Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 A "Citizen Journalist" is a news writer or reporter who is not necessarily credentialed through a journalism school, but is nevertheless a well-informed reporter on their chosen topics. Most tend to cover news from an independent, grassroots point of view.)
In this new WebSeed Citizen journalism program, participants ("reporters", who may be located anywhere in the world) are given a topic ("beat") to cover, such as food safety, the FDA, prenatal nutrition, or other topics. Using a web interface, they submit stories to NewsTarget editors who review the stories for publication on NewsTarget. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 And if you've been in journalism for very long, let's say 20 or 30 years, you've seen the deterioration of journalistic standards in this country. You've seen practices that used to pass as shoddy journalism now being considered everyday news writing. And I'm not just talking about fact checking, I'm talking about idea creation. Anybody can check facts. What about a time when journalists used to actually have original thoughts? They used to challenge the White House or the interests of Big Business. I don't see that happening much these days. |
| This is what passes for standard journalism these days, folks. It's the news machine that's selling billions of dollars in prescription drugs, cosmetics, junk foods, protein bars, weight loss pills and useless consumer products that ultimately help no one. It's the machine of American disinformation and commerce, and it's everywhere. You can't turn on the TV, fly on an airplane, drive down the highway or even take a leak in the men's restroom without being bombarded with commercial content parading as news. |
| I know there are some great people out there who are actually doing investigative journalism and writing intelligent stories, like Declan McCullough at Wired Magazine. He's a real thinker who can get to the story behind the story. And there are some larger newspapers that are willing to publish the truth about controversial topics, but if any of the people from those papers are reading this, I'm sure you'll agree with me that you are the exception in an industry that seems to be run by press releases and advertisers. |
| It's free from new ideas and the foundation of journalism on which this country was based. When was the last time a reporter had the guts to break a big story like Watergate? The last one I can recall was a story by Pulitzer Prize-winning Gary Webb about the CIA and its drug connection. And he ended up committing suicide just last year, if you can believe that. Click here to see story.
Where is the honest reporting in this country? |
| You've seen practices that used to pass as shoddy journalism now being considered everyday news writing. And I'm not just talking about fact checking, I'm talking about idea creation. Anybody can check facts. What about a time when journalists used to actually have original thoughts? They used to challenge the White House or the interests of Big Business. I don't see that happening much these days. Michael Moore is doing his part, but who else is willing to grab a mic, hike up to a mega corporation, and ask some really tough questions? |
| It's going to initiate more hard-core investigative journalism on stories about foods, drugs and health. And Truth Publishing remains 100% dedicated to respecting readers: no pop-ups, no registrations, no disappearing page links, no email spam, and absolutely no payola.
Stick around. It's going to be a great year here at the NewsTarget Network. And thank you for reading. We DO respect your intelligence. We know you're no fool. Otherwise, you'd be watching cable television instead of reading this. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 I'm not saying that the New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post or other newspapers never engage in real journalism -- clearly they do from time to time. Those papers have occasionally produced some really outstanding stories and true investigative reports, and for that, they are to be applauded. But shouldn't that be what newspapers are entirely focused on doing? Shouldn't these national newspapers be held to the highest standards of journalism? Shouldn't all their stories be investigative stories? Why do they run anything that's just a remix of the common newswire? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 One point worth mentioning here is that there is absolutely no requirement to have any real understanding of science, medicine, chemistry or physics to graduate from a top-notch journalism school. And when journalists have no idea what they're talking about, they go the default route and simply rewrite whatever was e-mailed to them in the corporate press release! Thus, modern skills of journalism do not require any independent thought whatsoever. They only require the ability to rephrase something already told to them by the spinmeisters at Corporation X. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Maybe I'm being too critical; after all, my own stories don't involve detailed investigative journalism, either. But I don't run a $100 million news operation with over a thousand employees and reporters. Simply put, we don't have the budget to do hard-core investigative journalism on every single story. Give me the budget of a paper like USA Today, and we could turn out some Pulitzer-Prize-caliber stories on what's going on with the FDA, the pharmaceutical companies, and other conspiracies taking place in the United States. |
Michael Pollan
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 That culture is embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, any one of which contains more wisdom about diet and health than you will find in any nutrition journal or journalism. The cook does not need to know, as the scientists have recently informed us, that cooking the tomatoes with olive oil makes the lycopene in them more available to our bodies. No, the cook already knew that olive oil with tomatoes is a really good idea.
