Media

Media stacks the deck in favor of pre-conceived conclusions

[Catching up on some older items I’ve been meaning to blog.]

Harry Forbes catches the Boston Globe drumming up sources who will confirm the conclusions that reporters have already drawn.

Ever wonder how Globe reporters get in touch with the dodgy folks who often end up as sad sack poster children for Globe stories? For example last month, the Globe ran a “tough economy” story that featured a family who had moved to Maine and were suffering from high gas prices. But both mom and dad still commuted to work from Maine all the way to Massachusetts. I asked how does the Boston Globe always find “poster children” such as this? Here is one way. The Globe’s main web page solicits people to get in touch with reporters who are working on future stories.

Five of the six solicitations on the front page of the Globe’s site when he wrote the blog entry were looking for people who are suffering in hard economic times, although “suffering” may be a bit of a stretch since one story focused on people who couldn’t go to Disney World for vacation. Oh the humanity! Here’s another one: “As gas prices rise, the value of SUVs is dropping. We’re looking for SUV owners who’ve found the trade-in value of their SUV is less than expected.” In other words, the reporter has concluded that the high gas prices are negatively affecting the trade-in value of SUVs and are looking for people who will support that point of view.

The problem with this approach is that the people who are still going to Disney World or who are able to sell their SUVs for a good price are not going to respond to the request. They don’t fit the profile and thus the story will only reflect the points of view of those who do, even if they are the one in a hundred or a thousand for whom they do.

This is shoddy journalism.

Another correlation that doesn’t mean causation

Here’s yet another example of an article that confuses correlation with causation. The Associated Press released a story last week on a study that says that in locales with bans on smoking restaurants there are fewer teens who smoke. Most headlines said something to the effect of “Restaurant tobacco ban influences teen smoking.” [Emphasis added] Does it really? Not according to what I read in the article.

All the article shows is that two facts show up in many towns: smoking ban and fewer smoking teens. But nothing in the study, at least in what was printed, claimed that there was any evidence to show they were connected. That’s like saying that because my town has both a high church attendance rate and a high auto theft rate, that it proves that high church attendance causes more auto theft.

In fact, why couldn’t the reverse the be true? Couldn’t it be true that towns where there are fewer teens who smoke, which perhaps is evidence that parents and town leaders are doing a good job educating kids about the evils of smoking, are also towns more likely to pass smoking bans? Thus if no smoking ban was in place, the teens would still be getting vigilant oversight from authority.

After all, are kids hanging out in restaurants and bars so much that what happens in them influences their decision-making? I think not.

And in the end, this study doesn’t even tell us as much as it claims:

Siegel and his colleagues tracked 2,791 children between ages 12 and 17 who lived throughout Massachusetts. … Overall, about 9 percent became smokers — defined as smoking more than 100 cigarettes. In towns without bans or where smoking was restricted to a designated area, that rate was nearly 10 percent. But in places with tough bans prohibiting smoking in restaurants, just under 8 percent of the teens became smokers.

So the difference—based on a study of just 2,700 teens in Massachusetts—is just 2 percent. What’s the margin of error here?

If you wish to delve into the statistics, you can get the original study here. But in my layman’s reading of it, I don’t see any attempt to address why these two facts are connected other than wishing to construct ever more reasons to ban smoking.

Media mistakes: watch out for flying artillery

This is what drives me nuts about reporters reporting on specialized topics with their own terminology and language: rarely do they get it right, which just shows a sloppiness. For example, this Associated Press story headlined “Misfired artillery crashes into girl’s bed.” It goes downhill from there.

A piece of artillery that was apparently misfired by the military crashed through the roof of a New Jersey home miles away Friday and injured a young girl’s cat, which had to be euthanized, officials said.

…

Picatinny officials told The Star-Ledger of Newark they were investigating. The base had been conducting tests Friday, and it wasn’t immediately clear what type of artillery hit the home.

Here’s the problem. It wasn’t artillery that hit the home, unless you mean that the military fired the actual gun through the air, having it land on home. The word “artillery” does not refer to the ammunition. In fact, the reporter could have used “ammunition,” “round,” or several other types, one of which was undoubtedly used by the spokesman for the base.

You’re probably saying to yourself, “Geez, Dom, lay off the caffeine for a while.” And you’d be right because I’ve had too much soda and coffee today, but it still doesn’t invalidate my point which is that reporters so easily drop the ball on stories, whether it’s the military or the Catholic Church. Yet the reading and viewing public so often trust that because it’s in print or on TV, it must be true. We must maintain a healthy skepticism of the media because they are not infallible.

