Day: February 7, 2005

Frank Lockwood on the James Watt Affair

Okay, I’m certainly tired of the James Watt/Bill Moyers dustup, and I suppose some of my readers are getting a bit annoyed, but its almost over.

I spent about an hour on Superbowl Sunday (go Patriots!) talking to Frank Lockwood. Lockwood is a reporter with the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, but is on leave at the moment while he is Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan (which is about 90 miles from where I live).

Anyway, Lockwood’s article on the Watt affair can be found here.

Rich Lowry: Conservatives vs. Honest Reporting

Rich Lowry provides a good example of how to lie through omission in this article about AIDS testing.

For Lowry this is a case of those evil civil libertarians vs. babies with HIV. But spending five minutes with Google completely punctures Lowry’s main claim, that mandatory testing of pregnant women is a necessary condition for lowering the number of babies born with AIDS.

Lowry notes that in 1996, New York City passed a law that health care providers would have to routinely test women for HIV and inform them if they were HIV positive so that measurements could be taken to reduce the risk of the infant suffering from HIV as well. I’m not aware of much about the New York City law, but similar laws elsewhere do allow the mother to refuse such tests, but few do. Such testing, of course, relies on the premise that a significant number of mothers who are HIV positive will not know they have the disease and will not request such testing for social reasons, so this is the only way to accomplish this task.

Lowry writes of the New York City experiment,

According to the New York Times, in 1990 there were 321 newborns infected with HIV in New York City. In 2003 there were five. A decade ago many pregnant mothers didn’t know they were HIV-positive. They weren’t urged to get tested, and so they couldn’t take drugs that would make it less likely their babies would be infected. Newborns were tested, but — incredibly — in blind tests, meaning the mothers wouldn’t be informed of the results. The mother wouldn’t know to get treatment for her child or herself.

He then contrasts this with those civil libertarian nutsos in California, especially in Los Angeles,

Then-Rep., now Sen. Tom Coburn pushed legislation similar to Mayersohn’s at the federal level in the 1990s, but was frustrated by the same forces that opposed Mayersohn. Consequentially, the testing policy varies from state to state. Nationally, the rate of infants infected with HIV has declined, but it has not been stamped out. California — where lunatic obsessions still reign supreme — has resolutely resisted the New York approach. In 2002, the Los Angeles Times reported that cases of HIV among children were actually increasing.

So let’s ask one more time: Do we want healthy babies or not?

Okay, the first clue that something is bogus here is the bait-and-switch. When he’s talking about New York City he’s talking about new-born infants with HIV. When he switches to Los Angeles (and the article he’s apparently referring to is definitely about an increase in Los Angeles County), suddenly he’s talking about children.

The second obvious clue that something is up is that he talks vaguely about an increase without giving any absolute numbers. So lets look at the infant AIDS numbers in Los Angeles courtesy of the LA Public Health Department (PDF — Non-AIDS signifies children who are HIV+ but do not yet meet the CDC definition of having AIDS),

Year AIDS Non-AIDS
2000 2 3
2001 3 5
2002 0 3
2003 0 6

Since Los Angeles County is significantly larger than New York City, it has apparently experienced exactly the sort of tremendous drop in infants born with AIDS that New York has. If we are only going to use these two cities as our datapoints, it appears that semi-mandatory routine testing does not really make a difference.

So why did the Los Angeles Times report that AIDS cases among children were increasing in the county? That report was entirely about older children, not infants. Most of the children in that report — there were 18 total — had either been born outside of Los Angeles County, where mandatory testing wouldn’t have made a difference (several were, in fact, born in Mexico) or had contracted AIDS from blood transfusions.

So I guess the question here is do we want honest reporting of the results of mandatory AIDS testing or not? Lowry’s implicit answer is a resounding no.

Sources:

Civil Libertarians vs. Public Health. Rich Lowry, National Review, February 4, 2005.

Pediatric Spectrum of HIV Disease (PSD) Annual Summary Report, 1988-2003 (PDF). Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, September 2004.

HIV Cases on Rise Among Los Angeles Children. Charles Ornstein, Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2002.

Grist Does the Right Thing

Grist Magazine has done exactly the right thing in responding to the questions raised here and elsewhere about the quote Glenn Scherer attributed to James Watt in an October column for that magazine. The column no longer includes the offending paragraphs in its main text, but at the end of the article this note appears,

*[Correction, 04 Feb 2005: The asterisked section of the article, above, originally read:

But a scripture-based justification for anti-environmentalism — when was the last time you heard a conservative politician talk about that?

Odds are it was in 1981, when President Reagan’s first secretary of the interior, James Watt, told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. “God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back,” Watt said in public testimony that helped get him fired.

