Showing posts with label Crystal Madison. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crystal Madison. Show all posts

Sunday, January 24, 2010

This is just too easy...



Last week the new Kaiser Family Foundation report on children's media use was released and it made a few headlines.

The crux of the report was something that most people who are somewhat aware of their surroundings, who are in the proximity of young kids - maybe if you go to the mall or get pissed off in a movie theater when all the cell phones are lighting up around you - pretty much expected to read: kids are using the media more than ever. They are using new media more than their elders and they are using what Fordham Professor Paul Levinson calls "new new media" (twittering, texting, blogging, YouTube, facebook) more than anyone. Frankly, Levinson's new book, "New New Media," is a much more enlightening and engaging read about these technologies and a book I highly recommend. The Kaiser study is a series of statistics based on surveys of teenagers...hey, it is what it is.

But now I just ran across something I was sort of expecting to see once the Kaiser study appeared: its paranoid misinterpretation.

The first people to point to the Kaiser report's statistics and issue portentous warnings about the decline and fall of civilization (again) are my good buddies in the Parents Television Council. The PTC is doing its usually thing in light of the study: jumping to completely unwarranted, censorious, hysterical conclusions. They can be read in their weekly warning newsletter right here.

The PTC piece is erroneously called "Children Overwhelmed by Media." This is impressive in itself because the very title of the article is already a misinterpretation of the Kaiser data. Some could call it a willful misrepresentation perhaps, an outright lie, but I really don't want to give the PTC that much credit. After my past experience with the PTC, including my debate with their 2008 "activist of the year," Crystal Madison, I've come to the conclusion that from the rank and file of the PTC and all the way to its top leadership, these people are simply too ignorant of social science research methods and data interpretation to even come up with a sophisticated lie about a simple survey like the Kaiser study. The study does not talk about whether or not children are "overwhelmed" - the loaded, negative connotation of that term is obvious - but that children are using new new media a lot more than before and they are using media in a different way than their elders, than children in the past. Why does this data mean that children are "overwhelmed?" Who has ever conclusively proven and established what is a "normal" level of media use and what is "pathological?" Thus, what standard is the PTC using to determine that the media-use percentages of the Kaiser study qualify as "overwhelming."

By the way, as a side note, one should go ahead and check out who some of the most committed activists of the PTC are by visiting their web page, http://www.parentstv.org/, and looking at the "grassroots" link. This has information on all their regional directors, including brief biographical information. What's obvious is that none of these people have any real background in social science research whatsoever. They appear to be a lot like the busybody neighbor, Gladys Kravitz, in the old "Bewitched" sitcom; the shrill, judgmental prude who can't make it through the day without sticking her nose in other people's lives. The sole reason for the PTC's existence is for its own censorious prudes to stick their noses in other people's lives and tell them how to run their families.

As for the PTC analysis of the Kaiser study, as you read on, you find it getting more and more amusing as it goes along. The more I think about it, as a matter of fact, the more convinced I am that I can use this as a piece of teaching aid in the future when I need to illustrate the most incompetent way to misinterpret the basic meaning of statistical data. But anyway, just after summarizing the Kaiser study, the PTC goes on to its rant about the data's "Impact." Naturally, according to the PTC brain turst, this data conclusively proves that children are harmed, they are turned ignorant, violent, sexually promiscuous band of little savages. The article rails against all the "harmful" media content children are now exposed to, including pornography and violence.

Except, of course, that the Kaiser study says nothing of the sort. First, the Kaiser study does not talk at all about the specific content of the information its subjects view or listen to. The PTC assumes that the subjects are watching porn and violence. And need we bring up the old joke about what you do when you assume...? Ok, sure, let's bring it up: you make an "ass out of U and me." The PTC, though, seems never to hesitate in making asses out of themselves. Second, the Kaiser study very clearly states that CAUSALITY IS NOT TO BE INFERRED from this data. Even when the data claims that more of the children who are the heaviest media users (47 percent of the children with high-use levels) tend to have lower grades (C or lower), the authors write "the study cannot establish a cause and effect relationship between media use and grades." This conclusion, by the way, is not merely "political correctness," as the PTC founder Brent Bozell has claimed in his past articles when he cavalierly equated a statistical correlation with a causality, it is a FACT!! Maybe kids who are lazy, unmotivated slackers in school to begin with tend to waste time on their iPods and their computers and smart-phones more than the over-achieving kids. Generations of slackers have found ways to waste their time long, long before the arrival of new media. Moreover, I'm also just kind of impressed by the fact that even 53 percent of the new new media's high users DO NOT get bad grades.

