Today Greenpeace is asking supporters to "pre-order" sustainable skipjack tuna as a way of pressuring retailers and tuna companies in to sourcing only from pole and line caught operations-- but it fails to properly highlight that skipjack, be it from the Pacific or the Atlantic, is already the most sustainably managed of all the tuna stocks worldwide.
Skipjack is plentiful and well managed, period.
NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt believes it is okay to report something that another news outlet has reported without verifying, confirming or clarifying its authenticity and or currency as long as that other news outlet is "highly respected and reputable." Even if NBC has been made aware that the information they are reporting is erroneous.
How do I know this? Well... they told me.
I was pleased to see NBC responded to our request for a change to its April 20th story so quickly. The email from the Senior Producer for Standards and Practices is below. You will notice NBC hedges and returns a face-saving rewrite of the graphic we challenged-- allow me to translate:
Done and done.
Now we're just waiting for a response to the request for a change to its April 19th story.
NBC Email:
Mr. Gibbons,
Apparently some lawmakers in Texas think they know better than doctors, dietitians and researchers when it comes to how to educate sensitive subpopulations about the trace amounts of the naturally occurring methylmercury found in fish.
The Texas House just passed a bill that calls for warning signs about mercury in seafood, directed at pregnant, to be posted in stores and it's headed to the state senate.
This week NBC Nightly News is finding that details matter.
When journalists use vernacular where scientific specificity is called for or unresearched statistics they once heard in place of the most up to date information, they wander down a path where accusations of sloppiness and laziness mix with questions about ethics and integrity.
Our friends tell us a lot about who we are.
Here's an example, Jackie Savitz over at Oceana is now on Twitter. She's a well known environmental activist who doesn't obscure the causes she supports or the campaigns she runs. She and I don't see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues but such is life. I know basically where she stands on certain things and generally we disagree-- nothing wrong with that.
It hasn't been two hours since we told you about the Mercury Policy Project's (MPP) proposed letter to the FDA and already the group is shopping around a significantly toned down version of its rhetoric filled rant. The new version includes abandoning its original ask that the FDA revise the government's Action Level for mercury in fish, to adopt the two-tiered system used in other countries and adds a middle initial to the primary author's name.
Wheedling distortion and stale, stifled, outdated scientific thinking like a weapon Michael Bender, the one-man-band who makes up the Mercury Policy Project (MMP), appears to have set his sights on hijacking the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) latest work on mercury and seafood.
Do you remember as a kid looking at the picture of a toy on the box and then opening it and finding it didn't quite match the sell job created by the artist's conception? I distinctly remember being a youngster and finding the difference between a remote controlled car and a radio controlled car meant one has a cord attached to the controller and the other didn't. I wasn't quite sold a bill of goods but the sales job didn't quite match reality. These days I find that headlines often over sell the product and under deliver on content.
Since February of '08 we've been warning U.S. grocery stores about the perils of engaging with Greenpeace (aka the 500 pound 5 year-old) on issues of sustainability. American stores have their own seafood sustainability plans and partners in place-they, quite frankly, don't need an eco-bully to dictate how they handle their sourcing.
