"If your mother says she loves you, check it out!"

A legendary quote from the City News Bureau, Chicago

Indeed, you can't believe everything you read in the paper or see and hear on TV. Sometimes we get duped.

The curmudgeon in me thinks it will only get worse as we inch closer to The Millenium which is really The Fake Millenium. The Real Millenium doesn't happen until January 1, 2001, but the media keeps perpetuating The Millenium hype. Don't forget, by the way, to buy tickets for the Boston Red Sox last home game of the year, which is billed as their last game of The Millenium. That must mean they aren't playing next year.

This Millenium stuff reminds me of the time we went through a similar round of hype in southeastern Wisconsin when the EPA mandated that reformulated gasoline, or RFG, would be used in our area in the winter to help reduce air quality problems. The stuff smelled different, and so The Scare was on.

TV newscasts and newspapers were replete with stories about people saying they had gotten sick merely from pumping the stuff at the gas station, and that cars, snowblowers, and lawn mowers (I know, that this was a winter story, and that the grass doesn't grow in Wisconsin in the winter, but I didn't make this up) would all stop working. Why it was so bad that you just waited for pictures of big bulldozers scooping up all the people who had died or fallen ill at the gas stations and delivering them en masse to the local hospitals. Maybe we didn't see them because, well, you know, the bulldozer engines had all quite working because of RFG.

In fact few people, if any, had gotten sick from pumping RFG, and engines kept humming along just as they always had on non-RFG. That didn't fit the hype, though, so there were few, if any, stories reporting those facts. Fact, after all, aren't hype, so they aren't always worth reporting.

This year, or, rather, for the rest of The Millenium, hold on to your hats for the Fake Millenium Y2K scares that will be perpetuated by stories that tease that ONLY IN TONIGHT'S NEWSCAST will you learn whether or not our food supply will be threatened as we tell you whether or not your microwave oven is Y2K compliant. While most people will come away from the story telling their friends and neighbors that their microwave may not be Y2K compliant, only a few will have heard that the last sentence in the story that there is no Y2K factor of any kind in a microwve oven.

Remember that sage advice from the Chicago News Bureau about your mother?

The New York City-area press forgot it and swallowed a big fish recently, going ga-ga over the story of a 13-year-old Honduran boy who was found by a cab driver, and said he was looking for his father who had left home after Hurricane Mitch devestated their homeland. The father had supposedly written the boy to meet him at a certain bridge near LaGuardia Airport. The lad said he'd made his way from Honduras to Miami to New York, and the city opened its heart and its news pages to him.

I'm a cynic, and after I read the lad's story in the New York Times, I couldn't wait for the other shoe to drop. Something smelled rotten. Sure enough, the story unraveled when Newsday and the AP (alone, among all the New York-based news organizations) sent reporters to San Buenaventura, the boy's hometown. While the boy's real story is still sad, the one he told was a whopper. In fact, the boy's father had died of AIDS, and he seemed unable to accept his father's death. He had come only from Miami, where he's been living with an aunt.

The mainstream San Francisco press was also bit in the rear recently by a clever alternative weekly paper, SF Weekly. The weekly had contacted the local newspapers, radio and television stations anonymously, purporting to be promoting a rally on behalf of yuppies who were moving into the Mission District. Rally organizers said they were fed up with "hate crimes" against their members, who included the Safe Parking for Utility Vehicles Working Group. The rally was covered as a bona fide event, and so SF Weekly had successfully made its point that sometimes the press swallows anything you feed it.

We've all been at parties when someone has touted the lastest medical study that they read about in "the paper" or heard about "on TV." They need no greater test of its veracity than the fact that it was spoon fed to them by the press. The problem is that they have no idea who funded the study. In some cases these great pieces of medical and nutritional advice have come from studies funded by trade groups or industries that would benefit by the results. We're finding that out in stories about the tobacco industry and its studies denying links between cigarette smoking and cancer. We had a big fish land on our newspaper's doorstep recently, in the shape of the Minneapolis-Wisconsin-Chicago bike ride to benefit AIDS. It sounds like a wonderful charitable project, as does the recently-completed three day Avon walk to benefit breast cancer. I'm an avid cyclist, and I almost did the ride last year, until I found out more about the organization that runs both the ride and the walk, and dropped out of the ride.

This story epitomizes how the press can fall prey to an endless succession of press releases and fancy marketing packges without having the ability to really check them out. Our city editor got a call from a friend who will be doing the AIDS ride this month with several friends, and I got a huge, slick marketing package about it. We would've simply turned the story around with a quick interview and photo of the participants, like many newspapers or television stations would do. Because I knew of the problems the ride has had, we did a sidebar (or accompanying story) about the ride's financial history.

A relative had heard bad things about the ride, so I did some research. I found out that while a national organization of charitable institutions recommends that no more than 40% of the money raised by such an event goes toward expenses (which means at least 60% goes to charity), the AIDS ride has often fallen way short in that respect. Each rider has to raise $2300 in pledges to ride (plus pay a $45 entry fee). Only 15% of the money raised by the AIDS rides in Texas, Florida, and Pennsylvania went to charity. The Pennsylvania ride was dropped after the organizers paid a $100,000 fine to the state.

Last year was the first year that Wisconsin charities were to benefit. According to one article in Isthumus, a Madison weekly paper, about 11% went to charity; according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the figure was closer to 6%. I called the head of a Racine beneficiary, and was told that though $2500 in seed money had been paid for them to be a beneficiary, they received a whppping $408 from rider organizers.

Each year the organizers pledge to do better and say that the numbers are so imbalanced because of the uncertainty of how many people will participate. In fact, this year the Avon marketing materials say that there is no guaranteed minimum contribution to charity because of that. We decided not to cover the Avon walk because of the financial question. Sure enough, though, the day it started, the Associated Press ran a photo provided to them by an Avon photographer, of the event. The event now had the stamp of legitimacy on it, though in fairness the AP's position is that while it offers material to newspapers and TV stations, it is up to each subscriber to decide whether or not to use it. The AP also ran a handout photo of the start of the AIDS ride, and several pictures ran in the Chicago Tribune of the finish of both the ride and the walk.

The Internet and the explosion of news programming on cable and network television have shrunk our deadlines and made the news business more competetive than ever. There is less and less time to check some things out thoroughly as the clock ticks louder and louder in our newsroom, and we worry about beating the competition to the punch. That, my friends, is the downside of having the latest news at our fingertips, 24 hours a day.

I'd write more, but I have to go and check my old manual typewriter and see if it is Y2K compliant. You see, my friend said that his cousin told him he had heard on TV the other day that...

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