Expanding, expounding...

Yesterday I wrote a reply on my own blog and thought later I should move it up here and perhaps expand it a bit...

Before I had a computer, when I had a few extra dollars I would buy British Sunday papers; the "London Sunday Times", "Scotland on Sunday" and such at Borders when they came in on Wednesday. I always learned more about what was going on in America through them than I ever did from our news here; let alone the rest of the world.

Sometimes I actually think about going back to the monotony of the assembly line just to have time to read again...

I remember learning that in the 40's the government sprayed radioactive mist from civil defense towers to see how the air currents spread it through the city (as I remember it was East St. Louis) and that they fed kids at a boarding school radioactive oatmeal because Quaker said that the oatmeal "killed" radioactivity. (I believe that was a study done by MIT with government funding, but it's been some years since I read it.) That came out because the families had found out and sued; it was settled out of court with them because there were no survivors. There was another one where they placed radiation in the milk in school lunches and tracked it's effect on the kids (I want to say that was in Memphis). All of these came out in Freedom of Information Act documents and were coroborrated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the time the article was written. No doubt those are some of the documents I heard about the current administration reclassifying (story on NPR last week about 1500 pages of things they've "taken back" that had been declassified).

I remember finding out that Nikes sold in America had a "safe" chemical in them for an antifungal treatment, while the ones sold in Latin America had formaldehyde (the chemical I think started my Dad's fatal cancer). Of course, after NAFTA, the ones from Latin America were making their way back into the US to be sold here as well...

I remember learning about Alison Hargreave, the only woman to climb the highest peaks on each continent without oxygen, losing her life on her descent from topping K2...

So many things we never hear about or read about in the American press...

I miss Murrow (what I know of him and what I've heard or read of him,I'm not quite that old) and Cronkite and true JOURNALISTS!!! Every now and then Walter turns up on NPR commenting on the anniversary of stories he covered when they were new; he is still as sharp as ever, and his hindsight adds so much along with the behind the scenes information he adds to the stories. Would that he were still on camera, but I am sure he couldn't be muzzled, just like Daniel Schorr; that's how he ended up at NPR after so many years with "the networks".

There is no place for truth in advertising I guess, and that's what most of our news is intended for...

alan