As cook in your kitchen you enjoy an omniscience about your food that no amount of supermarket study or label reading could hope to match. |
| For that to happen, however, the underlying nutritional science and the policy recommendations (not to mention the journalism) based on that science would both have to be sound. This has seldom been the case.
The most important such nutrition campaign has been the thirty-year effort to reform the food supply and our eating habits in light of the lipid hypothesis—the idea that dietary fat is responsible for chronic disease. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Rest assured, if I ever get my hands on enough funds to conduct such investigative journalism and fund a team of researchers and reporters, I'll be using Wikipedia as a source for leads and information. Wikipedia is a good thing -- the fact that the media bashes it should tell you that it's actually a very important competitor in the information monopoly that used to be held by the popular press.
Old school newspapers -- the kind printed on dead trees -- are dinosaurs. |
Mark Schapiro
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 Kiang, the dean of environmental studies at Peking University in Beijing—who was brought to the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of journalism by Orville Schell, the former dean, for several weeks of guest teaching—told me that the effect of initiatives like REACH and RoHS in China will be to open to greater public scrutiny a system that has been traditionally secretive and unaccountable. This may end up being the most profound impact of the changes initiated in Brussels. "REACH pushes us to move into a knowledge-based system," Kiang said. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Simply put, we don't have the budget to do hard-core investigative journalism on every single story. Give me the budget of a paper like USA Today, and we could turn out some Pulitzer-Prize-caliber stories on what's going on with the FDA, the pharmaceutical companies, and other conspiracies taking place in the United States. But for some reason, there's no good funding for those kinds of stories. There's no money to be made in telling the truth these days. |
Michael Pollan
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| But while nutritionism has its roots in a scientific approach to food, it's important to remember that it is not a science but an ideology, and that the food industry, journalism, and government bear just as much responsibility for its conquest of our minds and diets. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Your average hometown newspaper really just pretends to practice genuine journalism. It may have a few local stories it actually wrote on its own, but a lot of the content in newspapers, even in larger papers, is just filler content that it gets as a subscriber to various newswire services. If you ever wonder why all the papers in the country happen to be talking about the same topic on the same day, it's not just because it happens to be a timely topic; it's because they've all tuned in to the same news feed from the same centralized sources. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 To adhere to my journalism ethics, any article published on NewsTarget that mentions a product in which I have a commercial interest will be clearly labeled as such with a "full disclosure" summary. Any editorial coverage of Better Life Goods or EcoLEDs will clearly state that I am the owner of those companies. We will publicly post all funding of non-profits or grassroots campaigns so that you can see where the donation funds are going. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| Times2 and Jeff Swiatek of the Indianapolis Star, have done some good investigative journalism, drawing attention to drugs that entered the marketplace despite known dangers. They have also highlighted some very questionable activities related to the interaction of the pharmaceutical corporations and the government. When such reports are not disseminated beyond a local readership, though, they do little to provoke outrage and stir the public to action.
The New York Times revealed that some media are being paid to report promotional material under the guise of investigative reporting. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| They don't conduct honest journalism and they don't do investigative stories -- they just reprint what is handed to them or what appeases their advertisers.
