Our fight over the truth about tilapia continues. Earlier today, the Winston-Salem Journal issued a pair of corrections to the story they ran earlier this week that erroneously claimed NFI was orchestrating profit-driven attacks on research published by Dr. Floyd "Ski" Chilton, rather than simply holding the media accountable for not including dissenting voices in their coverage. Here's what ran in today's paper:
The Winston-Salem Journal has not made time to address errors in their article from yesterday, but they have squeezed in the task of pushing the story and its inaccuracies out on their newswire. In an act of double irresponsibility and amplification of misinformation, the abridged and re-titled article, [Researcher triggers storm over study on tilapia] appeared today on Scripps Howard News Service. NFI will be
Someone should tell Greenpeace to hold off on its self congratulatory applause. You see Ahold USA’s latest seafood sustainability efforts (Giant food, Stop & Shop etc) are NOT a result of Greenpeace’s non-science based, misguided campaign that, aside from yawns, has drawn a staggering amount of intense passing interest from tens of consumers.
While the hand wringing about whether tilapia is good for you continues unabated in the mainstream press one of the most respected medical research institutes in the world is saying consumers should not give up tilapia—despite the fact that one researcher has publically likened it to hamburger, bacon and doughnuts.
And then the other shoe drops-for days now we've been battered with misguided, poorly researched news reports that repeat from the rafters a sensational claim that bacon and doughnuts might have more healthful properties than tilapia.
Greenpeace is at it again today in the Washington Post. And this time they’re suggesting that their sustainability campaign is somehow having an effect on grocers.
The tilapia story is still bouncing around out there with misinformed journalists repeating the easily digestible but off-base, sound-bite science that continues to suggest eating doughnuts and bacon rather than tilapia because of their differing "health properties."
Nothing, if not polite.
The Winston Salem Journal’s Executive Editor responded to our letter this afternoon and had quite a bit to say about his paper’s reporting (you can read the whole email below.) But what I found most interesting was that he wrote:
