By all accounts, ozone levels in Houston last week reached unhealthy levels that should please nobody.
However, it’s interesting to compare the headlines that different news outlets applied to the news:
Groups disagree on severity of Houston’s smog last week (Victoria Advocate/AP)
Group says smog particularly bad this week in Houston (Denton Record-Chronicle/AP)
Houston tops for bad air (Houston Chronicle)
In Houston, record pollution (Dallas Morning News)
The Victoria Advocate‘s headline is probably most accurate, since an environmental group and a Texas agency did disagree on how to interpret the data. The Denton Record-Chronicle headline if somewhat misleading in that ozone and smog are not synonymous (the story itself is the full version of the AP story run by the Victoria newspaper). The Houston Chronicle headline is somewhat misleading, since bad air and bad ozone readings are not synonymous (although neither is desirable). The DMN headline is true to an extent, but somewhat misleading outside of the context that there are now more data gathering points in Houston, so claiming that a record number of points collected data of some occurrence isn’t really a useful method of comparing the data over time (and “pollutions” sounds much more ominous than ozone levels).
Houston air certainly has its problems, but the biggest problem tends to be ozone (and the main reason Houston is exceeding Los Angeles in “bad” ozone days this year is attributed to atmospheric conditions in LA). It doesn’t help the public debate on the issue when the media seizes on Houston “beating” LA for “bad air” or “pollution” (not synonymous with ozone) and burying the details well below somewhat misleading headlines.
(Update) The headline for Janice Williamson’s report for KHOU-11 is probably the most accurate of all: Houston smog hits danger zone.
