John Stossel Episode on 20/20 Getting Your Baby to Sleep
Excerpt: 'Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity'
Read an excerpt from the book you built.
-- In his latest book, "Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity," John Stossel expands on his popular "Myth" segments on "20/20" and unearths truths often distorted -- or disregarded -- by the media. Below is an excerpt:
Chapter ONE
Clueless Media
Thomas Jefferson said he'd rather live in a country with a free printing and no government, than in one with a government but no press. "The but security of all is in a free press," he wrote. "It is necessary, to keep the waters pure."
I couldn't concur more than. Without media to tell us nigh the excesses of government, the risks of life, and the wonderful new ideas that sally constantly from every cranny in America, our lives would exist narrow, and our liberty diminished. The Fourth Estate both informs and protects united states of america. "Where the press is complimentary, and every man able to read," said Jefferson, "all is condom."
Withal, thirty-vi years working in the media has left me much more skeptical of its product. Reporters are good at telling u.s.a. what happened today: what buildings burned downward, what ground forces invaded, the size of the hurricane that's coming. Many reporters take astonishing risks to bring united states of america this news. We owe them thank you.
Only when it comes to science and economics, and putting life's risks in perspective, the media do a dismal chore.
MYTH: The media volition bank check it out and give you the objective truth.
TRUTH: Many in the media are scientifically clueless, and will scare you to death.We don't exercise it on purpose. We just want to give you facts. But the people who bring us story ideas are alarmed. Then we get alarmed, and eager to rush that news to you lot.
We know that the scarier and more bizarre the story, the more likely it is that our bosses will requite us more air time or a front-page slot. The scary story, justified or not, volition get higher ratings and sell more papers. Fear sells. That'south the reason for the insiders' joke nearly local newscasts: "If information technology bleeds, it leads."
As well, raising alarms makes u.s.a. experience important.
If we bothered to keep digging until nosotros found the improve scientific experts, rather than the ones who send out press releases, we'd go the real story. Simply reporters rarely know whom to call. And if we did, many existent scientists don't want to be bothered. Why get involved in a messy fence? It might upset someone in government and threaten the scientist's grant money. "I'd rather be left solitary to do my work, and not have to babysit dumb reporters," one told me.
I real scientist, Dr. Bruce Ames of the University of California, Berkeley, did make the effort. He urged a skeptical reporter (me) to be more skeptical of pseudologic from pseudoscientists: "The number of storks in Europe has been going downwards for years, the birth charge per unit's going down for years," Dr. Ames pointed out. "If you plot 1 against the other, it'south a cute correlation. Only it doesn't mean storks bring babies."
Nosotros've been swallowing the storks-bring-babies kind of logic for years. (My favorite version: I come across fat people drinking nutrition soda; therefore diet soda must make people fatty.) For instance, stories nearly pesticides making food carcinogenic would fill several pages of a Google search. To the scientifically illiterate, the stories are logical. After all, farmers keep using new pesticides, nosotros consume them in the nutrient nosotros eat, and we keep hearing more people are getting cancer. It must be cause and consequence! Become the shovel.
MYTH: Pesticide residues in food cause cancer and other diseases.
TRUTH: The residues are largely harmless.
Ames laughs at the claims of chemically induced cancers, and he should know-he'southward the one who invented the test that first frightened people about a lot of those chemicals. It's called the Ames Test, and its first utilise in the 1970s raised alarms by revealing at that place were carcinogens in hair dye, and in the flame retardants in children's pajamas. Ames helped get the chemicals banned.
Before the Ames Test, the traditional way to test a substance was to feed big doses of it to animals and expect to meet if they got cancer or had babies with nascency defects. But those tests took ii to iii years and cost $100,000. So Dr. Ames said, "Instead of testing animals, why non test bacteria? You can report a billion of them on just one Petri dish and you don't take to look long for the side by side generation. Bacteria reproduce every twenty minutes."
