This article from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by khare@alumni.caltech.edu.
Excellent evidence of the herd. Just imagine if the anonymous noise injected into our world newsphere (noosphere?) was, say, a fraudulent story that a stock accounting scandal had been accused and the evildoers were shorting.
Oh, wait, that happened. An unemployed Orange County student took down Emulex...
Enjoy!
Rohit
khare@alumni.caltech.edu
Stop Those Presses! Blonds, It Seems, Will Survive After All
October 2, 2002
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
Apparently it fell into the category "too good to check."
Last Friday, several British newspapers reported that the
World Health Organization had found in a study that blonds
would become extinct within 200 years, because blondness
was caused by a recessive gene that was dying out. The
reports were repeated on Friday by anchors for the ABC News
program "Good Morning America," and on Saturday by CNN.
There was only one problem, the health organization said in
a statement yesterday that it never reported that blonds
would become extinct, and it had never done a study on the
subject.
"W.H.O. has no knowledge of how these news reports
originated," said the organization, an agency of the United
Nations based in Geneva, "but would like to stress that we
have no opinion of the future existence of blonds."
All the news reports, in Britain and the United States,
cited a study from the World Health Organization - "a
blonde-shell study," as The Daily Star of London put it.
But none reported any scientific details from the study or
the names of the scientists who conducted it.
On "Good Morning America," Charles Gibson began a
conversation with his co-anchor, Diane Sawyer, by saying:
"There's a study from the World Health Organization, this
is for real, that blonds are an endangered species. Women
and men with blond hair, eyebrows and blue eyes, natural
blonds, they say will vanish from the face of the earth
within 200 years, because it is not as strong a gene as
brunets."
Ms. Sawyer said she was "somewhat of a natural blonde."
Jeffrey Schneider, a spokesman for ABC News, said the
anchors got the information from an ABC producer in London
who said he had read it in a British newspaper.
In London, The Sun and The Express both reported that
unnamed scientists said blonds would survive longest in
Scandinavia, where they are most concentrated, and expected
the last true blond to hail from Finland.
The British accounts were replete with the views of
bleached blonds who said hairdressers would never allow
blondness to become extinct, and doctors who said that rare
genes would pop up to keep natural blonds from becoming an
endangered species.
Journalists in London said last night that the source of
the reports was probably one of several European news
agencies that are used by the British press, but it
remained unclear which one.
Tim Hall, a night news editor at The Daily Mail, said the
report was probably distributed by The Press Association,
Britain's domestic news agency. "Several papers picked it
up," he said.
But Charlotte Gapper, night editor at The Press
Association, said that although it had considered running
the report on Sept. 27, it had decided not to after talking
to the World Health Organization.
"We didn't do that story because we made an inquiry to the
World Health Organization first," she said. "They told us
that report was two years old, and had been covered at the
time. They said it had been picked up again that day by a
German news agency."
She added that she did not know which agency the
organization was referring to.
Dr. Ray White, a geneticist at the University of California
at San Francisco, said that the disappearance of a gene for
blond hair "sounds patently incorrect."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/02/health/02BLON.html?ex=1034599071&ei=1&en=3a0e4f0b2b251593
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