Lung Association Needs to Use More Brainpower

This is the type of headline that media outlets love: ‘Pittsburgh has the worst air in the country’. Print, radio and TV news outlets have been running this headline since the American Lung Association’s State of the Air report showed Pittsburgh moving ahead of Los Angeles in terms of sooty air to rank as the worst region in the nation. The same headlines were major stories in media markets all over the country, resulting in an unwarranted and indefensible trashing of Pittsburgh’s image. While some local Pittsburgh reporters dug a little deeper to find the true facts about the air quality ranking, news media across the nation simply repeated ad nausea the Lung Association’s flawed and grossly misleading findings. Continue