Black Press - British Columbia - Bclocal Again

On Nov. 2, 2011 I sent the following message to bclocalnews.com:

Please check my blog and leave a comment explaining why your publication refuses to post my comments.
http://rosemary-jacobs.blogspot.com/2011/11/comments-british-columbian-publication.html
Do you pay writers like Brenda Gill to write for you? Does she pay you or do you publish her material for free so that she can promote her business?
Rosemary Jacobshttp://rosemaryjacobs.comhttp://www.webanstrich.de/rosemary/http://rosemary-jacobs.blogspot.com

The reason that I asked about their relationship with writers like Gill was because in order to send an email to the publication I had to fill out a form on the site that had a title called “subject” with a drop down menu with the following options:

placing an ad

placing a classified ad

placing an obit

promoting your business online

feedback to editor

I wondered about the one offering to promote one’s business online. Did that mean that for a fee they would publish promotional material you submitted as newspaper “articles”? Might it even include having a ghost writer, a newspaper “reporter”, write promotional material for you, material that they publish without clearly labeling it as advertising or stating that it is paid for? Or could it be that they want to publish your material free of charge to fill space and save money by not having to hire journalists to write for them? If that is the case, does an editor check the articles you write for accuracy the way the media claims they check stories filed by reporters? 

Although I never did get an answer to my question about their relationship with writers, I did receive this, sent on November 2, apparently right after my email had been received:

Hello Rosemary;
Unfortunately, the Disqus commenting engine will hold back any comments containing a hyperlink or URL. It this case, there were three links included in your comment. Although these three links are, in fact, value added, I'm sure you can appreciate that not all are. Black Press must keep this logic in place to ensure inappropriate web links do not make their way to its news sites. 
The moderation and approval of comments held from automatically posting - containing hyperlinks etc. - is usually done each morning, however, with limited staffing it often slips for a time. In your case, the comments had not been moderated for days. That is not acceptable by our standards, so we apologize. 
The comment in question has now been moderated for approval. We thank you for your contribution and continued support. 
Take care.-------------Black Press Web Producerwww.bclocalnews.com

True to his word, what he called the “comment in question” was posted when I checked, but since the other two were still not up, I sent him this:

On Nov 2, 2011, at 6:30 PM, Webeditor - Marco wrote:Unfortunately, the Disqus commenting engine will hold back any comments containing a hyperlink or URL. 

Thank you for your response. May I suggest that you note this about Disqus on your site. I use it often and have never noticed the problem before. Perhaps you have set it up differently than others? 

It this case, there were three links included in your comment. Although these three links are, in fact, value added, I'm sure you can appreciate that not all are. Black Press must keep this logic in place to ensure inappropriate web links do not make their way to its news sites.  

I assume you have had problems with hyperlinks that commentators have posted.  

The moderation and approval of comments held from automatically posting - containing hyperlinks etc. - is usually done each morning, however, with limited staffing it often slips for a time. In your case, the comments had not been moderated for days. That is not acceptable by our standards, so we apologize. 
The comment in question has now been moderated for approval. We thank you for your contribution and continued support.  

What about the comments that I made about these articles? They have not been posted either.http://www.bclocalnews.com/opinion/letters/128212283.htmlhttp://www.northshoreoutlook.com/business/116764229.htmlYou will find the comments here:http://rosemary-jacobs.blogspot.com/2011/09/british-colombia-naturopaths-and-local.html
Sorry I spelled Columbia in Spanish. I did go back and correct it but don't know how to change it in the URL. 
Take care.
If you do not decide to leave a comment on my blog, I will inform readers about this myself. Thanks again for getting back to me, especially so promptly, and for posting my comment. I believe that naturopaths put the public at great risk and want very badly to warn people of the danger so that they can review the material for themselves and make informed decisions about  their treatment options. http://rosemaryjacobs.com/naturopaths.html  

I never got another response from bclocalnews.com and as of today, November 21, 2011 they have not posted my other two comments. 

I find this highly deceptive on a site that loudly broadcasts itself as a news site. It seems to me that offering the option called “promote your business online”, which is only seen by those who try to contact the paper directly by email, is the equivalent of “the small print” people have traditionally been warned to look out for and scrutinize in contracts they were about to sign, the major difference being that the small print was included right beneath the large print and people were educated to read the entire contract, the large and the small print, whereas people have not yet been educated to search through all the pages on a website looking for important information not included on the pages the public generally looks at. 

Readers Beware. Just because a publication promotes itself as a newspaper doesn't mean that the material it publishes is reviewed for accuracy by editors, that the company employs fact checkers or that it posts comments that question the accuracy of the material writers present. 

Black Press, Brenda Gill, bclocalnews.com, deceptive journalism, deceptive newspapers, dangerous naturopaths, British Columbia, Canadian press

Dr. Oz

Dr. Oz has put together a package of alternative medical treatments that he has awarded his very own “seal of approval” to. In other words, he recommends them. 

http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/oz-approved-health-diet-and-beauty-essentials

I didn’t get much beyond number two, vodka and the botanical Rhodiola rosea for “stress relief” because it brought back such unpleasant memories. 

My dad was an alcoholic, but he didn’t start drinking other than socially until the 1950s when he was in his 40s and our family doctor, noticing  how tense and stressed Dad always was, told him to have a cocktail before dinner every night to relax.

Back then doctors were highly respected authority figures. The doctor’s seal of approval was all that dad needed to get him to go from social drinking to nightly drinking. Just like Oz, our family doctor recommended one drink, but my dad, unlike my mother, couldn’t stop at one. The irony of it is that I think the doctor had the same problem my dad did and that he died prematurely of cirrhosis of the liver caused by the same stress relief remedy that probably killed my dad. 

