and, Nassau County, N.Y., 1999-2000.

These clusters have raised concern because the sporadic form of the disease is thought to be so rare -- most experts put the prevalence at about 1 per million population -- that several cases occurring in the same area is out of the norm.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has a CJD surveillance program, but it has been criticized as being inadequate by some experts and consumer groups. The CDC has refused requests to require physicians to report all CJD cases. Instead, the agency relies on death certificates to get a count of people dying from the disease.

The agency has acknowledged it only conducts autopsies on less than half of all the CJD cases that occur each year. Autopsies are the only way to positively confirm a CJD case.

In addition, at least four autopsy studies have shown that anywhere from 5 percent to 30 percent of the 4.5 million Alzheimer's cases and thousands of dementia cases in the United States may have been misdiagnosed and are actually CJD.

In one study done in 1989, Laura Manuelidis, section chief of surgery in the neuropathology department at Yale University, found 13 percent of Alzheimer's patients actually had CJD. Another study conducted at the University of Pennsylvania found 6 percent of dementia patients diagnosed with dementia were really suffering from CJD.

The CDC clearly needs to do more. For more information, see the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Foundation website, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America website (specifically, their News Archive article, New Form of Mad Cow Prion Discovered), the CDC website, or get involved through the Consumer's Union letter writing campaign to congress here.

Zapatero No Coward

This CNN article was forwarded to me by a friend. Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has pledged not to give in to terrorists, bristling at the notion that the Spanish are "cowards" when it comes to facing terrorism. The comments were in response to overwhelmong charges in the international press that by electing Zapatero, the Spanish were giving in to terrorism. "Not so fast" reports Thomas Greene in The Register. This election result is more likely the result of an electorate (some 80% against Spain's support of the US invasion of Iraq) reacting to the massive spin war immediately following the attack. From the Register article:

Within hours of the atrocity, the Popular Party struggled to focus the blame on Basque separatist outfit ETA, while the Socialists struggled to pin it on al-Qaeda. The attack quickly spawned a political spin contest, though neither had much factual basis for their assertions. Aznar's message, that ETA had struck, was calculated to garner support for his tough-on-terror stance. Zapatero's message, that al-Qaeda had struck, was calculated to persuade voters that Spain had stupidly picked a fight with people it had no beef with, and was paying the price.

[T]his is no victory for terrorism. It is, rather, a defeat for democracy brought about by the cheap politicization of national security. One candidate promises to keep us safe from mean, angry people; another promises to keep us safe from the ineptitude of the first. National security too often becomes a search for what people wish to hear, followed by a crowd-pleasing performance enacted for political advantage.

We may never know. One thing is for sure, suggestions that terrorists will now try the same in the U.S. to defeat Bush are nonsense. Anyone in the world who has read any of the outpouring of articles since 9/11 would know that such an attack would only give the election to Bush.

Another thing - the article was sent to me pointing out the Prime Minister's uncanny resemblence to Mister Bean (no commentary intended).

USA Today's Investigation of Former Reporter Jack Kelley

USA Today reports on the status of their seven week investigation of former reporter Jack Kelley's work. The group of journalists commissioned to investigate Kelley's work read about 720 stories that Kelley filed from 1993 through 2003, and narrowed them down to about 150 that were flagged for closer scrutiny. According to the USA Today article, "an extensive examination of about 100 of the 720 stories uncovered evidence that found Kelley's journalistic sins were sweeping and substantial. The evidence strongly contradicted Kelley's published accounts that he spent a night with Egyptian terrorists in 1997; met a vigilante Jewish settler named Avi Shapiro in 2001; watched a Pakistani student unfold a picture of the Sears Tower and say, 'This one is mine,' in 2001; visited a suspected terrorist crossing point on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in 2002; interviewed the daughter of an Iraqi general in 2003; or went on a high-speed hunt for Osama bin Laden in 2003." USA Today's extensive investigation is professional, thorough, and very public as the website has links to various stories regarding the investigation, and a sidebar describing how the investigation is being conducted. Suspect articles in the archive have also been flagged.

Kelley spent his entire 21-year career at USA Today and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize five times, but the current editor Karen Jurgensen said the newspaper will withdraw all Kelley's stories that were submitted for consideration. Publisher Craig Moon said, "As an institution, we failed our readers by not recognizing Jack Kelley's problems. For that I apologize. In the future, we will make certain that an environment is created in which abuses will never again occur." Pulitzer Prize winner John Hanchette writing in Editor and Publisher however makes the argument that the editors bear some of the blame.

In a related story in Editor and Publisher (taken from AP), Jayson Blair's new book is a flop (so is Stephen Glass').