Oil sands cloud rational thought in downstream news room

It was not quite the same as the big scoop the reporter had on The Simpsons with Blinky, the three-eyed fish, but Green Julie at the Commie Broadcasting Corporation figured she had a lock on the Pulitzer, when she filed this stinker about a “mutated fish” downstream from the Athabasca oil sands:

 http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2008/08/18/chip-fish.html

 

It took only a few hours before the story was repeated on news wires around the world, but that was the last we heard for seven months.

Fast forward to March 17, 2009. The same reporter files this story debunking the mutant fish story she’d filed back in August:

 

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2009/03/17/chip-fish-reax.html

 

In the interview with the professor, he said he’d determined this was not a mutation as soon as he saw the photos and immediately informed the Chief of the fact.

For seven months the Chief had his people (and the world) believe that one of their primary food sources was mutating because of down stream pollution from the oil sands.

Green Julie asked Chief Poitras why he didn’t disclose the findings. I’m paraphrasing here, but the Chief felt it wasn’t his obligation.

I don’t know why the reporter took seven months to do a follow-up on what was obviously a very alarming and bizarre news story, but in my mind the headline should have read “Chief suppresses information on ‘mutated’ fish.”

I think these oil sands have mutated some brains around a certain publicly-funded newsroom in Yellowknife if this counts as responsible journalism.