It’s been a little more than a year since the Hearst Corporation ceased publication of the print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Since then, the newspaper has lived on as an online only product. As a result, the online successor relies very heavily on unedited reader blogs instead of full-time journalists. If this article on fish and mercury is any indication, there are a number of pitfalls that come with that new model.

Why do I say that? For starters, the column by Tami Gustafson mentions the infamous sushi test that the New York Times conducted back in early 2008 — one that NFI thoroughly debunked and the newspaper’s own public editor criticized.

But the errors and distortions don’t stop there. As we’ve noted many times, no evidence of a case of methylmercury poisoning from the normal consumption of commercial seafood has ever been found in peer-reviewed medical literature. Gustafson’s article prominently mentions man-made pollution, yet neglects to mention that the traces of mercury found in commercial seafood is from natural sources like underwater volcanic activity — a scientific fact that has been upheld by twoCaliforniaCourts.

Gustafson also ignored some of the latest science that has found that governments need to do more to communicate the benefits of eating fish. That also includes news of an extraordinary online petition calling on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to update its 2004 advisory on fish and pregnancy because it may be causing “inadvertent harm.”

Put simply, there’s a lot going on concerning the science of seafood and nutrition that the activist community would like you to ignore. I’m sorry to see that Gustafson didn’t bother to do the sort of due diligence in order to get the story right.

* The Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted on the above blog entry that it was unedited and encourages readers to pass along their comments. We’ve done just that with the above entry.