Today’s Christian fundamentalist politicians are more politically savvy than Reagan’s interior secretary was; you’re unlikely to catch them overtly attributing public-policy decisions to private religious views. But their words and actions suggest that many share Watt’s beliefs. Like him, many Christian fundamentalists feel that concern for the future of our planet is irrelevant, because it has no future.

In fact, Watt did not make such a statement to Congress. The quotation is attributed to Watt in the book Setting the Captives Free by Austin Miles, but Miles does not write that it was made before Congress. Grist regrets this reporting error and is aggressively looking into the accuracy of this quotation.]

Very nice and effective way to handle this.

I spent about an hour talking this weekened with a gentleman who is doing a story on the whole Watt/Scherer/Moyers fiasco.

One of the things I emphasized is that I would hope that newspapers, both online and off, would learn from this lesson and others and realize that bogus quotes that end up getting recycled, reused and embellished generally share similar features, including bogus or completley lacking attribution, and that quotes that are really outrageous and just fit someone’s preconceptions too snugly need to be fact -checked.

It’s not like it takes a lot of time to plug a quote into Lexis-Nexis and see if it’s ever been referenced before, and quickly look at those references to see if they’re credible.

I think there also needs to be a much better vetting process for op-eds. I’ve found 8 or 9 major blunders of bogus quotes like this over the past couple years, and they’ve all been in op-eds. Op-eds are like a massive backdoor to slip in bougus materials in an otherwise well-run news organization.

Powerline Points Out Another Bogus Quote Moyers Used

Powerline picks up on the whole James Watt bogus quote that I’ve been writing about the past week. Powerline also notes that Moyers misquoted Zell Miller.

Moyers’ piece claimed,

The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: “The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land.” He seemed to be relishing the thought.

And why not? There’s a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true…. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, “to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible?

Look, those Christians are so nutty, they want famines. Except Miller was not talking about a literal famine. As Powerline notes,

But the quote attributed to Senator Miller had nothing whatever to do with the environment. Here is the full quote, as recited by Senator Miller: “The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land. Not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord.” The subject of Miller’s speech was not environmental policy, but Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction.

All from the same Bill Moyers who a couple years ago was whining about the threat that media-misinformed voters posed to our democracy. But this is pretty prophetic,

It often happens in democratic countries that many men who have the desire or directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each other the need to associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each other and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been presented to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are immediately in the shadows finally meet each other and unite.

Take out the word “newspaper” and substitute “weblog” and you’ve got a perfect description of the current state of affairs. Powerline is almost certainly correct that pre-Internet these two small misquotes would have almost certainly never been corrected, and Moyers would have gotten away with bersmirching both Watt and Miller.

Victim of Animal Rights Extremists in UK Talks about Her Experience

The experiences of May Hudson, 67, do a nice job of illustrating the depravity of animal rights extremists in the UK.

Hudson is not an animal researcher or farmer and she’s apparently never worked for an animal enterprise. What she is, these days, is a cleaning lady who takes care of the homes of her clients to earn a bit of pocket money. But because she was a cleaning lady for the owners of a farm in the UK that raises guinea pigs for medical research purposes, Hudson has experienced the full brunt of animal rights violence.

According to a profile of Hudson in The Guardian,

Bricks have been thrown through her windows, incendiary devices left outside her house, and a lifesize rag doll, with a noose around its neck, a knife in its chest and a note on its body saying: “This is me next,” has been deposited at her front door.

. . .Three vehicles owned by her children were spray painted with paint striper, causing thousands of pounds of damage. Her daughter Jayne also received a letter which warned: “If your mother doesn’t quit within one week we can’t be responsible for what is going to happen to you — so can you please display these yellow cards in the bedroom where your children sleep.”

Hudson held out against the violence for years, but the threats against her children and grandchildren finally forced her to throw in the towel.

Hudson describes the numerous acts of violence and assault carried out by the animal rights extremists against her,

The first time they came with bricks, it was the early hours of the morning. My husband was very ill with cancer and was sleeping in our room alone. I was in the spare room and I heard this almighty crash. I ran into him and the whole window had been smashed, the brick landed on his pillow, just inches from his head, there was glass all over the pillow. If he had moved his neck an inch he would have been stabbed with glass.”

. . .

Two months after my husband died they came back. The brick came through the window and hit me on the shoulder. I had an almighty bruise. Even now I still lie in bed sometimes wondering: ‘Are they going to come tonight’?

And to complete their ghoulish, disgusting behavior, animal rights extremists recently sent a letter threatening to dig up the body of Hudson’s dead husband if she didn’t quit. The threat was taken very seriously given that the animal rights ghouls had recently dug up the body of her employer’s mother-in-law.

Presumably assaulting a 67-year-old woman and threatening to dig up her husband’s body makes these nutcases feel like their true revolutionaries rather than pathetic punks.

Source:

First came the bricks, then the threats. The Guardian (London), January 22, 2005.