At 10:16 PM 9/4/2009, you wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
think you are quibbling. This is a bit like saying there is no
Democratic Party because the Democrats are unorganized and they
seldom agree among themselves. Okay, the Party may be nebulous but
they have a headquarters and they welcome contributions so that
makes them a Party. Mainstream media, where ever its boundaries lie,
consists of television, newspapers, magazines and books that sell in
the millions and that most people watch or read. Perhaps you have to
draw an arbitrary line and say a newspaper is mass media if it has
more than 200,000 readers.
Okay, but the "mainstream" I was denying has any defined boundaries
isn't actually "mainstream media," that's relatively easy, but
"mainstream science."
The point is that such media has enormous influence on society and
it reaches far more people every day than I have reached with
LENR-CANR.org in 7 years. This tremendous difference in scale gives
them abilities and influence far beyond mine. I hand out 5,000 or
10,000 papers a week, year after year, and have no measurable
effect. CBS "60 Minutes" devotes 15 minutes to the subject and doors
fly open to researchers all over the country.
Sure. Look, there are pathways to that kind of influence. There are
people who know how to access them. Media is hungry for content. It
can be provided. The New Scientist probably depended on what authors
provided, my guess is that the bias was that of the authors, the
magazine made its choices based on interest, not on some editorial
policy about cold fusion, per se. Providing well-written articles on
cold fusion to publications would be one way forward, if we want to
accelerate the process. Or press releases, like the ACS release. The
media that picked up on that would not have gone out and sought that
information on their own. "Hey, the ACS is running a seminar on cold
fusion on the 20th anniversary of the original Fleischmann press
conference, lets send a reporter and pay their expenses, etc., etc.
Some did go, I think, but probably because of the press release.
Others just used the material from the press release.....
You might compare the mass media to "very large animals." Yes,
there are many different sized animals and it is impossible to say
where on the continuum you reach "very large," but when you get up
to elephants, let us say, you find radical differences from the
rest of the animal kingdom. Such as the fact that few predators can
hurt a healthy elephant. (One of the largest animals is Homo
sapiens, although we tend to think of ourselves as small.)
Also, whether mass media reporters mean to attack or are merely
being lazy, the effect of their articles is to hurt the field. And
they will not accept information "spoon fed" from me.
Maybe not from you. You are trying to feed reporters, feed editors
and publishers.
My favorite example of a journal with a split personality was the
Journal of Fusion Energy, September 2004 issue which has an attack
on cold fusion on page 161 and a long paper about cold fusion in
China by X. Z. Li On page 217.
What is the attack paper? (I know about Li's paper.) Is it available on-line?
It was an editorial comment. I do not know if it is available on
line. I did not upload it. I will scan it and post it here. Remind
me if I forget.
Editorial comment. Not peer reviewed. Editor's opinion. Not a quality source.
- Jed
