sbl...@ubishops.ca wrote: > > I never heard a rat called a "teenager" before this > study, Canadian or not. > >
A teenage rat would be extremely elderly! > Why they did it is obvious. Studies demonstrating the dangers of > cannabis for teenagers are sexy; such studies for rats, not so > much. If you want publicity, you go with what is sexy, and hide > what can impair it. It's also wrong. > What is it that surprises you about this Stephen? The "news" is a commercial product. Commercial products are routinely adjusted to ensure that they sell to the greatest number of people at the highest price (or rather, those that are not so adjusted, quickly cease to be commercial products). Surely it became clear to you long ago that journalists are not scientists (as if no scientist ever "turned a phrase" in order to make his or her work seem more exciting to the public), and certainly no journalist's boss is a scientist. Their values lie in a different place. There are, to be sure, some good science journalists. Ben Goldacre of the Guardian comes to mind. But what he has done is figure out a way to make good science journalism "sexy": he badmouths other journalists (and scientists) who do exactly what they are paid to do (viz., make science salable to newspaper readers). It's good old "gotcha" journalism. It is, of course, worth pointing out that the the pot-hurts-brains article was BS, but being outraged seems a bit, well, disingenuous. Almost all reporting on illegal drugs in the mainstream media is BS, and has been since the 1960s -- from pot-is-addictive, to LSD-causes-genetic-damage, to crack-babies, to the suburban-crystal-meth-epidemic. It's all BS. There's nothing surprisingly egregious about this particular article, is there? Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 chri...@yorku.ca http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ========================== --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