Like my father, the family GP, General Practitioner, was also the product of a devout Irish Catholic family. Alcoholism was probably in both their genes. I’ve always been afraid it was in mine too. I’m guessing that it was because of their culture that neither dad nor our doctor could face, acknowledge or deal with the reason why my father was perpetually stressed and decided instead to simply “treat the symptoms” rather than the cause of his condition. 

While I’m not sure that I know the cause myself, I believe that I do. I think that marrying my mother was a tragic mistake for both of them. They brought out the worst in each other. Although they must have loved each other when they married, they were from completely different worlds. My mother’s parents were Russian Jews. Back then my parents’ marriage was called a “mixed marriage” and believe me everyone including both their families was very disturbed by it. Strange my dad could break that taboo but not the one about divorce, but then maybe he knew he’d hear a bunch of I-told-you-sos and it was the I-told-you-sos that he couldn’t face. Or maybe he feared that if we didn’t all live under the same roof that he wouldn’t be able to support us. It beats me. 

However, hearing Dr. Oz, Oprah’s television doctor and health guru, telling people to drink to treat their stress, horrifies me. In this day and age why doesn’t he know that many people can’t take just one drink and that anyone who is constantly or even just frequently stressed should learn the cause and try to deal with it? He of all people, the “alternative medicine promoter”, a member of the sect that constantly shouts that MDs, the practitioners of evidence-based medicine, only treat symptoms while they, the alts, treat the causes of disease.

It also disturbs me that Oz recommends adding a botanical drug to the vodka. Actually, he recommends many botanicals in spite of the fact that no one knows if any of them will eventually be found to be as lethal as cigarettes, that other natural stress remedy that both my parents were addicted to, and that by the time that the toxicity of the botanical becomes apparent it will be too late to prevent thousands of premature deaths. 

What makes this even stranger is that not too long ago Oz scared many of his viewers by claiming that apple juice given to babies contains arsenic and that although the amount is low and the FDA and scientific community, which have studied arsenic for decades, state that the amount and type are no cause for alarm, Oz said he was concerned about long term safety. 

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2011/09/15/dr-besser-vs-dr-oz-apple-juice-showdown-on-gma/

Concerned about long term safety of something well studied but not concerned about the long term safety of things that have never been studied? Why the double standard, Doctor?

Oz’s recommending alcohol to treat stress and botanicals that have never been studied or evaluated for long term safety scares the hell out of me, especially since there are probably thousands, or maybe millions, of people who watch his show and believe all he says, but there is another thing about the TV doc and his medical sideshow that simply annoys me. 

His face constantly pops up in ads on my FaceBook page and when I browse the Internet. I’m really tired of his using his MD, entertainment TV program and celebrity status to try to sell me products. 

But then again maybe the reason his sideshow is so popular is because he tells the public what it wants to hear - there are simple, inexpensive solutions for all of life’s problems. Health and happiness can be bought. They come in a bottle. 

“Entertaining” lots of unseen TV viewers and offering them simple panaceas for all that ails them must be far less stressful for Oz than practicing heart surgery, a brutal field that constantly looks reality and death in the eye, one where the doctor has to truthfully inform patients of dangers, risks and the odds of success and one in which he has to tell the family that dad died on the operating table. One where you have to face consequences as opposed to a TV show where you will never learn that someone who took your advice was seriously harmed by it.

Dr. Oz, natural remedies, stress relief, botanical drugs

Comments A British Columbian Publication Won't Post

On October 30, 2011 I read this article by naturopath Brenda Gill 

http://www.bclocalnews.com/lifestyles/132810383.html

in the online edition of bclocalnews.com, a British Columbia publication.

I left the following comment which as of today, November 2, 2011, has not been posted.

Be careful what you consume. While it is true that observational studies do not reliably show cause and effect, it is also true that dietary supplements including vitamins do not have to be studied before they are sold and usually aren't. As a result, there is no way to know if they offer benefits, cause harm or are just a total waste of money. Only the extremely naive like naturopaths would believe that they either offer benefits or can’t hurt without solid evidence demonstrating that. There could well be something out there that many people take which is as lethal as tobacco and that by the time that is discovered it will be too late to prevent a lot of needless premature deaths.
Rosemary Jacobs
http://rosemaryjacobs.comhttp://www.webanstrich.de/rosemary/http://rosemary-jacobs.blogspot.com

This is not the first failure of bclocalnews.com or a naturopath writing for it to refuse to post a comment I submitted.

http://rosemary-jacobs.blogspot.com/2011/09/british-colombia-naturopaths-and-local.html

Is there a pattern here?

I don’t take an Internet site seriously that doesn’t permit readers to post comments or offer an easy way to contact the site owners and authors to present differing opinions or evidence that they may have gotten their facts wrong. To me such a failure indicates that the people involved are promoting their personal beliefs, agendas or goods and services and that they don’t want their readers to hear anything that might make them think that the material on their site could possibly be inaccurate. 

However, I do take seriously a site that provides for comments, especially one that bills itself as a news site, until, that is, I discover that the site refuses to post negative comments. I think that is downright deceptive. As far as I’m concerned not only does it indicate that the authors are promoting their beliefs, agendas and/or businesses, it also shows that they want readers to believe that they are being open and objective while in reality they are deliberately preventing anyone who disagrees with them from telling that to their readers. 

The only way I have found to contact anyone at bclocalnews.com is by going to their site and clicking on the “contact us” link. That brings up a form to fill out. After one has done that, he clicks the “submit” button and wonders if anyone in authority at the publication will ever see it. 

I am now going to fill out the form, give them this URL and request that they leave a comment here explaining why my comments on their site have never gotten past their moderators. 

Brenda Gill, naturopaths, British Columbia, newspapers, bclocalnews.com