Blonds get last laugh after media's gaffe
Posted on 10/02/2002 4:06:17 AM PDT by MeekOneGOP
Blonds get last laugh after media's gaffe
Erroneous reports cited study predicting extinction of towheads
10/02/2002
Apparently it fell into the category "too good to check."
On Friday, several British newspapers reported that the World Health Organization had found in a study that blonds would become extinct within 200 years, because blondness was caused by a recessive gene that was dying out. The reports were repeated Friday by anchors for the ABC News program Good Morning America and on Saturday by CNN.
There was only one problem, the health organization said in a prepared statement Tuesday: It had never reported that blonds would become extinct, and it had never done a study on the subject.
"WHO has no knowledge of how these news reports originated," the organization, a Geneva-based agency of the United Nations, announced, "but would like to stress that we have no opinion of the future existence of blonds."
All the news reports in Britain and the United States cited a study from the World Health Organization - "a blonde-shell study," as The Daily Star of London put it. But none reported any scientific details from the study or the names of the scientists involved.
On Good Morning America, Charles Gibson began a conversation with his co-anchor, Diane Sawyer, by saying: "There's a study from the World Health Organization, this is for real, that blonds are an endangered species. Women and men with blond hair, eyebrows and blue eyes, natural blonds, they say will vanish from the face of the Earth within 200 years, because it is not as strong a gene as brunets'."
Jeffrey Schneider, a spokesman for ABC News, said the anchors got the information from an ABC producer in London who said he had read it in a British newspaper.
Journalists in London said the source of the reports was probably one of several news agencies used by the British press, but it remained unclear which one.
However, so many people with fair coloring just aren't having children anymore. Out of my father's 6 children, there is only one grandchild. The youngest is 25 and single, so there is hope for her! The others didn't and don't want children.
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