Here's another cautionary tale about journalism in the internet age. I've recently seen a rash of blog posts and online news factoids like this one about a $1.2 trillion dollar lawsuit filed against Oprah Winfrey by a poet named Damon Lloyd Goffe.
This lawsuit is preposterous on many levels, so it's an irresistible story for bloggers and news outlets that need a quick, sensational post. The problem is, the posts are all wrong.
According to most accounts, the lawsuit was filed on July 31st, 2009. But in fact that is the date the frivolous lawsuit was thrown out of court, not the date it was filed.
If you poke around long enough you can find one responsible blogger who wrote about this a few days earlier: Michael Doyle, a legal affairs reporter for McClatchy's Washington Bureau.
On August 3rd, Doyle posted in his blog "Suits & Sentences" that Goffe's suit was dismissed on Friday, July 31st. Doyle also remarks that Goffe also filed another suit against NBC last month claiming:
"My life is been recorded and broadcasted since 2003 via satellite/cable network Bravo/Bravo 2, whose parent company is NBC/Universal, as well as the internet under the title 'the will smith show' and previously 'real world.'"
You can't make this stuff up.
So how did the false version of this story get such traction in the celebrity blogosphere? Three of the blogs that I saw pointed to aggregator sites, which in turn pointed to that traditional fount of disinformation, The National Enquirer.
The Enquirer's deliberately undated article, posted after July 31st, claimed the suit was filed on July 31st, rather than dismissed on that date. Other articles like this one point back to the World Entertainment News Network, an entertainment wire service. It's hard to say who got the story from whom, but it's easy to see why those "original" sources would suppress the truth of the matter.
Perhaps Enquirer editors knew the story would get more mileage if it "forgot" to mention that the crackpot lawsuit was already thrown out of court? That kind of story won't go viral. Much better (for their website traffic anyway) to pretend that Oprah faces a real threat, fact-checking be damned.
Diebold recently spun off its voting machine company and renamed it to Premier Election Solutions. That's a pretty transparent attempt to leave behind the bad associations the public has with the name Diebold. At least this is a more accepted business practice than removing critcism from your own Wikipedia entry, which Diebold also did.
It seems the parent corporation couldn't sell off the troubled election division, so they spun it off instead.
The press release says, "Premier inherits a very strong reputation for service that is unmatched in the election system industry." As we can see from the recent decertification of all electronic Diebold, uh, Premier voting machines in California, that strong reputation must be bad strong, not good strong. And clearly they are not unmatched: the other voting machine vendors all failed the California tests too.
In fact the California action might have played a role in this decision, though a Diebold spokesperson played that role down in a recent PCWorld article:
The moves in California played a small part in the decision to restructure the business unit and lower revenue expectations, Jacobsen said. "This is a cumulative effect," he added. "There's a lot of activity in a lot of states."
Or maybe the thrill was just gone for Diebold after losing ex-CEO Wally O'Dell. Without him how can they possibly deliver those Ohio votes for Bush again in 2008?
At first I planned to rant about the way that Cadbury-Schweppes has tried to turn the benzene in soda controversy to their favor by releasing 7-Up Natural. (I wrote more about Benzene and Soda yesterday). Yet removing the offending chemicals from your formula is a very appropriate reponse. It obviously has marketing benefits for the company, and it removes another source of benzene from the supermarket shelves.
Cadbury-Schweppes removed (most) of the artificial ingredients from 7-Up, including sodium benzoate. So now they have no additional lawsuit potential from cancer-stricken customers who might one day try to sue.
There is some controversy about the claim that 7-Up is now "100% Natural" since they still use high-fructose corn syrup as a major ingredient.
Whether they took this step primarily to remove the benzene or primarily as a marketing ploy, the net effect is still quite positive. Let's hope the rest of the soft drink makers follow suit.
Taking a break from this blog's voting theme, I wanted to raise awareness of a big sleeper of a health issue.
A carcinogenic compound known as benzene can form in drinks that contain ascorbic acid and either sodium benzoate or potassium benzoate.
Guess what: a lot of soft drinks contain both of those ingredients.
Benzene is one of the most carcinogenic compounds around. If benzene levels in public drinking water exceed 5 parts per billion (ppb) the press must be notified and public warnings must be broadcast.
Most soft drinks have levels below 5 ppb, but a few of them test much higher than that. And when they do test higher, their consumers don't get notified at all.
The FDA and various soft drink companies have known about this for about 16 years. The FDA chose to let the drink manufacturers police themselves. A few manufacturers reformulated their drinks to prevent benzene from forming, but most of them did little or nothing.
As a recent Canadian study showed, testing by the drink manufacturers in controlled factory conditions seems to produce much different results than testing on randomly selected drinks from store shelves.
It seems that the amount of benzene formed depends a lot on whether that batch of soda was affected by heat or light during transportation or storage. So even though they say that standard Coca Cola has less than 2 ppm of benzene in it, if you take a plastic liter bottle of Coke and put it in the sun for a while, all bets are off.
So basically, the only safe bet is to "avoid or limit the consumption of products that contain both ascorbic acid and sodium/potassium benzoate."
A recent FDA report said that there's "not enough data" to understand whether benzene in soda is really a threat. Of course that lets them and the food corporations delay taking any action for a while longer.
Nice of the FDA to sit on this for so long, giving us 16 extra years of
drinking refreshing benzene, eh?
For more information about the perils of benzene in your soda, the Accidental Hedonist blog did a great article on the topic earlier this year.
That article cited an editorial by Dr. Ruth Kava of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) that claims that fears of benzene in soft drinks are overblown. However a quick look at the other articles on the ACSH site reveal Dr. Kava's unspoken agenda. Other headlines on the site today included "DDT Use is Long Overdue" and "Threat of Low-Level Radiation Often Exaggerated." Every article brands some health concern as overblown, or some environmental progam as a waste of taxpayers' money. Dr. Kava and her organization seem to be trying to sow confusion and to prevent a consensus from forming on this issue.
The plain fact is, if benzene is bad for us, and if it doesn't need to be in our food and drink, it should be removed. Now.
In the past couple months we've seen some powerful retrospective articles about the vote suppression techniques used in the 2004 U. S. elections.
Greg Palast describes how 3.6 million votes were cast and never counted in 2004, more than enough votes to change the outcome in many races. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. shows how an intentional, orchestrated Republican effort in Ohio prevented more that 350,000 predominantly Democratic votes from being cast or counted.
Since the evidence is mounting and the 2006 midterm election looms, I decided to dust off the RantWorld soapbox to try to spread more information about this crucial issue.
We the American people are surrendering our rights of self-government. It's appalling how easy we are making it for the folks who want to manipulate the voting process.
Where is the outrage? Why are none of our elected officials stepping up as champions for fair elections?
The tepid responses to this issue take many forms:
Most puzzling is why the Democratic Party doesn't mount an effective, coordinated campaign to ensure fairer voting practices in 2006 and 2008. During the past three national elections -- 2000, 2002, and 2004 -- the Republicans have gained great advantages from vote suppression and manipulation, and the Democrats' expense.
Is it any surprise that Katharine Harris, one of the pioneers of race-based voter suppression techniques, is absolutely sure she will win re-election in November, in spite of scandals and pathetic poll results?