(N.B. I often think everyone should be the subject of an interview or at least be present at an event later reported in the press so they can witness firsthand that reality and reporting are not always the same thing.)

If I ever wanted to be in a reality show…

If Isabella were 7 years old, I would already have sent in my email:

Is being a reality show contestant in your future? Gaby writes in: Wife Swap, ABC’s hit primetime show, seeks J.R.R. Tolkien enthusasts! Potential families can live anywhere in the United States, but we ask that families applying for the show consist of two parents and have at least one child, age 7 or older, living at home. Specifically, I’m looking for families whose lives have been transformed by the world of Middle Earth! If you yearn to walk the streets of Bag End, I want to hear from you! Families featured on the show will receive a $20,000 honorarium. If you refer a family that is selected you receive $1,000. To submit for the show, email a family photo and description to: gaby.wifeswap@gmail.com.

Melanie says our lives are not “transformed by the world of Middle Earth” the way they probably intend, as in dressing up in costume for conventions and the like. I suppose. Could be fun to be on such a show though. I wonder what they have in mind.

The media’s papal template

The headline says Generation gap shaping American church as it awaits first visit from Pope “XXX”. Without clicking through was this headline from Pope John Paul’s first visit to the US in 1979 or Pope Benedict’s upcoming first trip to the US this month?

The fact that it was probably used for both events says more about the preconceptions and prejudices of mainstream media than it does about the state of the Catholic Church in the US.

I wish I were in Steubie

Fr. Roderick Vonhogen, the Dutch priest of the Catholic podcasting network SQPN is going to be in Steubenville, Ohio, next week, along with other Catholic podcasters and media folk for a conference entitled “Media and Faith:Engaging the Culture.” It’s being sponsored by the Communications Arts department at Franciscan University.

I really wish I could go, not just to meet Fr. Roderick and the Willits and the other speakers and attendees, but also to go back to my alma mater. It’s been more than 10 years since my last trip to the Ohio Valley and — it surprises me to say this — I miss it. Something about that place gets under the skin (cue coal and steel pollution joke here).

One of the co-hosts of the conference is Dr. Wayne Lewis, who was the faculty advisor when I was editor of the student newspaper The Troubadour. We had a great time producing the paper and I’m proud to say we won “student organization of the year” the year I was editor. Our April Fool edition was a classic for the ages, especially since a mercifully unnamed board member almost called then-Cardinal Ratzinger because of it. Oops. I may have to find it to scan it and put it online for nostalgia’s sake.

Anyway,the conference sounds great and I would love to participate in many of the talks, especially the podcasting and Web 2.0 ones. I know I have plenty of opinions in those areas and would love to share ideas with the panelists and others on them.

But I will have to pine from afar, curb my jealousy, and hope that I can eventually hear audio or see video (streaming online, anyone?) at some point.

One request though: Please, someone take Fr. Roderick to Drover’s and have him sample the hot wings. And make sure he records the event. That would be worth listening to.

Methinks he has missed the point

The Boston Globe’s religion writer takes this Easter Sunday to review several books on Christianity, including Phil Lawler’s “Faithful Departed”, upon which he levies both disapprobation and tempered praise.

Doubt - as essential to thoughtful faith as to assessing politicians’ utterances - is too scarce in some of this season’s religion books, if doubt means less than strict adherence to dogma. In “The Faithful Departed,” Philip F. Lawler comes off the Grumpy Old Catholic in bemoaning the failure of coreligionists, in Boston and elsewhere, to follow traditional church teachings, even before the priestly sex-abuse scandal torpedoed the bishops’ moral authority. He won’t persuade doubting Catholics who respectfully dissent from their church on matters like gay marriage, contraception, and female ordination, exercising their privilege under Catholic doctrine of following their informed conscience.

But bravo for his condemning bishops who covered up the priest sex-abuse scandal and escaped punishment. Lawler labels as a liar the Rev. John McCormack, formerly an underling in Boston, who Lawler says assured a parent that a priest was safe when McCormack knew the cleric to be an alleged abuser. McCormack remains bishop of Manchester, N.H.

I would have much to say in response to this review, but as usual Diogenes does a much better job in fewer words than I would use:

“Bravo” says a Boston Globe reviewer in his drive-by 5-sentence review of Phil Lawler’s book, The Faithful Departed.

Now to be perfectly honest, if you trouble yourself to read the whole thing, you might question whether “bravo” captures the essence of the review. Indeed you might wonder whether your Uncle Di even read the whole thing. Fair enough. But then I wonder whether the Globe reviewer read Phil’s book, so I guess we’re even.