Newspapers lie by omission as well. They distort the news by what they leave out -- what they refuse to cover. The news industry frequently passes over stories that might anger advertisers. This is a common practice, whether we're talking about network news, cable news, newspapers or magazines, or even online news from sites that have heavy corporate influences. But at Wikipedia, you don't have any of these influences. |
Anne Harrington
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 The New York Times article generated a lot of copycat journalism, and a huge amount of interest across the country. Again and again, the message went out: It's real! It works! How can we use it? Having become involved in this area myself, I was often asked for my opinions on all the excitement, but never more poignantly than in the winter of 2000, when I received the following email from a young man in South America (I have deleted the author's name to protect his privacy):
My name is . . . , I live in Cali, Colombia. A few days ago I listened [to a talk] about the placebo effect. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The prevalence of the dairy industry's dubious claim is an example of media's role as a propaganda machine for advertisers
What I am surprised about is mainstream journalism these days. Much of the time, as we now know, they just make up their sources. If they need something to fill in the blanks, they just dream them up. journalism is a mess in this country, and the fact that this story was major headline news all around the country just demonstrates it even further.
Where is the critical thinking out there? |
Anne Harrington
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| Nevertheless, the article was effective as a piece of journalism in part because the story it told was, on a structural level, neither new nor specific at all. It drew, rather, on the tropes, values, and literary sensibilities of a particular narrative of mind-body medicine that I call "Eastward journeys."
What is this narrative? It begins, like "healing ties," as a response to the mood of broad antimodernist lament that has characterized many American stories about stress since at least the discontented 1970s. |
Michael J. Panzner
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 Blogs even started overtaking traditional media outlets as a source of breaking news and real-time commentary in some cases, with blogging occasionally referred to as "citizen journalism."
In recent years, blogs have been one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet, providing access to a broad array of insights and tips on virtually any topic, including consumer finance and personal investing. But the explosion in content has also made it difficult to track down or isolate information that is especially useful or relevant. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| Remember, though, few of these headlines resulted from in-depth investigative journalism. Many journalists today are merely looking for the attention-getting headline (byline) or 2-minute soundbite that will advance their careers.
• NIH Scientists Broke Rules, Panel Says, , Rick Weiss, 6/23/2004.
• USA: The Pharmaceutical Industry Stalks the Corridors of Power, The Guardian Unlimited, Julian Borger, 2/13/2001.
• NIH Seeks Consulting Ban, , Ted Agres, 9/27/2004.
• British Medical Journal Blasts FDA on Lotronex, |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 What they put together in each monthly issue is, quite simply, a masterpiece of nutritional reporting that frankly deserves some kind of award for courageous journalism (except they'll never get a reward because they don't conform to the limited, mainstream thinking about health and medicine -- they're truly on the leading edge, and the leading edge is never mainstream).
The bottom line is that if you like my writing, you'll love this newsletter. And just like me, they don't take money from the product companies they write about. |
Melody Petersen
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 Two tests, two quizzes and three journalism articles due, not to mention working around 20 hours a week into the early morning hours as a bartender. Was I feeling disconnected, anxious, irritable or out of control?" The university's staff told Katie that on the basis of her answers to the test she might have anxiety. She declined the therapist's offer to schedule an appointment.
The next year, Central College, in Pella, Iowa, published the results from its testing for mental illness on National Depression Screening Day. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Read my full report to see why I've become such an outspoken advocate of the Amazon Herb Company, even while refusing to become an associate myself (due to journalism ethics, because if I got involved with the company, I could no longer offer a truly independent opinion like what you're reading here).
If you're at all interested in enhancing your health, preventing serious disease or even investigating the possibility of taking control of your financial future by becoming an Amazon Herb associate, I strongly encourage you to read this report. Click here to read it now. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 There is no scrutiny of the study's findings, no critical thinking and absolutely no independent journalism being conducted by the mainstream media on this particular topic. It's as if these media outlets just can't wait to be spoon-fed the latest propaganda from drug company collaborators and then parrot it out to the public as fact.
The distortion in question concerns the assessment of women who participated in a nine year trial measuring the effects of vitamins E and C. |
Michael Pollan
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| The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power—thirty-two billion dollars a year—used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat. |
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