{"id":10808,"date":"2012-12-04T04:00:21","date_gmt":"2012-12-04T09:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/smarttan.com\/news\/?p=10808"},"modified":"2012-12-04T01:17:09","modified_gmt":"2012-12-04T06:17:09","slug":"bloomberg-tanning-story-citedno-tanning-industry-sources-at-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.smarttan.com\/index.php\/bloomberg-tanning-story-citedno-tanning-industry-sources-at-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Bloomberg Tanning Story Cited
No Tanning Industry Sources At All"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Bloomberg News story about indoor tanning published Sunday included all the talking points from the American Academy of Dermatology Association\u2019s anti-UV lobbying docket, but interviewed no sources from within the tanning community.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was a consumer journalist in the 1980s and 1990s, and when we wrote stories critical of a company or a market, you had to actually interview someone in that company or market,\u201d Smart Tan Executive Director Joseph Levy said. \u201cInexplicably, Bloomberg didn\u2019t do that at all. I\u2019d have gotten fired for turning in such a story when I was a reporter. They wrote a story about indoor tanning without actually talking to anyone in indoor tanning.\u201d<\/p>\n

And most of the story \u2014 authored by a journalist from Bloomberg\u2019s Melbourne, Australia, bureau, but which was mostly about the U.S. Tanning market \u2014 mis-quoted statistics and took AADA anti-UV lobbing points at their word. Specifically:<\/p>\n

The story headlined \u201cTeens Dying from Sunbed Tanning Curb $5 Billion Tanning Industry\u201d cited two disputed survey-studies about sunbeds \u2014 studies that actually don\u2019t specifically pertain to indoor tanning salons. Bloomberg and the sources it contacted failed to disclose that three kinds of sunbeds make up the data sets in the studies and that the data identify different risks for each kind of unit:<\/p>\n