Nuts!

(It may seem weird for me to be writing about non-faith stuff today, but Holy Saturday has always been a strange sort of day for me, no longer Lent, but not yet Easter. So this is how I deal.)

Bad news for fans of the TV show “Jericho”. For the second time in two years, it’s been cancelled. What a bummer.

We’ve been fans of the show, and not just because our friend Karen Hall wrote an episode and then later gave me one of her copies of the script as a gift. I’ve enjoyed this look at small-town America and how the real red-blooded heart of our country would cope and hang together in the face of a disaster that cuts them off from the world.

CBS says that despite the fan campaign to bring it back, there just weren’t enough other viewers coming onboard.

A campaign by fans combined with data showing that the show was being recorded and watched outside its broadcast time persuaded CBS to order a short second season. But the show has performed poorly since the new episodes began appearing last month. The most recent episode attracted fewer than six million viewers and a 1.9 rating in the 18- to 49-year-old demographic.

Of course, the writers’ strike created by the obstinacy of the networks and studios probably had something to do with that as well. Some shows are airing new episodes, some aren’t. Old shows are premiering as others are having season finales. I think viewers are just plain confused.

Plus, the story has changed somewhat this season. It’s no longer about survival in the face of a mysterious disaster. Instead it turned into an Iraq analogue with Americans taking the place of Iraqis and insurgents, complete with a thinly disguised Halliburton as an evil government contractor bent on taking over the country. I thought it was still an interesting take on the relationship between different parts of the country and between the government and corporate interests.

Whatever the case, the last hope is that a cable network will pick it up, but that’s a faint hope at best. I really wish we were at the point that mainstream dramas could be produced and delivered solely on the Internet where a niche audience would be enough to be a success. That day is coming, but alas for “Jericho” it did not come soon enough.

Brother takes public whack at cop-sister

Something tells me there’s going to be some awkward silence around this family’s Easter dinner table. From the letters to the editor in the Salem Evening News, here in Salem, Mass.:

When a co-worker showed me the edition of The Salem News with the high-paying cops salaries in Salem, I bet him anything my sister, Sgt. Kathleen Makros, was in the top five. When he looked, he said I was right.

I just shook my head. If I was a taxpayer in Salem or the mayor, I would be outraged! People are suffering with bills and cops making salaries like that? Thank God I live in a town where the people were brave enough to stand up to the police and the town administrators and say no to more cops and overtime!

Ouch! For those outside of Massachusetts, state law requires private companies to hire off-duty cops at overtime rates to be present at job sites in public areas, unlike most states that only require a flagman or other regular company employee to direct traffic. That little law tends to inflate payrolls, and even if they don’t come out of taxes, they do come from companies who pass on the costs to consumers anyway.

They will exploit the 4,000 heroes

As of the most recent figures I saw today, the death toll for servicemen and woman in Iraq since 2003 stands at 3,990. That is 3,990 heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

Be prepared for when that number reaches the entirely symbolic round figure of 4,000. No matter whether the pace of deaths has slowed or how much has been accomplished, be assured that the mainstream media will play it as a milestone of the long defeat of the United States, the inevitable stagnation of the most powerful military in the world in a new quagmire.

Don’t believe a word of it. It is all political theater designed to exploit those deaths for electoral and ideological gain. Instead, listen to the guys on the ground in their own words, unfiltered by the media. Michael Yon’s site is a good place to start. He’s no Pollyanna, but he’s no reflexive anti-war nut either.

But watch the media storm that will boil up. It’s coming. Mark my words.

Anti-Catholic Comedy Central

Just when you think Catholic bashing in the media can’t any more obnoxious it does. Brent Bozell exposes Comedy Central’s virulently hate-filled anti-Catholic screed in the form of a Tv show called “The Root of All Evil.”

It’s hosted by bottom-feeding shock comic Lewis Black, whose schtick of being as offensive as possible has garnered him such fame that this is the first time I’ve heard of him. Black is a bigot who judges the Catholic Church, which stands on trial charged as being the root of all evil. Sounds hilarious. This is on Comedy Central, why?

He’s joined by another no-name comic, Greg Giraldo, who Bozell says abandons all pretense all comedy to vent his spleen about the Church he was baptized into. You can guess the level of blasphemy and offensiveness that spews forth.

As usual, these cowards attack the Church because they know that Catholics will return insults only with words and prayer, whereas even a much milder level of invective at Islam would be met with fatwas and attempts on their lives.

By the way, Alltel Wireless was the sponsor of the phone-in poll for those who wished to vote for the Church as the root of all evil. Knowledge of which you can do with what you will.

