Letters to the Editor
-
TV and autism
<<Allen, whoever writes that
"roughly 17 percent of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s was DUE TO the growth in cable television."
clearly does not understand cause and effect relationships...>>
That was Greg Easterbrook at Slate.com, and the two articles he wrote on the topic were some of the most irresponsible, poorly researched poppycock I have ever had the misfortune to read. It was clear he doesn't even have a basic understanding of some common major features of autism. The study itself that made that statistical connection was never published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, but on the website of the Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management. Easterbrook uncritically accepts that there even *is* an autism epidemic when he quotes the correlation of diagnosis rates to prevalance of TV ownership in the areas under study.