Oh, just kill yourself already.

[elfs]

There are few things that bother me more than poor reporting. FOX radio yesterday had a blurb about how the northern spotted owl is still in decline despite it's having been listed on the endangered species list for over a decade. The FOX reporter went on about how much of the forest is set aside for the spotted owl but concluded the report with this sentence: "Scientist say that the method of counting owls is flawed." Neener-neener-neener, indeed.

So I looked into the study and discovered that the problem is not, as FOX smugly implied, overreporting. No, the problem is undercounting. Spotted Owls are counted by their calls, but an Eastern predatory owl has been an evolutionary pressure on on the spotted owl and has been decimating the noisy population, leaving only the quieter members of the species. If no owl is heard in a territorial region for a period of time, that forest is marked as owl-free and is suitable for logging.

Yeah, that's responsible journalism.

NPR did the same thing today while reporting on a study about obesity. Omaha and I have noticed that fatty, sugary, low-nutrition foods are high on the list of things they sell to the kids. And yes, the fact that all of the kids on the ads are thin and healthy implies that you can eat that crap and remain thin and healthy. One of the studies NPR cited said that fast food restaurants clustered around schools. Well, duh; that's where families live, and families are time-pressed, densely-packed populations that need food.

But what irritated me most was that NPR quoted a statement from McDonald's stating that "McDonald's restaurants are placed in commercial districts intended to serve everyone," but then said the Harvard study found that "Fast food restaurants are found in proximity to schools regardless of the density of commercial development in that neighborhood."

Both statements can be true. Both are legitimate statements with no implications for cupability, but NPR's juxtaposition of those two statements implied that McDonald's is lying about its intentions.

Speaking of spokesmen, today the London Zoo opened up a new exhibit: Homo sapiens. One "natural" exhibit shows human beings hanging out, sunning themselves, eating, singing, and other things human beings do. When asked why the London Zoo was doing this, aside from the publicity stunt, the spokesman for the London Zoo said, "We have set up this exhibit to highlight the spread of man as a plague species and to communicate the importance of man's place in the planet's ecosystem."

If anyone at the London Zoo really believes that he's part of a "plague species", why hasn't he done the planet a favor and killed himself?

You know why? Because it's never him, it's someone else. It's always some vague other "they" that the world would be better off without. The London Zoo, by pressing this argument, is encouraging tribal thought: someone else is to blame for the world's problems, let's identify that someone else and do something about it.

Today, my candidate for someone else: Journalists and spokespeople.

Comments

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

Heh. I've considered volunteering for a homo sapiens exhibit at Woodland Park a few times, but didn't think it was really compatible with family life. :-)

"Journalists"

[(Anonymous)]

Next time I see you, remind me to tell you about my recent chat with a reporter who originally talked to me 'on background' and then called me back to read a quote from me he was going to include in an article.

He still breathes, but only by my sufferance.


Steve

[moofinator.livejournal.com]

Yes, Fox would be the people I expect not to tell me the whole truth, if I had to get half-truths from any news source.

But I'd like to argue NPR's case a second, just as devil's advocate...

First off, Burger King wouldn't return anyone's phone calls (seriously). McDonalds did, so everybody and their brother is going to quote what they said. But everywhere I've ever lived, McDonalds and Burger King usually set up shop in very close proximity to each other (across the street usually), and these two restaurant chains probably make up the majority of fast food restaurants.

NPR wants McDonalds to say that they market to kids, that would really be news! This is an important issue because McDonalds is practically a synonym for junk food, and child obesity is on the rise. This troubles many people, especially parents.

McDonalds wants to be able to say they don't target kids with fattening junk food, because they put their stores in commercial areas where they'd serve 'everyone' (where adults would also buy it). They may be using weasel words though, because I don't think you can run a business on land that's not zoned for commercial property. Ponder that one a few seconds, if I worked at McDonalds I'd write sentences like that.

The Harvard study would expect to find a numerical average number of fast food stores for the average commercial density near schools, with more fast food stores in higher commercial density areas near schools (since higher commercial density means more shops in an area). However, the Harvard study finds that this is not the case. Instead, they find a whole lot of fast food restaurants near schools, regardless of whether there's a lot of other stores there or not.

NPR's counterpoint thus becomes: McDonalds is using a shady definition of "commercial district," because it has little to do with the presence of commerce. If you believe this, you should question whether McDonalds and Burger King do it because they do a land office business, selling kids a bazillion calories a day. Do they really care if kids get overweight?

An ethical company might.

"McDonald’s Corp. spokesman Walt Riker said the fast-food giant locates its restaurants “in high-traffic areas like every other business, to serve customers. It has nothing to do with schools.” " <- MSNBC.com

Nothing at all, unless you identify schools as high-traffic areas. Elf, you're a parent, so I'm sure you've picked your kids up or dropped them off and seen a monolithically large mass of cars and children walking to and fro. Is there a school in this country that isn't a high traffic area?

There's none in Florida, that's for sure.

[moofinator.livejournal.com]

I guess that was a long post that could be summed up easily:

NPR seemed like it was implying something about McDonalds because it was implying something about McDonalds.

[auroramama]

Yersinia pestis has no choice about being a plague species; we have at least some choice. There's some ground between mass suicide and (continued) mass extinction. The London Zoo exhibit is goofy, but if anything it seems to be pointing out that we're (just) another animal, not demonstrating our outsized footprint on the planet.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I'm just intrinsically offended by the notion that humanity is a "plague" at all. That implies some objective standard upon which we have agreed to measure "plague" species'; I (and most of my fellow humans) have not agreed to such a standard.

[auroramama]

That's true -- I don't know what the term was supposed to mean, and the most common definition applies only to strains of bacteria, etc., that (can?) cause epidemic serious disease in humans. I took my best guess at what was meant. On the other hand, I think scientific consensus would award human beings the title of "mass-extinction species".

[fallenpegasus]

How about the past mass-extinction events in the deep fossil record, most of which are deeper and more distructive than a Sierra Club / Greenpeacer's worst nightmare, and for which we humans cannot be presumably be blamed, given that we had not evolved yet?

[auroramama]

How about them? You're right, humans aren't to blame for them. They were deeper and more destructive than anyone's worst nightmare. It took millions of years for life to recover from them. Does that sound like something we'd like to emulate?

I don't know what the original article was trying to say, but personally I'm not interested in calling humanity names or making moral pronouncements about what we're to blame for. Until quite recently, human beings had no idea that they could do permanent damage to the planet. We were just doing what all species do: try to survive and thrive.

But now that we do know what we're doing, do we want to continue to wipe out species right and left, until it's just us and our commensals, like rats, roaches, English sparrows, squirrels, pigeons, crabgrass, and ailanthus trees? Do we want our descendants to inherit such an impoverished world? Are we even sure that we'd be able to survive widespread destruction of ecosystems and their life-supporting services? Do we want to find out?

If you only have one of something, and you don't know exactly how it works, it's stupid to take it apart. Even stupider to throw away some of the pieces. We have no guarantee we'll be able to put it back together.