The examination proved successful. It was hailed equally a major scientific breakthrough, and today, the Ames Test is ane of the standards used to discover if a substance is carcinogenic.
Only afterwards getting the hair dye and the flame retardants banned, Dr. Ames and other scientists continued testing chemicals. "People started using our exam," he told me, "and finding mutagens everywhere-in cups of coffee, on the outside of bread, and when you fry your hamburger!"
This made him wonder if his tests were too sensitive, and led him to question the very bans he'd advocated. A few years later, when I went to a supermarket with him, he certainly didn't ship out whatsoever danger signals.
DR. AMES Practically everything in the supermarket, if you lot actually looked at it at the parts per billion level, would have carcinogens. Vegetables are adept for yous, yet vegetables brand toxic chemicals to keep off insects, so every vegetable is five percent of its weight in toxic chemicals. These are Nature's pesticides. Celery, alfalfa sprouts, and mushrooms are just clogged of carcinogens.
STOSSEL Over at that place it says "Organic Produce." Is that better?
DR. AMES No, absolutely not, considering the corporeality of pesticide residues-man-fabricated pesticide residues-people are eating are actually niggling and very, very tiny amounts! We get more carcinogens in a loving cup of coffee than we practice in all the pesticide residues you lot eat in a day.
In a cup of java? To put the risks in perspective, Ames and his staff analyzed the results of every cancer examination washed on rats and mice. By comparison the dose that gave the rodents cancer to the typical exposure people get, they came up with a ranking of the danger. Pesticides such as Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane and EDB came out much lower than herb tea, peanut butter, booze, and mushrooms. We moved over to the mushrooms as the cameras connected to curlicue, and Dr. Ames put his oral fissure where his convictions were.
DR. AMES One raw mushroom gives you much more carcinogens than any polluted water you're going to drink in a twenty-four hour period.
STOSSEL So you're saying we shouldn't eat fresh produce?
DR. AMES No. Fresh produce is good for you! Here, I'll eat a raw mushroom even though it's full of carcinogens.
Dr. Ames is widely respected in the scientific customs, but he is non on many journalists' electronic Rolodexes. He'southward the real deal, and no help at all if y'all're looking for screaming headlines.
MYTH: Radioactive decay is deadly; go on it abroad from food!
TRUTH: Food irradiation saves lives.
A classic example of journalists falling for a stunningly stupid scientific scare-falling en masse and actually hard-was the outcry over treating food with radiation.
The irradiation procedure would give consumers wonderful new options: strawberries that stay fresh three weeks, and chicken without the harmful levels of salmonella that the Centers for Illness Command and Prevention says impale six hundred Americans every year, and cause countless cases of food poisoning. (The final fourth dimension y'all thought you had the flu, you may have really been sick from bacteria on chicken-this is no myth! Launder the counter, your hands, and everything that touches raw meat, because they are all crawling with potentially dangerous germs.)
But reporters and ecology activists don't worry much nigh the horrible toll from bacteria. For some reason, even when bacteria pose a far greater take chances, the media obsess nearly chemicals and radiations. Radiation! Horrors! Three Mile Isle! Jane Fonda! Nuclear bombs!
They don't worry much about bacteria because bacteria is natural. But radiation is natural too. Nosotros are exposed to natural radiations every minute of our lives: cosmic radiation from infinite, radiations from the ground, and radiations from radon in the air nosotros breathe. Every year, the average U.Southward. citizen is exposed to natural radiation equal to almost 360 dental 10-rays.
The reporters and protesters probably didn't know that, only even if they did, they'd still be upset because irradiation plants propose passing radiation through food.News stories featured Dr. Walter Burnstein, founder of a "consumer group" named Food & Water, saying, "This will be a public wellness disaster of the magnitude we have never seen earlier!" I have to adore the activists' skill in naming groups: Nutrient & Water. What reporter could argue with a group with a name like that? They must be the good guys, right? I interviewedDr. Burnstein and his "political organizer," Michael Colby.
