The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) recently published a new report that not only misled, but was completely unnecessary. And CBS repeated it rather than criticize its irrelevancy.

The NIAAA study claimed that the number of alcohol related deaths has been vastly under-reported. However, this was misleading. A separate government agency NIAAA agrees with has been publishing the correct number of deaths for years, and media outlets have been using that correct data. So the new taxpayer study went looking for a problem that wasn’t there.