Consciously Confusing

I woke up in a Holiday Express to an article in the Dayton Daily News about radioactive fish.

The article covered the story of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which has been leaking tritium into monitoring wells and making people nervous about the local water supply.  Making the situation worse, a fish that tested positive for Strontium 90 was caught in the Connecticut River, four miles upstream from the plant.  Strontium 90 has been linked to bone cancer and leukemia.

The usual suspects were lined up to confuse readers. State officials dismissed the plant as the source of the ST-90.  A chief of preventive services said that nuclear testing and Chernobyl were to blame. An expert consultant said ST-90 was everywhere and that radioactive fish are okay to eat.  State health officials said that the amount of ST-90 was consistent with baseline levels.   But an Australian doctor countered that baseline levels had not been established for ST-90.   Then finally, a Connecticut River fishing guide said the obvious, that ST-90 doesn’t do much good for the image of local fish.

So who is right or what is right?

Do you ever get the feeling that the mass media is consciously confusing us?  Scroll through the headlines on Bloomberg’s web site on almost any day and you will see contradictory headlines  like “Oil prices fall on economic worries,”  and “Oil prices rises on growth speculation.”   Does anyone really know what’s going on?