It's damn hard to get any real or accurate information out of a newspaper these days. Just take the recent spate of stories in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about the "outbreak" of illness which "claimed 3 victims" (now 4) and allegedly caused by raw milk. These articles are just the most recent and egregious example of factually inaccurate reporting, smear tactics, hyperbole, pandering and total failure as journalism. I come across complete falsehoods and totally wrong understandings in the paper all the time when it comes to areas of knowledge in which I have some expertise; I'm sure you see the same. That such articles are so common in the limited areas we each know just throws the entire rest of the media into question.
So about that raw milk.
"Claimed 3 victims" read the headline -- sounds like they died, doesn't it? Well, not yet. It is possible for the very young, old, infirm or otherwise immune system compromised to die from E. Coli -- absolutely. But they have not yet; they're only ill at the moment. Or were -- they may have recovered over the weekend. (In fact, they did recover quickly.)
But 3? 4? Hello? This is no epidemic, no "outbreak." Hundreds of people probably get sick every single day in Minnesota from various forms of food poisoning, from their own kitchen to restaurants. I personally get sick a lot more often when I eat out, than when I eat at home. There was a recent case where a restaurant had 47 cases of poisoning reported in one instance. Somehow the magnitude of the alleged raw milk caused illness seems a bit ... lacking, shall we say?
But that's the least of it -- the pandering and hyperventilation and making a mountain out of a mole hill is what the media does all the time. We've almost grown numb to it.
The Minnesota Department of Agriculture (not Department of Health, as you might imagine) has a lot of guilt here, too. And that the MDA is guilty does makes one wonder -- who put them up to it? Follow the money, and it seems likely the corporate "pasteurized" dairies might be a likely candidate. Or someone else with an ax to grind.
Why would the Department of Agriculture be guilty of misbehavior here? Let's examine the facts. The department has stated the illnesses have been "traced to raw milk" from the Hartmann Farm, but the facts don't really support such a conclusion. 4 people are sick. 1 is not a customer of Hartmann Farm. Of the remaining, 2 are children, both of whom have parents who have stated the children did NOT consume raw milk, although the parents drank it and did not get sick. No E.coli has been found at the Hartmann Farm as of yet. We seem to lack the smoking gun here. In fact, we seem to lack any firm evidence of causality, and instead have a bunch of questionable linking by the Department of Agriculture.
The then irresponsible media jumped on it, painted Michael Hartmann to be a bad actor -- probably figuring because he was somewhat of an eccentric libertarian they could bash him with smears tactics and never be called on it.
People are reading misleading statements such as Hartmann Farm lost their class A milk license and assume that the Farm must therefore be awful. Thank you Star Tribune for starting and perpetuating a completely false picture. Hartmann won a Minnesota Supreme Court case regarding licensing because the Minnesota Constitution itself overrules the very notion that the license was required for his business. No such license is required for a farmer to sell his product directly to a consumer. You can't blame a guy for not wanting to subject himself to arbitrary and onerous licensing requirements and fees if the Constitution specifically exempts farmers who want to sell their product directly to consumers from having to obtain any such license. Citizens and so-called journalists should try doing a little research, and reading this bit of the law -- it's highly enlightening. Especially when you begin to wonder who benefits from all the unnecessary licensing red tape.
So now, Hartmann's reputation has been smeared, libeled and slandered, and his livelihood endangered on completely weak and incomplete evidence. Small business owners, farmers, and self-employed workers everywhere should be alarmed.
There are a lot of blogs and commentary on this particular case. It looks so much like the Minnesota Department of Agriculture is simply looking for an easy scapegoat for stomping on the reputation of raw milk producers. Why would they do that?
And as usual, the mainstream media is only interested in an inflammatory, pro-big corporation story which would diminish the power of the small guy (oh, say, like blogs and other web news sources), and their usual effort to be provocative at any cost. Here are some links to a couple of perhaps entertaining and enlightening blogs on the subject:
And the bigger picture, perhaps:
The truth is out there. It just takes a lot of work to find it. No wonder old-style newspapers are suffering financially; they have become incapable of reporting news and doing journalism. They have become nothing more than mouthpieces for corporate and political PR.
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