NEWS FLASH! Dateline… Atlanta

CNN has apparently gone on record, saying that irresponsible and informal gold mining in the Amazon has caused an outbreak of Malaria… Who’d a thunk?

Blasting all hope of responsible journalism, an oxymoron if there ever was one, they detonated a thirty second incendiary, promotional device urging you to watch their diatribe. It served to remind me why I so rarely turn the TV on and find it unbearable when I do. Clearly they plan a fair and objective treatment of all mining…like good reporters do. They featured a truly rabid woman interviewing a Latin government lackey about the “fact” that CNN had travelled to the jungle with the air force and “found an illegal mining operation.” She then asked, in that cheerful and objective tone that inspires cooperation, what this government toady had done about it…

I won’t even pretend to guess how they intend making the malaria point… But goodness, how stupid do they think we are? And where were they in microbiology class in their sophomore year of High School? And I mean, it’s not like these illegal miners are hiding out in the jungle with Butch Cassidy’s ghost and no one knows where they are, and it takes a genius from Harvard to go find them there. Come on! I once heard that these kinds of news outputs are geared to an average eighth grade level, but I had no idea how uninformed and well, dull, average eighth graders are if such is the case. My only real guess is that since news anchors are literary by nature, they jumped to the alliteration of malaria and mining and drew hasty conclusions that mining causes malaria with no regard for the lack of coherence in the argument.

I don’t like informal mining either for it’s impact, not only on the environment but also on mining’s image in general. Yet, for this woman to declare her personal, earthshaking discovery of the presence of illegal miners and demand to know what action some sub-vice-lieutenant-governor’s minister of the interior of some banana republic’s jungle state, or whatever, has done about it only demonstrates her ignorance and ineptitude. If you want to help with the problem, and there is no denying that there exists a bad situation, one needs to attack it with the facts before defaulting to figures of speech.

Still, the good news is that she gets to air this as a groundbreaking splash across the panorama of big network programming. Oh goody! Don’t you just bet the do-gooders will turn this to their global warming uses and call it “fact”? Were it not so sad it would inspire laughter. Watch out all of you Hollywood moguls and political activists, you JuliaRobertses, GeorgeClooneys, BarbaraStriesands. And dare I invoke the sacred name of Gore? Watch out guys, biases and lies are even more inconvenient than the truth…