Summary: In This Episode: There’s a lot of talk about accuracy in the media these days, up to and including frequent accusations that the mainstream press publishes “fake news.” The real “fake news” isn’t what you may think — and it starts even before you click.<br> <br> <a class="twitter-share-button" href="https://twitter.com/share?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">Tweet</a><br> <a href="#transcript">Jump to Transcript</a><br> <a href="https://thisistrue.com/category/podcasts/">How to Subscribe and List of All Episodes</a><br> Show Notes<br> <br> * <br> Like a game of telephone (aka <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers">Chinese Whispers</a>), the New York Post attributed <a href="https://nypost.com/2017/11/16/baby-boy-is-reportedly-first-pot-overdose-death/">their marijuana overdose story</a> to the <a href="http://www.rgj.com/story/news/marijuana/2017/11/16/colorado-doctors-claim-baby-boy-first-marijuana-overdose-death/870700001/">Reno Gazette Journal</a>, which itself was a copy of a report from <a href="http://www.9news.com/news/health/colorado-doctors-claim-first-marijuana-overdose-death/491760125">KUSA Denver</a>.<br> * Newsweek <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/marijuana-death-colorado-baby-713284">gets it wrong too</a>: the “FDA” report they touted actually links to a <a title="Drug Enforcement Administration" href="https://www.dea.gov">DEA</a> Fact Sheet that’s no longer online, but admitted there haven’t been any marijuana overdose deaths. And that’s still true.<br> * But the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/features/alcohol-deaths/index.html">CDC’s report</a> documents that alcohol causes 88,000 deaths per year, backed up by an <a href="http://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/nti/pdf/812117-Drug_and_Alcohol_Crash_Risk.pdf">NHTSA report</a> showing that drunk drivers are much more likely to be in crashes than pot smokers. So the real problem is…? We’re fighting the wrong battle (as per usual).<br> * And this from a guy who has no interest whatever in pot, and who does (occasionally) drink.<br> <br> <a name="transcript"></a><br> Transcript<br> There’s a lot of talk about accuracy in the media these days, up to and including frequent accusations that the mainstream press publishes “fake news.” For the most part, I don’t think that’s true, but that doesn’t mean people who watch TV or read news online don’t have to be intelligent consumers of news, especially when it comes to medical or scientific topics. Or, to put it another way, we need to exercise Uncommon Sense as a filter on the news, and this episode has an example of why.<br> Welcome to Uncommon Sense, I’m Randy Cassingham.<br> This is a look back on a story from issue 1223 of the This is True newsletter from about a year ago, which will be included on the Show Page at thisistrue.com/podcast9. It’s called Second Hand Smokescreen, and it illustrates something that really drives me crazy about the news business. I’m going to read you the story, verbatim:<br> One of the facts that marijuana legalization proponents like to point out is that even the federal Drug Enforcement Administration admits there’s never been a single documented death from a marijuana overdose. So when a medical case report published in the journal Clinical Practice and Cases in Emergency Medicine noted that a child had died in a case “associated” with cannabis in Colorado, where marijuana is legal, headlines blared that the “first marijuana overdose death” had been recorded. Nope. First, the boy was not any sort of pot “user” — he was just 11 months old, and lived in a hotel room with his parents, who admitted they had marijuana when a blood test on the boy...