Best headline ever

And it’s not in a tabloid, but the Washington Post: Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo

Haleigh’s “right to die” or right to live?

The media can’t help itself sometimes. The fingers fly of their own accord, framing stories according to a specific template, no matter the specific circumstances.

When the issue is the taking of the life of someone who is not dying, but whose life depends on ongoing care, then it must always be framed as a “right to die”, even when the person involved is not asking anything of the sort.

A couple of years ago the tragic case of Massachusetts girl Haleigh Poutre was front-page news nationwide. The then-11-year-old was on life support after allegedly being beaten into a coma by her stepdad and her adoptive mom, who happened to be her biological aunt. The Department of Social Services, whose primary duty is supposed to be to help children in need, had gone to court to have her terminated. Ironically, the man accused of beating her opposed the motion, since he would have faced murder charges.

And while DSS prevailed in the court fight, Haleigh herself made a case for herself by showing signs of recovery the day after the court order was issued in defiance of her doctors’ iron-clad judgment that she would make no “meaningful recovery”. And two years later, Haleigh herself is working with prosecutors to build the case against her stepfather (her adoptive mother having killed herself and Haleigh’s grandmother days after the initial criminal case began).

Good for Haleigh.

Unfortunately, the news coverage of this inspiring event is full of the most slanted language. Consider these bits from the Boston Herald’s coverage.

The case sparked a passionate right-to-die debate when, eight days after Poutre’s beating, DSS sought a court order allowing her to be removed from life support.

Consider those bits I’ve highlighted. Who was seeking a “right to die”? Certainly not Haleigh. The young girl was fighting to live, as evidenced by her miraculous recovery. No, Massachusetts was seeking a “right to kill” the girl who had become just another statistic in the long, sad list of children who have suffered while in the care of the commonwealth’s social service apparatus.

And certainly the court order “allowed her” nothing in her own interest, since Haleigh was not seeking to be removed from life support. No, the court order allowed the commonwealth to have her removed from life support.

But the template imposed on such cases by the mainstream media is so ingrained that they can’t write the story any other way, even when it makes no logical sense. When the issue is the taking of the life of someone who is not dying, but whose life depends on ongoing care, then it must always be framed as a “right to die”, even when the person involved is not asking anything of the sort.

Because the near-silenced conscience of a nation still can’t confront the truth the “right to die” is often a “right to kill the mute and defenseless” or a “right to be killed while in the midst of despair.” And the rest of us better hope we don’t end up in the medically nonsensical “vegetative state”, or at least that we don’t end up that way in certain hospitals or under the care of relatives who would just as soon be rid of us.

Catholics Come Home

There’s a new advertising campaign originating out of Phoenix called Catholics Come Home. Using slick commercials and a high-tech web site, the campaign seeks to goad the conscience of lapsed Catholics to re-discover (or discover for the first time) why their Catholic faith is important to their lives, their families, and their eternity.

They have three commercials at the moment: “Epic 120”, which is a two-minute tour through the impact the Catholic Church has had on history and still does today; “Movie” which reminds us that after our lives end we will review our lives (like a movie) and will get to evaluate what we have done; and “Mix”, which shows individual Catholics explaining how they left the Church, why they came back, and what a difference it’s made.

These are high-quality productions, as good as anything out there. Kind of reminds me of those Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints commercials the Mormons used to do, including the offer of a free book.

The local Phoenix Catholic newspaper, The Catholic Sun, did a story on the start of the campaign in that diocese recently. They say the average Phoenix household will see the commercials 13 times between now and Easter.

And if it’s successful—and they have the money for it—they’ll expand into other dioceses. Looks promising.

The Human Experience

The folks at Aggie Catholics really liked the movie “The Human Experience”, which was made by Grassroots Films, the same folks who created “Fishers of Men” and “God in the Streets of New York.”

The story of the film revolves around a young man and his brother and their quest to find what it means to be human in light of their own experiences and struggles. They have three different life-transforming experiences in search of the answers to the questions about the meaning and purpose of life. What does it mean to be a human? Why do we have to suffer? Where is God? Where can we find hope?

[…]

This movie moved me because it tells us what humanity is all about. It put on film what it means to be a human and that our identity is tied up in our great dignity. This came a perfect time for me, because I have recently been thinking deeply about the issue of human identity and dignity.

The makers of this film have done us all a favor. They have made a pro-life film, without ever talking about abortion, euthanasia or other pro-life issues. It is pro-life because it is pro-human. They have made a pro-Christ film without explicitly talking about Him. This is the kind of movie that can move anyone who sees it.