The Complete Patient

My first job in journalism was with the Chicago Daily News, a proud bastion of American journalism. I got hired while I was still in college as a copy boy. My job was to sit at the front of the vast newsroom with two or three other copy boys. Each time a reporter or editor yelled “Boy!”, one of us would jump up and scoot over to to grab freshly written or edited copy and deliver it around the building to the next editor or typesetting station for processing. (It didn’t matter that one of my co-workers was a girl, she responded to “Boy!”)

When I worked the four-to-midnight shift, my job sometimes included running over to the grungy Billy Goat Tavern (today it would be considered “funky”) down under Michigan Avenue, and picking up some whiskey for a columnist on deadline.

My favorite part of the job, though, was standing outside the press room, and watching through the clear glass the huge printing presses, which stretched for what seemed like a city block, humming and turning the rolls of newsprint into the next day’s “news.” I loved the smell of newsprint and ink, the mammoth size of the presses, the whole aura. Most of all, I think I loved the idea of being there on the inside as the day’s “news” was being packaged for shipment out to the community at large.

When the Chicago Daily News went out of business in 1978. I was very sad, just as I was for a number of years afterwards as other metropolitan papers failed or struggled. But as the trend has accelerated in recent years, I’ve come to realize that these behemoths of the establishment probably deserve to fail.

I know everyone blames the Internet, but the Chicago Daily News went out of business for the same reason the Associated Press will eventually fold of its own weight, and eventually most of the nation’s metropolitan papers will bite the dust: they lost contact, if they ever had it in the first place, with their readers, whom we might refer to today as “the end users.” I bring up the Associated Press because it just published a major article about raw milk, and the best I can say for the article is that it is pathetic.

It says the U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers Mark McAfee, owner of Organic Pastures, to be “a snake oil salesman,” without citing a source. It says parents of five children sued Organic Pastures, when in fact, two sued.

There’s also disagreement about the interview process. Mark says the reporter hasn’t been in touch since at least mid-April, and then it wasn’t clear the reporter was working on a story about the grand jury investigation. The reporter, Paul Elias, told me he had “three distinct interviews” with Mark, having spoken with him most recently a week-and-a-half ago.

I would guess that the real situation is somewhere in between, but what’s key here is that Mark seems not to have been kept in the loop about what was happening, and what was happening was extremely important. When the Associated Press does a major story about you, it’s still a huge event (despite the old media's decline), because that story could be picked up by any of more than 1,700 newspapers and 5,000 television and radio outlets that are members of the AP. It’s much bigger than a single paper doing a story, so the reporters owe it to a subject like Mark to be upfront about what they’re doing.

The bottom line, though, is that the article represents the government’s viewpoint much more than the consumer viewpoint or Organic Pastures' viewpoint in that its main purpose is to scare people about raw milk. It comes at the story from the viewpoint that if the government is investigating you, it must be because you did something wrong, not because possibly the government is conducting a vendetta against you. Fortunately, increasing numbers of people understand that they can’t believe much of what government mouthpieces like the Associated Press publish, which accounts for the fact that Mark’s business increases each time such a smear comes out, and Associated Press’ business drops.

In that vein, it’s worth pointing out that since the Chicago Daily News folded in 1978, the Bill Goat Tavern has grown from a single bar to a city-wide enterprise with seven locations, and one in Washington, DC. My guess is that in thirty years, we'll be able to say the same thing about the AP and Organic Pastures--AP will have folded and OPDC will be thriving. Yes, whisky and raw milk will outdo slanted government propaganda every time. Maybe Bill Marler and I can drink to that sometime.

***

As Bill Marler points out following my previous posting, the Centers for Disease Control has come out with its report on the six California children who became ill in September 2006. It’s heavy-duty reading, in part because it seems almost designed to confuse in terms of who got sick from what. Or is that because they just aren’t sure what happened?

And they state, once again, that a boy got sick after consuming raw milk at a friend’s house. Wasn’t that the story of Lauren Herzog, a girl?

Also, the timing of this release and its admonition to avoid raw milk is intriguing. The events are nearly two years old, yet here it is being released on the eve of hearings and debate in California over AB 1735 and the newly proposed SB 201. Normally, I'd say I'm being at least a bit paranoid, but having seen the lengths to which both state and federal authorities are willing to go to so as to frighten people and derail Organic Pastures, I have to say such conjecture seems eminently reasonable.

Update on Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 11:08PM by The Complete Patient

No sooner had I voiced my concerns about the impact of the Associated Press, when its story shows up in The Wall Street Journal.

Oh, and the CDC report? That's now used as anti-raw-milk fodder in U.S. News and World Report. Yes, if it comes from government scientists, it must be accurate, right?

Good question from Steve Bemis. How did Bill Marler know in advance about the CDC report?