Viva Wasserman!

The essential difference between The National Examiner and the New York Times is that the former will print any type of bilge, whereas the New York Times prints it only if it passes a certain criterion.

Thus, stories about the amazing baby that sleeps and eats under water, teen girls kidnapped by a vampire, or the towering beast that prowls British moors in search of human flesh are printed by the tabloids, but spurned by the New York Times.

Because they are too absurd?

Oh no, not at all: absurdity has never deterred the established media. Not satisfied with stories repeatedly disproved by scientific measurement, they cheerfully print nonsense that crassly contradicts natural laws.

The real NYT criterion is this: does the article aid the ideology of social engineering and income redistribution? If so, print it, however absurd; if not, censor it, however true.

Theories of a flat earth or little green men from outer space do not point an accusing finger at anyone and are therefore useless for social engineering; hence the NYT regards them as bilge, notwithstanding the fact that they really are bilge.

Not so with the baloney about asbestos, radioactivity, nuclear power and radon. Not so with the rubbish about DDT, cyclamates, high-voltage power lines, microwaves, genetic engineering, and a hundred other subjects that can be used to demonstrate the profit-greedy corporations' sadistic glee in afflicting the martyred consumer with cancer, genetic mutations, clubfeet, and other horrors. Here the genuine experts are censored; the news fit to print is that interpreted by the Brodeurs, Cochranes, Rifkins, and the others who make a living by twisting, ignoring and manufacturing evidence to fit their sociopolitical agenda.

When these charlatans' concoctions backfire, they are censored. Nuclear Winter, long since recognized by the scientific community as a propagandistic fraud, continues to march unblemished through the pages of the American press and across the screen of the boob tube. For six long years, the NYT kept silent about radon; and now that the discovery of the Reading Prong has made the issue unconcealable, the NYT still censors the connection to energy conservation. Let the utilities insulate low-income housing for free, and let the kids inside get lung cancer; it all serves the noble goal of income redistribution.

What do I call charlatan's concoctions? Fabrications that an intelligent layman can explode with a minimum of scientific knowledge, or even with none at all. The NYT (and of course, hundreds of other mass media) have given space to such ludicrous quacks as one Harvey Wasserman, who on a recent talk show claimed the cancer rate round Three Mile Island had quintupled. Just look up the US cancer rate in the Statistical Abstract. The 1986 edition shows it close to 20%. Quintuple this a la Wasserman, and you get a cancer rate of 100% (or more).

Now think this through. What happens to a man who falls off the roof of a Harrisburg skyscraper onto the concrete pavement below? He gets up, shouts Viva Wasserman! and walks away, for he cannot die of anything but cancer. Wasserman, the Great Medicine Man, has cured America's number one killer, heart disease: there are still heart attacks, but they cannot be fatal. There are no more highway fatalities: victims mangled and crushed to a pulp live on, for they can die of nothing but cancer.

That type of story is so absurd that it might have difficulty getting into the National Examiner's across-the-board garbage. But since it serves its social mission of illustrating the victimization of the hapless ratepayer by the swinish nuclear industry, that type of hand-selected garbage can be found time and again in America's leading newspapers.

Which is why the New York Times would have a long way to go if it tried to rise to the level of the National Examiner.