X-Message-Number: 8667
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 21:31:00 -0400
From: Saul Kent <>
Subject: No Comment

        Charles Platt stated in his report on the NY Times Sunday
Times article that people being interviewed are reluctant to say: "no
comment".  
        
        I want to report that saying "no comment" or not answering
a question won't necessarily stop "journalists".  In this case, the writer
of the Times story was fishing around for information about how many
dogs have died in our experiments at 21st Century Medicine.

        No one obliged him with this information.  When I was asked
the question, I didn't answer it.  So, he merely quessed that  dozens of
dogs have died and The Times printed his guess.

        Charles also said that journalists don't care if they get the
facts right.  In this case, I received a call from the "fact checker" at
the
NY Times, who read me the part of the article that dealt with me.  I found
that virtually everything she read to me was wrong and had to be
corrected.  

        This reminds me of a NY Daily News story about the Cryonics
Conference sponsored by the Cryonics Society of New York in 1969 at
the NY Academy of Sciences, in which the writer got every fact wrong,
including the address of the Academy.

        It also reminds me of being interviewed around the same time
by NY Times writer Homer S. Bigart, a pullitzer-press winning reporter,
who was at the end of his career.  The article he wrote from the interview
turned out to be perfect:  it was unbiased and every fact was right.
Just goes to show that everything in the newspapers doesn't have to be
screwed up, and that there is always the chance, however remote it may be,
that we'll run across another Homer Bigart.

---Saul Kent

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