Junk science has exploded thanks to the Internet.  It’s easier than ever to strike fear in the hearts of consumers by using words like “toxic” or worse, “cancer” in association with a given product.  Some of you may remember the Alar hoax. Nowadays, junk science finds willing advocates in form of uninformed celebrities who endorse their misguided causes. The latest example of embracing myth and fear over truth and reason is Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Dr. Oz has cynically leveraged his celebrity status into becoming an irresponsible spokesman against products Americans use daily, whose safety is beyond question.  He’s disgraced his status as physician by becoming an agent of fear, rather than an agent of healing.

Even worse, the mainstream media perpetuates junk science without vetting anything Dr. Oz says.  They report his nonsense, but never the criticism of it.  Nor does the MSM bother to investigate the anti-capitalist group supporting him.

Dr. Oz has irresponsibly generated public fear about dozens of safe products…and by “safe”, I mean scientific studies with rigorous protocols that have determined they are exactly that:

Apple Juice

What the … ? Is he serious?  I’m afraid so.  He recently made the outrageous assertion that apple juice is unsafe because of the amount of total arsenic found in it.  The EPA, he says, permits 10 parts per billion (ppb) of arsenic in water, but has no standards for apple juice., so he uses the same 10ppb as the toxicity level for apple juice.

Water is not apple juice.

Not only does the FDA permits 23ppb of total arsenic in apple juice, but virtually every step along the supply chain tests for arsenic levels.  Even in China, farmers are trained on how to properly cultivate apples and arsenic levels in soil are measured.  When the apple concentrate arrives in the U.S., the FDA conducts random checks.  Manufacturers then rehydrate the concentrate into juice, and test every lot.  If total arsenic exceeds 23ppb, they toss it.

Oz’s report was so misleading report that the FDA took the unprecedented step of debunking the claim publicly.  The FDA also reminds us that only inorganic arsenic, as opposed to organic arsenic, is toxic, and that dearest Dr. Oz tested for total arsenic. In addition, the FDA did the same testing on one brand’s apple juice that Dr. Oz did, and came up with results that showed ninety percent less total arsenic.  As the FDA responded to Oz, “The analysis of foods can pose a challenge to analytical laboratories and seemingly minor variations in sample treatment and analysis can have a significant effect on results.”

No kidding.

As Rick Cristol, President of the Juice Products Association told me, “The Juice Products Association, its member companies and even the FDA provided Dr. Oz Show producers with substantial information to develop a factually accurate program.  Yet, Dr. Oz chose instead to frighten the public with misleading and inaccurate information, that the former Acting Director of the Centers for Disease Control, and now a broadcast reporter, described as yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.”

Yet the mainstream media pays no attention to any of this.  They just perpetuate the fear by reporting on what Dr. Oz had to say — not his critics.

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When it comes to junk science and the interpretation of it, I have news for you: the wheels have officially and totally come off the wagon.

A new study published in Journal of Applied Psychology is calling for a revival of research into possible test bias in standardized testing. A topline read of this new report offers some truly startling and impressive looking information:

Results based on 15 billion 925 million individual samples of scores and more than 8 trillion 662 million individual scores raise questions about the established conclusion that test bias in preemployment testing is nonexistent and, if it exists, it only occurs regarding intercept-based differences that favor minority group members.

Wow, more than eight trillion scores examined. This must be one heckofa study to have looked at all that information. The researchers used what they called “a powerful and sensitive methodology,” in search of test bias where heretofore no one has been able to find it. A provocative premise indeed.

In order to support this premise, the researchers engaged in some very sophisticated mathematics, like this item – one of my favorite passages – from page 653: (more…)

On the heels of an L.A. Times story that 31% of Americans are “still not angry yet at the nation’s media,” one wonders how much lower that percentage would drop if the public knew exactly how much they are not being told by the media.

Last week, Washington Post blogger Jay Mathews moved a provocative post about a research paper published in the Harvard Educational Review, purporting to provide ‘new evidence’ that the SAT is biased against African-American students and in favor of white students.  On Monday, June 21, writer Scott Jaschik with the website Inside Higher Ed also moved a story on the report with similar structure and flow.

I wrote about this latest example of junk science last Sunday and have been thinking about what is behind all of this SAT bashing ever since.  Standardized tests in general and the SAT in particular are two gigantic cultural piñatas.  Because they are yardsticks by which achievement can be measured, they are despised by people who subscribe to the theory of equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity.

If you take a look at what Mathews and Jaschik have done in their treatment of this report from the Harvard Educational Review – which, BTW, is not a peer reviewed journal – a scary trend begins to emerge.  The style of reporting in both cases takes on an eerie and frightening tone that should give everyone reason to pause. (more…)

Here’s my problem with NBC political correspondent Chuck Todd’s blast against “Drudge driven journalism:” the alternative that Todd attempts to defend isn’t actually journalism. If Chuck Todd’s network and the rest of the MSM really had been practicing journalism all along, there would never have been a vacuum for people like Matt Drudge, Andrew Breitbart, etc. to fill.

Many people would like to define the term “journalism” as the unbiased dissemination of information, but it’s never been that. For a very long time publications made no secret of their political points of view. Historically, America had Whig newspapers, Republican newspapers and Democratic newspapers. All of them spun the news in a particular direction and readers knew it. The situation has not changed, except that the legacy media desperately and unconvincingly clings to the notion that it is detached from any ideology and therefore the sole arbiter of truth. No matter where they fall on the the political spectrum, Americans know better. That’s the reason the Drudge Report, Breitbart’s “Big” sites and, to put a point on it, liberal outlets like Huff Po and the Daily Kos thrive.

My own field of expertise provides an object lesson in why legacy journalism is fading into irrelevance as “Drudge-driven journalism” fills the void in a world hungry for knowledge. The MSM’s coverage of science in general and environmental issues in particular has been abysmal for years. Journalists are, by training and inclination, generalists. How many times have members of the old media tried to explain away slanted coverage of the non-existent global warming crisis by declaring that they of course are not scientists and can not be therefore expected to personally understand the issue? Instead, they insist that they must rely on experts and if you have a problem with the way they’re covering the issue, go talk to the experts. (more…)

In yet another case of willful blindness, our formerly august mainstream media all but ignores Al Gore’s global warming millions.  Their secular saint, Prophet Al, has become a very rich man off his global warming “science.”  Yet, whenever he is interviewed by those virtuous paragons among the media elite, you’ll hear nary a peep on the fact that Prophet Al stands to become the “World’s First Carbon Billionaire,” if and when governments – especially ours – enact the cap and trade legislation, of which Mr. Gore is the most vociferous proponent.

The lying hypocrisy of it is just too much for an honest person to bear.

Mr. Gore has, in effect, declared economic war on the middle-class American family through his global warming faux science.  The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the cap and trade legislation, which passed the House last year, will cost the average American family $890 per year.  But the conservative Heritage Foundation immediately challenged this figure.  Using a more inclusive analysis, Heritage raised the estimate to at least $1,870 per year.

Heritage also took the trouble – on behalf of American families – to take into account the larger picture, significant details completely ignored in the CBO’s accounting: (more…)