But have no fear, for experts have arrived to set us straight, in the form of the Statistical Assessment Service -- STATS for short. As part of its noble service, STATS offers us the new book "It Ain't Necessarily So: How Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture of Reality" by David Murray, Joel Schwartz and S. Robert Lichter, a trio of social scientists. The book gets to the scientific heart of the journalistic matter, unraveling dozens of science stories that have appeared in print over the last 10 years to reveal "the means by which savvy news consumers can defend themselves."

For example, are trick-or-treaters being sliced to pieces by razors in apples and poisoned with tainted licorice? "Halloween candy-tampering is a myth," the authors write. Since 1958, all 76 reports of candy-tampering have been mistaken or fraudulent. The three reported deaths attributed to sabotaged Halloween treats were ultimately traced back to a lie to cover up an uncle's drug stash, an intentional poisoning of a child by his father and sensational reports of a girl's fatal seizure resulting from a congenital heart condition.

But "It Ain't Necessarily So" doesn't limit itself to disproving popular urban legends. Are you worried about species dying out as a result of global warming? Don't. Those scare stories are the doing of green scribblers who cherry-pick the scientific journals for alarming factoids and who work in cahoots with Volvo-driving scientists who skew their results in an effort to oppose progress and capitalism. Alarming increases in infectious diseases? Relax, those numbers can be written off to gays getting AIDS and the aging of the population. Magazine and newspaper articles saying anything to the contrary are just the media's way of pushing for yet more government money to be thrown after bad. Breast cancer skyrocketing, sperm counts plummeting, racial discrimination against mortgage applicants running rampant -- just watch the media spin.

The experts debunking these reports go by names designed to reassure, names like The Greening Earth Society (we're all in favor of verdancy) and The Harvard Center for Risk Analysis (Harvard, of course, knows everything). The last decade has seen the rise of many such groups, here to dice and slice the news and point out its many shortcomings. Staffed with people holding doctorates (in at least some discipline), expressing patent objectivity and publishing newsletters to promote their side of the latest stories, such groups are ever ready to take calls from journalists looking for help in understanding a scientific paper or in search of a ready quote from someone on the other side of an issue's fence.

The trouble is, many of these groups are industry fronts, pushing industry agendas. The Greening Earth Society, for example, which promotes the benefits of carbon dioxide, was created by the Western Fuels Association, according to the Integrity in Science database created by The Center for Science in the Public Interest. The Harvard Center for Risk Analysis has received funding from numerous corporate sources, including unrestricted grants from Amoco, Dow Chemical Company, General Motors, Monsanto, Procter & Gamble and many others.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"