Dr. David Gorski, who blogs as Orac, describes the man behind Natural News, Mike Adams, this way: Whether it be his support of quackery, his rants against vaccines, his vile attacks on cancer patients, or his New World Order conspiracy mongering and support of the radical fringe in US politics, no one brings home the crazy quite like Mike Adams, and no one brings home such a wide variety and vast quantity of crazy, with the possible exception of Alex Jones, on whose website and web radio show Adams is a frequent guest. Elsewhere, Orac describes him this way: Mike Adams, the man who founded NaturalNews and has been one of the most prominent promoters of quackery on the Internet. Indeed, Mike Adams appears to be battling it out with Joe Mercola for the title of owning the biggest quackery website on the Internet. Among supporters of quackery, no one quite brings the crazy home the way Mike Adams does, be it writing antivaccine rap songs, abusing dead celebrities by claiming they would have survived if only they had used whatever quackery Adams supported at the time or painting them as victims of big pharma, or conspiracy mongering on a level that make Alex Jones blush. Truly, Mikey has a special talent among woo-meisters. Joe Mercola might have the most popular “natural health” website out there, but Mike Adams, as number two, clearly tries harder....As we all know, no one misinterprets studies, latches onto bad studies, or exaggerates the findings of studies quite the way Mike Adams does. See Oracs blog at scienceblogs/insolence/2013/09/25/mike-adams-endorses-the-antivaccine-canary-party-i-almost-feel-sorry-for-them/. Science writer Brian Dunning, host of Skeptoid, lists his ten worst offenders on the web in the promotion of scientific and factual misinformation at skeptoid/episodes/4283. Number one on the list is Natural News. Number two is Age of Autism, and number three is Prison Planet and InfoWars, both sites belonging to Alex Jones. So they disagree on whether Alex Jones is worse than Mike Adams, but on the lunacy of either, there is no doubt. Even a lunatic might give you the right time of day, though. So the mere fact that an item appears on the Natural News site doesnt mean that it is an outright lie, or even, as appears to be the case most of the time, that it is subjected to some kind of gross misrepresentation or misunderstanding. Nevertheless, I dont think that a sane person is going to quote Natural News as a source for any information.
Posted on: Mon, 18 Nov 2013 05:51:11 +0000