Mincing Words

On the web, no news isn't necessarily good news. Too many informational sites dodge the bulletins and ramble off into flackery or marginalia. Take, for example, the new flagship site for the American Meat Science Association (www.meatscience.org), which is heavily funded by the meat industry. Web surfers who want to sink their teeth into juicy details about last month's recall of 25 million pounds of E. coli-infected hamburger meat will find not a word about the episode. Grilled about the omission, AMSA executive director H. Kenneth Johnson says: ''We're meat scientists. We support action that's science based,'' he explains. ''We don't get involved in regulatory issues. Those are political.'' Or could it be that the industry-boosting association's simply got too much at steak?