Unbiased Experts

I did an Internet search on the book and found what I had expected. Watchdog sites. There's nothing wrong with watchdogs; they're actually quite necessary. However, I find it interesting that no dogs seem to be watching Rampton and Stauber.

Even the quotes from the back of the book are misleading. Talk about experts with your own point of view. They do all that talking about companies trying to make people seem separate from their cause, and Rampton and Stauber do the same thing. I looked up some of the people quoted on the back cover. Barbara Ehrenreich is a political activists who heroically took minimum wage jobs to write and sell a book. She also publicly dumped out a Dasani at a conference because Coke is apparently violating human rights in Columbia.

Jeremy Rifkin leads organizations such as the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation and the Beyond Beef Coalition. He wants people to eat less beef because cows release methane. Aside from the fact that cows release less than fresh water, I'd like to point out that, without beef consumption, more cows would live longer and produce more methane.

I felt the need to look them up because I didn't notice a periodical next to their name. Usually anyone on the back of the book has some sort of organizational affiliation. The USA Today review seemed the least fanatical, so I left it alone. The first two obviously wanted to start the wave.

Needless to say, I was interested in Brill's Content, the periodical. Brill's Content had gotten itself into trouble in the past. It is a for profit magazine with corporate affiliations that attacked a Time article. Unfortunately, everything Brill's Content had said was false turned out to be true. Another company bought it in 2001.

In essence, I'm merely pointing out that they didn't exactly get unbiased and objective quotes for the back cover. Even the Center for Media and Democracy seems a bit biased. Their web page has a fist above a sign that says "STOP GOVERNMENT FUNDED PROPAGANDA." Ironically, it doesn't say "buy ours instead."