RSSNewsday, the Non-News “Newspaper”
Gene Lalor | November 27, 2010
I don’t read a real daily newspaper. I have to read Newsday. 
Ever since the old Long Island Press bit the dust and followed the lead of New York City dailies, the Journal-American, the Daily Mirror, the Herald Tribune, et al. and succumbed to corporate mismanagement and exorbitant union demands, all we Long Islanders have left is the pseudo-newspaper, Newsday.
It’s a sad state of affairs, I tell ya!
I had high hopes for that liberal rag after its circulation department was caught with very liberally, illegally, inflating its readership numbers and then after conservative multi-billionaire Charles F. Dolan of Cablevision bought the paper in 2008 for $650 million. Sadly, Charlie chose to let things ride at Newsday where editorial content is barely distinguishable from news articles.
Not that he cares or will even notice but I hope Dolan loses his shirt on this misadventure.
Fortunately, Newsday does provide some redeeming, entertaining features, a few of which have appeared in its “news” pages over the last week.
The New York Times may still purport to print “all the news that’s fit to print,” or all the news that fits, or something like that. Newsday does that motto a few better by printing all the news that meshes with its liberal agenda even if it’s rumor or blatant lies.
Wait! The Times does that as well!
In any event, this past week’s Newsday inane installments included Friday’s article, “Secondhand Smoke’s Deadly Toll,” a piece on the 3,000 who die daily in Africa from malaria.
The secondhand smoke article is based on a report in Great Britain’s medical journal, Lancet in which Scottish “experts” contend that secondhand smoke causes 379,000 deaths from hear disease, 165,000 deaths from lower respiratory disease, 36,900 from asthma, and 21,940 deaths from lung cancer. As an added bonus, Lancet throws in the “fact” that 281,000 women and 265,000 children worldwide die annually due to secondhand smoke.
Some, all, or none of that may be true. No one really knows since the “facts” are all based on guesstimates by the same people who still say that global warming is caused by those nasty animals, human beings. However, it all constitutes sufficient evidence for Newsday to print it as news, totally devoid of journalistic research.
I don’t contest that Africans are dying in huge numbers from deadly malaria. What I find reprehensible is Newsday’s unforgiveable omission in its article on the cause of that plague, the banning of the pesticide, DDT. Malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes, DDT kills mosquitoes.
Malaria.org capsulized the idiocy of the PC banning of DDT: “Malaria kills over one million people, mainly children, in the tropics each year, and DDT remains one of the few affordable, effective tools against the mosquitoes that transmit the disease. Attaran et al. explain that the scientific literature on the need to withdraw DDT is unpersuasive, and the benefits of DDT in saving lives from malaria are well worth the risks:” http://tiny.cc/tbc8o
Fat chance of bringing back DDT.
The U.N.’s World Health Organisation, WHO, decided that DDT’s negatives, chiefly helping to win World War Two for the allies and wiping out malaria, were overweighed by its environmental impact and its threat to wildlife and avain eggshells. We now have more bald eagles in the U.S. but a few million fewer Africans every year, thanks to the DDT ban, something else Newsday fails to mention.
Newsday’s most outstanding excursion into journalistic fantasy last week was its article on pregnant American women and what the paper described as last year’s worldwide H1N1 influenza “pandemic.”
The what?
It seems pregnant American women had far more smarts than Center of Disease Control, CDC, expert mavens and Newsday reporters since, en masse, those smart ladies refused to get those government-endorsed, unproven, potentially-deadly inoculations against a non-existent “pandemic.”
Newsday failed to mention that the H1NI “pandemic” never happened.
However, that’s par for the Newsday course. If government or government entities say that passive tobacco smoke is killing billions or that malaria is the coolest disease since the bubonic plague compared to DDT or that non-pandemics are ravaging the globe, it must all be true.
It’s all the news that Newsday sees as fit to print.
Contributor's website: http://www.genelalor.com/
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