If you read MSN this morning while drinking your coffee you might have seen this little piece of muck racking, 4 dirty secrets of the seafood industry. Its got a healthy dose of hyperbole in the title so it must be good, right? And the reporter must be an independent, top-shelf journalist devoted to exposing the truth, right?

Well, in the immortal words of Paul Harvey heres the rest of the story.

The reporter who penned this piece is Emily Main who writes for Rodale, an outlet with a history of publishing slanted, inaccurate pieces that slam seafood. In January it ran an article titled 3 Surprisingly Unhealthy Seafood Picks that included fundamental inaccuracies. We reached out to offer resources to Rodale and help correct those errors but no changes were made. Then in April the team was back at it, this time featuring a report titled The Biggest Problem with U.S. Fish. More misleading scaremongering and no correction or willingness to address our concerns. Then today its exposing dirty secrets, a narrative that relies on agenda-driven activists to weave a distortion filled narrative that features zero balance.

Emily and her crew should probably spend more time reading The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) code of ethics rather than anti-seafood handouts. On SPJs site they would find an admonition to, make certain that [reports] do not misrepresent and test the accuracy of information from all sources and distinguish between advocacy and news reporting.

Instead of picking apart this latest bit of rhetoric, masquerading as journalism, well pledge that rather than waste time and energy reaching out to Rodale, to help them find their way to accuracy and balance in seafood reporting, well just use this space to point out their almost comically slanted reporting in the future.

And as Rodale marginalizes itself as a source for aggregators like MSN well remain a resource for all the other outlets who take accuracy seriously.