MR. COLBY If yous expect at the existing studies on humans and animals fed irradiated food, you will detect testicular tumors, chromosomal abnormalities, kidney impairment, and cancer and birth defects.
STOSSEL Caused considering somebody ate irradiated food?
MR. COLBY Absolutely. Absolutely.
STOSSEL [Food & H2o claimed an Indian report had said that, but we called the author and she told the states she didn't conclude that at all.] Nosotros but talked to her and she says she didn't say that! She never said those kids were developing cancer.
DR. BURNSTEIN These are pure scientists and she doesn't want to brand that interruption. We are taking information technology the extra inch. We're saying to people, "Don't-don't exist put to sleep by people who work in examination tubes-don't." I don't need proof that it goes to cancer. We already know it leads to cancer.
Reporters gave Burnstein and Colby'southward dubious claims and so much credulous press coverage that politicians in Maine quickly banned nutrient irradiation. New York and New Bailiwick of jersey followed suit. That spread fear to other states. I went to Mulberry, Florida, to report on a protest against Vindicator, a plant that proposed using radiation to impale germs on strawberries. When I got at that place, demonstrators were marching with picket signs, chanting, "Don't nuke our food! Don't nuke our food!" Their campaign persuaded the country of Florida to put a moratorium on Vindicator's opening.
DR. BURNSTEIN Vindicator volition become out of business, and not only Vindicator. That'll be the stop of the entire irradiation industry ... When nosotros go to talk to people, we don't have to interruption their artillery to convince them not to consume irradiated food. We just say, "Irradiated food," and people become, "What? Who wants the nutrient irradiated?"
The fact that Dr. Burnstein was not a research scientist, only rather an osteopath with a family practice in New Jersey, didn't diminish the respect he got from the media. His protests drew headlines and TV coverage. Reporters knew radiations was bad for humans, and therefore bad for food.
One adult female stood outside the Vindicator establish shouting angrily, "How much pollution are nosotros going to put into our mouths?!"
"None," is the respond. People recollect food irradiation makes nutrient radioactive, but it doesn't; the radiations merely kills the bacteria, and passes correct out of the food. That's why the FDA and USDA approved the procedure a long time ago. Spices have been irradiated for more than twenty years. Irradiation is good for united states of america. If it were more common, all of us would endure fewer instances of food poisoning and we could take fruits and vegetables that stay fresh weeks longer. Only scaremongering has kept it from catching on.
Food & Water told people that the AMA and the Earth Health Organization did not corroborate of irradiation, but that was a prevarication. Both organizations did approve. WHO told the states irradiation is equally important as pasteurization.
Pasteurization also met public skepticism when it was introduced. Louis Pasteur discovered that heating milk would impale bacteria, but critics charged that pasteurization was "meddling with nature," and that it might alter the properties of the food-or contaminate it. The U.South. dairy industry actually promoted raw milk as more acceptable than pasteurized milk. Only the persistence of scientists and medical experts allowed pasteurization to get standard practice. Irradiation might save as many lives, if the scaremongers would just leave of the way.Subsequently iii years of delays, the Vindicator plant finally was allowed to open. But fear of radiation has kept this practiced idea from spreading across America. But a tiny fraction of American meat is irradiated today.
If 50 percent were irradiated, the CDC says nearly a million cases of bacterial infections could be avoided and 350 lives could exist saved every year. 350 lives! Why isn't the press screaming about that? Considering reporters and legislators wait for danger in the wrong places.
Many reporters believe the activists because "something must be causing the cancer epidemic." Mysterious and unnatural additions to our environment are an easy doubtable. After all, during the by 50 years, Americans have been exposed to chemicals and forms of pollution and radiation that humans have never experienced before. "No wonder there's so much more cancer!" say reporters. Get the shovel.
