Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We got a lot of feedback on last week's program. Mike Gagliano wrote in with praise for Bob's piece about financial reporting. He wrote: "...Human emotions and a whole array of other complex factors determine why stocks rise and fall each day, much more so than your average broker would have you believe, and it was refreshing to see an honest look at this phenomenon. The fact is when it comes to the Stock Market, no one really knows what's going to happen tomorrow or why what happened today happened -- not even Warren Buffet." Eric Meijer wrote in to say: "I've been a financial journalist for about 20 years, the last 12 as a trainer of financial journalists for Reuters in London, as a contractor to Pearson in South Africa and for Fairfax Business Media in Australia and so on, and I think this piece was extremely astute and nicely done. All this is best summed up by Michael Lewis's dictum: "Those who say don't know. Those who know don't say." We did a story last week about ABC transporting depleted uranium as a matter of investigative reporting. I spoke with Homeland Security Department spokesman Dennis Murphy about this "radioactive" matter and Rich Wipfler of Menlo Park, California had this to say: "I was under the mistaken impression that if depleted uranium can be sent into the U.S. undetected, then there were serious flaws in our port security system. I came to understand by listening to our government representative that this was not the case." And Mr. Wipfler wishes that I'd focused more on that point. But Phillip H. Klein had this reaction: "Mr. Murphy is completely correct when he says that noble intent does not permit one to flout the law. After he said that, however, he appeared to be trying to give the impression that, had the uranium that ABC shipped not been depleted, it could have been detected. As a former radiation chemist, I must disagree. I know of no rapid way to determine whether or not a bar of uranium has been depleted. At best it requires sophisticated equipment that can determine the energies of the particles emitted as uranium decays to other materials over the course of hundreds of millions of years." We appreciate your letters and scientific explanations. Keep them coming. Write to us at onthemedia.org and please, please, please don't forget to tell us where you live and how to pronounce your name. [MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, journalists in Mexico take the law into their own hands, and is true crime writing getting respectable?
BOB GARFIELD: This On the Media from NPR.