I guess it's not surprising that the unquestioned reprinting of press releases that has been common in newspapers for so long has spread to video tape.

I was very active in special interest political battles in San Francisco for many years. On a number of occasions news stories appeared in local newspapers based on studies done by partisans in our particular issue. Since the studies involved some battle that was raging in our little teapot, I knew that the findings were literally made up to suit the position of that side of the battle.

In one case, the so called study wasn't even reduced to writing. An activist told a sympathetic editor some hypothetical estimates I had made in a meeting the week before. These musings were then used to calculate an outcome favorable to the activist and the editorial position of the paper and that outcome was then attributed to an economist in Berkeley who, when asked, couldn't produce a written copy of his study and refused to discuss it.

So the next time you see a headline, often across the top of an inside page of a daily newspaper, declaring something like "Study Finds Most US Children are Starving to Death," check to see who did the study. Undoubtedly it will be by something like the "Organization to Eliminate Childhood Hunger." This group will either be a trade association for federally subsidized food producers or a non-profit organization that lives off of government grants whose funding source is being threatened.

I'm glad that a story was done about this corporate hold on the American media. I always question what I hear on the news, especially when there are stories of a new drug that is "safe" because a recent study ran new tests on it. Often, the "organizations" that fund these studies are given a fancy name but the scientists that run the study work for the pharmaceutical companies. I disagree wholeheartedly with the rampant use of prescription medicines and am appalled at how people are so quick to assume they are safe. Thank you for running a story that the public needs to hear.