Churnalism

“Big Vape is copying Big Tobacco’s playbook” says Liza Gross in her recent article on The Verge. This isn’t the first time, nor I suspect will it be the last time, that a media outlet tries to conjure up images of a faceless, and evil industry by conflating the tobacco and vaping industries.

Even if a representative of the vaping industry is interviewed (which is rare), the journalistic hack tries to subtly (or not so subtle in some cases) taint the piece with the usual “shill” claims.

It seems that the shrieking from tobacco control about the Smoke-Free Foundation is still going. I am not particularly surprised by the near-constant wailing. It has, however, taken on a particularly curious note with the activist magazine Tobacco Control now flat refusing to publish any “industry-funded” papers; something it’s refused to do since 2013.

Again, not particularly surprising. But it does highlight a very interesting, and potentially damaging viewpoint.

The thing with journalists is they tend to get friendly with regular sources of information. The “go-to” folks for soundbites and information, no matter how bizarre that information is. The flip side of that, is when they are ‘confronted’ by opposing views the immediately adopt the “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” stance by retreating past la-la land up to cloud cuckoo.

This whole thing really started to gather momentum when Public Health England released the recent evidence update on electronic cigarettes. We knew that there would be some responses from the opponents to vaping, the trouble is the evidence update was in fact a response to the multitude of rubbish science and poor media.

Not going to beat about the bush with this one, not going to play nice. After all the evidence presented to date along with all the upcoming evidence certain organisations still don’t get it.

We, as vapers know unequivocally that there are certain organisations along with certain individuals that seek to dehumanize smokers, and by extension vapers. Who is it I’m picking on today then?

The American Medical Association. Now if that sounds at all familiar, it should. It is effectively an American version of the BMA, and we know just how useless they are. What is worrying in this instance, is the seeming lack of math understanding. Bear with, and let’s take a look at the PR rubbish first.

Breaking News! E-Cigs Will Help Them Quit Smoking! A survey says…

Same old same old. Whenever someone references a “survey” it does make me wonder who wrote the survey, and how they interpret the results. This one is unfortunately no different.

E-cigarette users are much more hopeful that the devices will help them quit smoking than the general public is, including people who just smoke traditional tobacco cigarettes, according to a new French survey.

Seems like my plan of taking a few days out have gone awry with some olds. There’s been an alarmist survey on teen e-cig use, covered in delightful depth by Clive Bates. By the way, the study that the news articles refers to hadn’t actually been published yet at time of print.

The piece of olds I’ve been looking at has gone a little unnoticed. All well and good, means I can write this in relative peace 😉

Hmmm how to start this post. It is, or at least for me it is a bit of an upsetting topic but with the recent kerfuffle it needs to be addressed. Again.

For this post, I will be heavily referring to the brilliant postings from the lovely Lorien over on her blog. True, she hasn’t posted for a while but she has been incredibly active elsewhere and I simply cannot give enough credit to her, or any of the other advocates. Some of you may be wondering why I’m referencing older posts, well the answer is pretty straightforward in that nothing has changed.

Settle down folks this double posting isn’t going to become a regular thing. Sometimes something happens in the world of vaping that just requires a second post.

By now you should have seen the debacle that is the article from Vox. It is, to put none to fine a point on it, dire in the extreme. Terribly one-sided, and all of it in favor of a particular US Researcher’s point of view. I’ll be honest and state that I suspect the article may have been written by that researcher with only a few changes made by the author herself. Call me cynical if you like.

I’m going to begin this one by posting up a few tweets from various users.

If you like, the article mentioned in the tweet is here feel free to have a read, I’ll wait 🙂

Just so you know, Antoine Flahault is a respected Professor in Biostatistics and neither smokes or vapes, but is heavily vested in the truth.

I’m going to gloss over the tweets regarding Philly, because that little story is about money which is a whole different rant for another day 😉