But such a laughably incompetent interpretation of simple statistics is not much of a surprise when it comes to the PTC, its activist members, or any of their adjunct organizations like the Media Research Council or the Culture and Media Institute. These are the folks who put links on their web pages to studies that prove the exact opposite of what the PTC et al. is trying to argue. These are shrill, authoritarian censors who, apparently, are too busy to be bothered to read a study past its title. Perhaps they should ask their illustrious advisory board, made up of such intellectual giants as Pat Boone and has-been Disney actor Dean Jones, to do a better job of advising them about the meaning of very basic scientific data.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Cowardly ABC and lying PTC

ABC television needs to be sent a different set of protest letters for their cowardly cancellation of Adam Lambert’s performance on Good Morning America. This time, the letters should be sent by a true cross section of America, people who, once in a while, actually take ideas like free speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of choice seriously.

ABC, you see, was sent some 1,500 letters by members of the Parents Television Council following Lambert’s homoerotic performance on the American Music Awards. By ABC’s own admission, that was something they considered a small number of complaints. Nevertheless, they suddenly got paranoid over a fringe group of censorious thugs like the PTC and suddenly cancelled Lambert’s scheduled appearance on GMA. What gives? Over a small number of protests??

The PTC’s own reaction to this, however, has been a display of their usual duplicity. According to this article, Dan Isett, the Director of Public Policy for the PTC, suddenly backpedaled from the group’s usual policy of advocating ever-more draconian and bizarre efforts at censoring broadcasting (the PTC are the yahoos who believe that shows like Ugly Betty and Lost and Law and Order are obscene and the government is justified in keeping them off TV). According to Isett, “the idea that he (Lambert) should be scrubbed from TV completely is not where we’re going.”

Yeah, right! The PTC are not in favor of censoring anyone…Sure, Danny, anyone with half a brain, or any passing familiarity with your scummy organization will even believe that for a second.

Blatant lies in the face of criticism and challenge are the PTC’s stock in trade. If one spends even a few moments looking over the PTC web page, they will be quickly overwhelmed by quote after quote, one article and essay after another, giving clear instruction and policy positions on how the group will fight to REMOVE various TV programs from the air because they deem such programming “obscene,” “filthy,” “sleazy,” “vulgar,” or “offensive.” They threaten to pressure advertisers to withhold support from TV shows until they are cancelled, yet a lying douche bag like Isett has the gall and the decency to say that censorship is “not where we’re going.”

But telling lies, even in the glaring media spotlight, has been a PTC specialty since its inception. The group’s founder, Brent Bozell, has threatened to publicly label advertisers as being complicit in murder for putting their commercials on professional wrestling programs that were proven to have contributed to children killing other children. NOT ONE SINGLE instance of a child killing another child has ever been proven to have been influenced by wrestling.

Bozell has also been less than perfectly honest about the political orientation of his group. The son of a former Joseph McCarthy speech writer, Bozell has repeatedly tried to claim – with the perfectly straight face of a sociopath – that the PTC is a nonpartisan organization and that he himself is not even a Republican. Yet on his bio on the PTC web page, he proudly claims to have been Pat Buchanan’s National Finance Chairman in 1992 and a one time president of the National Conservative Action Committee, which “helped elect dozens of conservative candidates over the past 10 years.” This is all on his web page! Check it out!!

As former pro wrestler Mick Foley writes so eloquently about Bozell in “Foley is Good: And the Real World is Faker than Professional Wrestling,” the PTC founder is “a charismatically challenged, lying sack of shit.”

But he’s not the only one of his kind at the PTC. The organization seems to draw pathological liars to its membership ranks like some kind of a magnet. The head of the New Jersey chapter of the group, one Crystal Madison, most often will say that she opposes censorship, but has told TV Newsday magazine that she is a PTC member to fight for a future where shows like Dexter and Family Guy will be “eradicated.” I don’t know, eradication kind of sounds like censorship to me. But those people who listen to my Culture Wars radio show will also know that Madison has been giving instructions to her supporters on how to pressure my college’s donors until the radio show of yours truly is removed from the air. Confronted about this, just like Isett, she backpedaled and claimed that financial pressure was not really an attempt at removing my show from the air. Yeah, Crystal, sure, we believe that!

Nevertheless, ABC television has chosen to cave in to the bully tactics of a group of transparent liars who represent values light years removed from the sentiments of mainstream America.