Letters to the Editor
smartalec
Published Letters: 51 Editor's Choice: 4
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@ Clockwork Smurf
[Read the article: This Modern World]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"People do decide what issues speak to them, and ignore the others, and by seeing what scandals do gain traction you can tell alot about what the hidden beliefs of the electorate are."
Would that you were right, CS.
But there's a major assumption in your analysis, which is that the media are just a neutral reflection of reader / viewer / citizen / voter interest -- which they clearly are not.
The mass media, almost w/o exception, are now, and have been for almost two decades, a player, and they're not playing on our side.
Consider the unquestioning support they all gave the war, from its inception thru the "surge" to the delicate and untenable situation now. Consider the way they lied and lied and lied about Gore, about Kerry, about the theft of the 2000 election, about the Bush administration, and about what's been happening in Congress. Consider the nonsense they heap on Obama, and the passes they give to McCain both on his utter fealty to the worst of the Rethug power centers, policies, and values, and on his complete abrogation of the few halfway decent stands he's ever taken (on the Bush tax cuts, on the Christianist psychos, and on torture, to name just a few of the most blatant).
(And don't be gulled by claims that it's all about "the ratings." That's a lie too. Donahue's show had better ratings than Matthew's Hardball at the time Donahue was cancelled, and the network explicitly said it was because of the anti-war stance with which the network didn't want to be associated.)
Any analysis of the mass media's involvement in our polity that doesn't start with a recognition of the fact that the networks, the cable channels, and the biggest newspapers are now the propaganda arm of the GOP, and a wholly owned subsidiary of the same corporatocracy that now owns the Republican party -- any such analysis is incomplete at best, and actually much closer to diametrically wrong.
Here are a couple of resources that might help you appreciate what's being done to our country by "our" media:
http://mediamatters.org/
http://dailyhowler.com/
http://www.factcheck.org/
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Evolution in action n/t
[Read the article: The hot A-11 offense's female cousin]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"I must enter something into the letter body."
Why?
Waste of bandwidth.
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Correlation undemonstrated
[Read the article: The television got me pregnant]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Not only is there no demonstration at all of causation (as Ms Clark-Flory notes), there's no demonstration even of assocation.
In order to show correlation, they'd have to have compared pregnancy rates with rates of sexual activity -- not just among the sexually active taken as a uniform block.
For example, if Jean has sex four times as often as Joan, but gets pregnant only twice as often, Jean's "pregnancy rate," defined in any meaningful way, is lower than Joan's.
But wait - it's worse than that... much worse.
In the "takedown" of this study referred to here by poster jhenner (Mon 11/3 7:45pm), Open Salon poster Amy Tuteur, MD, reports that the members of the study population who were not sexually active at any point over the 3 years of the study -- and accounting for 43% of the total study population -- were completely left out of the calculations. That means we have no idea whether the non-sexually-active members of the study group watched "sexual" TV at a higher, lower, or equal rate compared to their sexually-active peers. But (as Dr Tuteur points out), the study authors clearly do have a very good idea. Does their choice not to report this crucial data possibly suggest something of an agenda, hmm?
What this all means is that the study demonstrates.... absolutely nothing.
NOTHING.