Integrity? What’s That?

Every once in a while the news media takes things too far and forces us to call into question their integrity. I know that hammering on the media is getting old and we are doing our damndest to not do it because it sure doesn’t win friends or help the cause…

But, with that said, these journalistic hacks are in the UK, so it’s open season…

I’ll start with their “poll.” Here’s is what they ask:

Should more be done to protect the public from passive smoking?

• No, smokers are punished enough as it is
• Yes, the public should not be subjected to poisonous fumes

What the hell kind of poll is that? I mean, you don’t need a degree to see the bias here. I wonder where this quality publication stands on the issue?

But the accompanying article really answers that question:

Just 30mins passive smoking is dangerous

Inhaling second-hand smoke for as little as half-an-hour damages blood vessels and can lead to heart attacks and strokes, a study has found.

Oh, come on! This is alarmist propaganda if I’ve ever seen it. Hell, the Surgeon General’s report said this exact thing years ago and it’s been throughly scrutinized as being a bunch of crap. After all, by this logic 30 minutes of cooking, sitting in traffic or burning a candle could kill you too. After all, it’s the same chemicals.

But it gets worse, because these morons cite something that has been throughly debunked by a number of people due to it’s horrilbly bad science:

The study explains why there is a 20 per cent drop in heart attack admissions in places which pass smoking bans, he said.

Get real! Are they citing the Stanton Glantz Helena study which was a lie, or the French heart attack study which was so manipulated that it looked like it was put together by a dirty politician?

This is really crazy and I hope people are seeing this for what it really is. Bullshit.