“Didn’t volunteer”? Dear God, why oh why can’t we have a better press corpse?
You know that New York Times story that implicated a ‘tag team’ of virus and fungus in the collapse of American bee colonies? And how it implicitly exonerated pesticides, which are among the prime suspects in the bee plague?
CNN reports that it turns out the author of the study on which the NYT depended is funded by Bayer and may have ulterior reasons for downplaying the role of pesticides, some of which were banned in Europe because it was found that they were killing off the bees. The question is why the bees suddenly became vulnerable to fungi and viruses that had long been around. And the pesticides can’t be ruled out.
The NYT reporter on being queried said that the author of the study had not ‘volunteered’ the sources of his funding.
Okay, just exactly what was the damn New York Times reporter — a Professional Journalist™ after all — supposed to do? Ask?!?
Time for a blogger ethics panel. What’s wrong with us that we can’t live up to the high standards of the newsies?