MARIS61
Real American
- Joined
- Sep 12, 2008
- Messages
- 28,007
- Likes
- 5,012
- Points
- 113
Before the world of twitterheads and facebookuniversity, and before Obama made it okay to violate Federal Law as long as you voted for him, all Federal Agencies compiling and/or creating scientific, economic, intelligence or any other kind of official information for the public, were required to submit it to committees or Agency heads for review before publishing it.
I know this to be fact as I spent 11 years of my life 1979-1990 proofreading these voluminous troves of misspelled, poorly punctuated, often indecipherable reports often consisting of several conflicting and competing scientific AND political "opinions and conclusions", before we printed them. I also sometimes knew the biologists, engineers and such who authored the reports or performed the data collection or conducted the field tests...Great people, many with pre-conceived conclusions firmly coloring their professional opinions because they are human after all. This is why they were fired/prosecuted if/when they leaked portions in advance for personal/political gain.
Virtually everything published about The Mt St Helens Eruptions and subsequent studies, The Exxon-Valdez Oil Spill, The NW Spotted Owl Report, Military weapons instruction manuals (think comic books), many studies on helping salmon co-exist with hydro-power, hydro-electric projects we built in Saudi Arabia...super intensive, unbelievably complete collections of data, facts, opinions, theories...
All of these reports, with the exception of military weapon instruction manuals, originally contradicted themselves throughout. After they went through complete review and cleansing of personal and political influence, they were presented to the public. Hence their incredible value to generations of both the scientific community and all Americans.
You can't have a Public Information Officer (this is generally the only person who is authorized to disseminate information to the public, but educated only in spin-ology and perhaps broadcasting, probably the least educated about whatever topic we're talking about) with zero actual knowledge of science, biology, or canoe-building, just decide that it's suddenly their job to "educate" the public by tweeting something they read or believe. Their job is to be the vocal chords of the government, not the brain, and believe me it's a very good arrangement for fact-lovers.