MYTH: Chemical pollution is the crusade of the cancer epidemic!
TRUTH: There is no cancer epidemic.
Yous wouldn't know information technology from the media, merely there has been no surge in cancers. The death charge per unit due to cancer has been failing for more than x years. You might argue that fewer dice from cancer today simply considering there are better treatments for the disease, but await at the cancer incidence rate.
The incidence of prostate and chest cancer is upwardly, simply that's only because there'south more than early detection. In the 1980s more men starting getting PSA tests, and more than women had mammograms. Lung cancer increased in women because more women took up cigarettes, and skin cancer increased because of lunatic sunbathing. But overall cancer rates accept not been rising, and lots of cancers, like tum, uterine, and colorectal cancer, are on the refuse.
We think in that location's a cancer epidemic because we hear more about cancer. Cancer is a disease of an aging population, and fortunately, more people now live long enough to become cancer. More than talk near it as well. Many years ago people who got cancer were secretive about it.
The other large reason we think there is an epidemic is that the media, suspicious of chemicals, hype dubious risks.
Well-nigh every week, there is another story about a potential menace. Reporters credulously have the activists' scare stores: While I've been a reporter, I've been asked to do alarmist reports almost hair dye, dry cleaning, java, chewing gum, saccharin, cyclamates, NutraSweet, nitrites, Red No. 2 dye, electric blankets, video display terminals, dental fillings, cellular phones, vaccines, spud chips, farmed salmon, Teflon, antiperspirants, and even rubber duckies.
I refused to do almost of those stories, and now I accept to ask, if the scares were valid, where are the bodies? If ane-10th of what the reporters suggested was happening did happen, there would be mass death. The opposite is true: Despite exposure to radiation and all those nasty new chemicals, Americans today live longer than always.
The media hysteria may be nonsense, simply our fear is real-and contagious. That can exist mortiferous.
MYTH: Ddt causes all kinds of cancers, and well-nigh wiped out every bird in the globe.
TRUTH: Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane saves lives.
Malaria will kill more than grand children before yous finish reading this book. The chemic DDT is at the core of the problem-not the use of DDT, but the failure to use it because of media hysteria. In Republic of uganda solitary, said minister of health Jim Muhwezi, "We are losing betwixt two million and three million people a yr." Recollect of it: Millions dice because the media gets it wrong.
Y'all are probably saying, "What is he talking well-nigh? Ddt is atrocious!" But it isn't. DDT is capable of doing far more good than damage. You just don't know that, because some people, including reporters, are terrified of Ddt.
Here'due south how information technology happened: Fifty years agone, Americans sprayed DDT everywhere. Farmers used it to repel bugs, and health officials to fight mosquitoes that carry malaria. Nobody worried much about chemicals then. It was a shock to lookout man the old videos my producer found: People at picnics just sat and kept eating while trucks sprayed thick white clouds of Ddt on top of them. In fact, when the trucks came to spray, some people ran toward them-as if an water ice cream truck had come-they were so happy to have mosquitoes repelled. Tons of DDT were sprayed on food and people.
Despite this overuse, at that place was no surge in cancer or any other human injury. Scientists institute no evidence that spraying DDT seriously injure people.It did cause some damage: Information technology threatened bird populations past thinning the shells of their eggs.
In 1962, the book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson made the impairment famous and helped instill our fear of chemicals. The volume raised some serious questions about the use of Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, but the legitimate nature of those questions was lost in the media feeding frenzy that followed. Ddt was a "Killer Chemical!" and the press was off on another fear campaign.
Information technology turns out DDT itself wasn't the problem-the trouble was that much too much was sprayed. That'due south often true with chemicals; information technology'southward the dose that matters. We need water, for example, but half-dozen feet of information technology will kill us.
