Editor, National Geographic magazine Dear sirs:
I have posted this on your forum pages, but would like to call it to the attention of your editors; please pass it to the senior editors. I strongly encourage you to revise your editorial policy and to give metric indications prominence in your articles. The article on Europe in the January 2002 issue of National Geographic magazine presents erroneous and dangerously incomplete information regarding the EU and Steve Thoburn, the "metric martyr" of England. Mr. T.R. Reid hand his editors must have forgotten an important principle of journalism -- checking the stated facts. First the erroneous matter. Thoburn was charged with operating non-certified scales, not for selling bananas by the pound. The reason for his scales lacking certification was his refusal to use scales that met the specifications of British law. Scales are supposed to be able to weigh food items in kilograms, though auxiliary readings in pounds and ounces are allowed. Standards officials no longer carry non-metric weights to check scales. Customers may ask for a desired number of pounds of produce, but the official weight and receipt must be in metric units under British law. This law was enacted to support standards harmonious with ED 80/181/EEC but that was not the basis for the charges brought against Thoburn, whose scales lacked a metric readout. The law that Thoburn thumbed his nose at was Britain's, not Brussels'. Now, the dangerously incomplete matter. The European Directive cited (80/181/EEC) requires all goods sold in the EU to be labeled only in metric units and to be devoid of all other units. This applies to packaging, product labels, instruction sheets, and advertisements. The original deadline for this requirement to be met was Dec 31, 1984. It was then delayed to the end of 1989, then to the end of 1999, then again to the end of 2009. These delays were provided to give the United States time for producers to prepare and for our government to revise the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act (FPLA) to allow metric only labeling in the U.S. This third delay may well be our last. Japan and the Republic of Korea have already passed similar laws, which are now in effect. We in the U.S. now have metric-only labeling allowed for goods sold under regulations and laws modeled on the Uniform Packaging and Labeling Regulation (UPLR) and over half the states allow this metric-only labeling on UPLR goods. The FPLA is next to be revised. Educational magazines in the U.S. are, for the most part, meeting Jeffersonian principles for journalism by using metric units, sometimes alone and sometimes in parallel with non-metric units, in order to "provide for an educated public". A handful of diehard, conservative editors are preventing their magazines from living up to these responsibilities. It is past time for the National Geographic magazine and the Smithsonian magazine to quit living like the spurned spinster in Dickens' "Great Expectations". They need to open their windows to realize that Americans comfortably watched the 2000 Olympic games broadcast almost entirely in metric units and to see that Americans, except for these dusty editors, are seeing metric units with increasing frequency in the marketplace. James R. Frysinger -- James R. Frysinger University/College of Charleston 10 Captiva Row Dept. of Physics and Astronomy Charleston, SC 29407 66 George Street 843.225.0805 Charleston, SC 29424 http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cert. Adv. Metrication Specialist 843.953.7644
