Thursday, January 26, 2006

More payola

Via firedoglake (from the Huffington Post), we learn that fauxnew's science reporter is on the Phillip Morris payroll, and has been since the day he walked into Fox.

Junk Science
On March 9, 2001, he wrote a column for the website headlined "secondhand smokescreen." The piece attacked a study by researcher Stephen Hecht, who found that women living with smokers had higher levels of chemicals associated with risk of lung cancer. "If spin were science, Hecht would win a Nobel Prize," Milloy wrote. For good measure, he heaped scorn on a 1993 Environmental Protection Agency report that also linked health risks and secondhand smoke. Later that spring, he authored another smoking-related piece for FoxNews.com. In that one, he cast aside two decades of research on the dangers of exposure to secondhand smoke and concluded, "Secondhand smoke is annoying to many nonsmokers. That is the essence of the controversy and where the debate should lie--the rights of smokers to smoke in public places versus the rights of nonsmokers to be free of tobacco smoke." You might chalk it up to Milloy's contrarian nature. Or to his libertarian tendencies. Except, all the while, he was on the payroll of big tobacco.

Are any of them not on the take?

2 comments:

Scott said...

I have my suspicions that, on the national level, nearly all of the reporters, anchors, and columnists are getting paid bribes by either the White House or private industry. Will we ever see an investigation to prove it? I've got no idea, but I hope so.

four legs good said...

I hope so too.