“So far, the workers have tested positive for extremely low levels of radiation, not enough to cause adverse health effects, according to officials at the federal Energy Department, which oversees the plant.”
There it is. I wrote below about “a sentence virtually guaranteed to appear in any mainstream American news coverage about accidents involving radiation,” but didn’t expect to see it again so soon and in the same newspaper. As in its Fukushima story earlier this week, the New York Times acts as a simple conduit for the word of the agency responsible for the recent radiation leaks at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico. What exactly were these “extremely low levels”? How exactly did the workers test positive for exposure–internally or externally? Do “adverse health effects” refer to acute symptoms or longer-term problems? And who exactly are these anonymous “officials”? (I’d bet the cost of a hard-copy subscription that this all comes from an Energy Department media hand-out.) You won’t learn anything–just a sidebar would do!–in The Times except that everything is hunky-dory.
Harking back to the days when executive editor Abe Rosenthal equated environmentalism with New Left counterculturalism, which he despised, the paper of record has tilted toward the official line on these stories. Farther back in time lurks complicity in the government’s campaign to hide the dangers of atom bomb test fallout from the public, when reporter Gladwin Hill rhapsodized in the Sunday travel section (6/9/57): “In the dawn’s early light in the wake of a detonation, the atomic cloud can be seen attenuating across the sky. It may come over an observer’s head. There is virtually no danger from radioactive fallout.” The sentence.
So who cares? There are plenty of other reputable sources of information today at the reader’s fingertips. But while The Times is no longer the gospel of news it once was, its first instinct is still to represent the “Establishment,” as the New Left was correct to posit long ago.
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Anyway, it was just kitty-litter.
