Precious fluids, salty dogs

The always-good Eric Alterman delivers another scary, decline-of-the-news-biz column, which focuses on how already-poor business reporting, particularly health reporting, is likely to deteriorate.

...in “Revealing How Dentists Profit by Abusing Children,” Roberta Baskin earned one of the highest honors in broadcast journalism for her reporting on real-life little-shop-of-horrors dentistry at a chain of Medicaid clinics called Small Smiles. That same winter, she found out that her investigative unit had been axed by WJLA-TV because it was “’a luxury’ they could no longer afford.” She asks:

Is it a luxury when our reports convince companies to reform bad business practices? Is it a luxury when regulatory agencies suddenly are motivated to enforce laws already on their books?

Evidently, yes.
Meanwhile, bad reporting allows all sorts of health hokum to gain traction. I give you, ladies and gentlemen, Gen. Jack D. Ripper, er, the Plattsburgh City Common Council, which is seriously considering removing fluoride from public drinking water. And while they waste time on this, nobody talks much about an actual health threat that affects the North Country's large population at risk for heart disease: too much salt in the diet. Why? Because there's a Big Salt lobby, which bullies government agencies that release accurate information.
-ht/dmc