That's Entertainment!: Brockovich's Story Merely Movie Magic

Investor's Business Daily ^ | 10/3/2005 | Editor

[Isara]

Science: Erin Brockovich, the environmental heroine celebrated in the movie of the same name, is receiving the Harvard School of Public Health's highest honor. Too bad her fame is based on an enormous falsehood.

The Julia Richmond Award is given, Harvard says, to those who "have promoted and achieved high standards for public health conditions."

In this case, as a letter to an outraged alumnus, American Council of Science and Health President Elizabeth Whelan said, it's for Brockovich's efforts "on behalf of all of us, and especially the residents of Hinkley, California, whose health was adversely affected by a toxic substance dumped by a utility company."

Her alleged fight for environmental justice was told in the cleverly titled 2000 movie "Erin Brockovich."

In it, the Brockovich character, played by Julia Roberts, and showing more cleavage than scientific knowledge, is a crusading legal assistant who exposes the alleged poisoning of everything — from chickens to frogs to people — by a Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) plant's leaching of a rust inhibitor called chromium-6 into the water supply of nearby Hinkley.

Only problem: It was all false.

....

The researchers found cancer rates were no higher than in the general California population and death rates were actually lower than expected.

....

Brockovich pocketed a cool $2 million in the Hinkley case, and her firm is currently suing a number of oil companies, the city of Beverly Hills, Calif., and its school district for exposing students to oil well fumes on the property of Beverly Hills High School between 1975 and 1997.

....

One expects Hollywood to take liberties with the truth — but not an institution supposedly dedicated to scientific fact and honest research, such as the Harvard School of Public Health.

[Isara]

It's a sad state of our higher learning institutes. We can't trust people in them.

[joesnuffy]

Kinda like the falsehood Julia enjoyed for a while...
That she was a member of MENSA-

[Dick Vomer]

harvard quit being a center for "higher education" a long time ago. It is merely a liberal indoctrination center for "right thinking" and uses it's cache to push the left's agenda.

Notice it's recent advances in the hard sciences..none... It will put out position papers and polls mainly to buttress the left's failed ideology.

That is what passes for academic achievement at the university level these days. "Women's studies" "Gay,Lesbian and Trans-gender studies "African-American Studies" "Latino Studies" ..etc...

This is what the medical school and other graduate programs have become.... little policy paper factories for big government using the cover of "science" from Harvard...what a joke.

[Restorer]

the alleged poisoning of everything — from chickens to frogs to people — by a Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) plant's leaching of a rust inhibitor called chromium-6 into the water supply of nearby Hinkley.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were also polluting the water with dangerous dihydrogen monoxide.

[pcottraux]

No surprise here.

Erin Brockovich is another classic liberal Hollywood cliche, where the "Rebel against the system" who is a common schlub stands up "to fight against the evil corporate system" and dares to stand up for "the rights of common people everywhere", while exposing corruption via the villains' evil corporations.

Whatever. It's a romanticized cliche that is the foundation for liberal thinking.

Same thing with "Patch Adams." It's all fake, and not real at all, but it's a dead-in-the-water cliche.