In the 1950s nosotros sprayed DDT indiscriminately, but it simply takes a tiny amount to prevent the spread of malaria. If sprayed on walls of an African hut, a pocket-sized amount will keep mosquitoes at bay for half a year. That makes information technology a wonderful malaria fighter. Simply today Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane is rarely used to fight malaria considering environmentalists' demonization of information technology causes others to shun it.
That frustrates Dr. Amir Attaran, who researched the issue at Harvard Academy. "If it'south a chemical, it must be bad," he told u.s.. "If it's DDT, it must be awful. And that'southward fine if you lot're a rich white environmentalist. It's not and then fine if yous're a poor blackness kid who is nearly to lose his life from malaria." Uganda'due south health minister angrily asked united states of america: "How many people practice they want us to lose before we utilize DDT?"Good question.
The U.S. regime does spend your revenue enhancement dollars trying to fight malaria in Africa, but information technology has not spent a penny on DDT. The money goes for things like musquito netting over beds (fifty-fifty though not everyone in Africa fifty-fifty has a bed). The office that dispenses those funds, the Bureau for International Development, acknowledges DDT is safe.
I went to the State Department to interview the USAID official in charge of international health. With a straight face, she denied that their no-funds-for-DDT policy had anything to do with being "environmentally correct." I felt similar I was talking to a robot.
DR. ANNE PETERSON I would recommend that if those who want to apply [Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane for] indoor spraying, that they can and should. And it is definitely less harmful than dying and existence exposed to malaria.
STOSSEL But you won't pay for it?
DR. ANNE PETERSON Currently nosotros don't pay for it.
STOSSEL This is pathetic. Millions of people are dying and you, to exist politically correct, are maxim, "No, we don't want to pay for Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane."
DR. ANNE PETERSON I believe that the strategies nosotros are using are as effective as spraying with Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane. And we are getting them out as far and every bit fast as we tin. Then, politically correct or not, I am very confident that what we are doing is the right strategy.
The right strategy? Dr. Attaran has a improve perspective: "If I were to characterize what USAID does on malaria, I'd telephone call it medical malpractice. I would telephone call it murderous."
After my interview with Dr. Peterson, USAID said it has reconsidered its policy, and it may fund spraying of Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane.
We'll see. For at present, millions dice while USAID dithers.
The agency was but responding to media hysteria. Media hysteria invites politicians to exercise the incorrect affair. In this instance, the result of the media getting it and so incorrect is millions of deaths.
Media attention as well kills reputations, particularly when sensationalism and the herd mentality are in play. Serious subjects, worthy of careful examination, are often treated with a kind of journalistic shorthand that cheats readers and viewers, while ruining lives. In this next example, innocent children became unknowing pawns.
MYTH: "My teacher molested me." Kids wouldn't make upwards stuff like that!
TRUTH: Yes, they would.
This trendy media scare sent people to jail. Many were innocent of whatever law-breaking, merely they were convicted by the court of public opinion. The witnesses against them were children who testified to horrible events-events which, in many cases, never happened. Simply when the media express gets rolling, people get run over.
1 victim was Kelly Michaels, a New Bailiwick of jersey preschool instructor convicted in 1988 of molesting twenty children in baroque and sadistic means. She spent five years in prison earlier an appeals court ruled that prosecutors had planted suggestions in the minds of the children who testified against her.
I don't blame the kids; I arraign the prosecutors and the media. Reporters' imaginations and keyboards were fired up in 1983 by accusations of sodomy and satanic abuse at a California day-care center called the McMartin Preschool. The woman who started the barrage of charges was later discovered to be a paranoid schizophrenic. Her claims of devil-worship and sadism were outlandish on their face up, but never mind: It was "expert copy." Headlines blared, prosecutors roared, and seven people were charged in a total of 135 criminal counts.
Information technology was nonsense. But the defendants had their lives ruined. The case against them was cooked upwardly by therapists and social workers who planted suggestions in the minds of impressionable children, who and so told horrendous tales to prosecutors. The prosecutors also listened to the drumbeats of the media, which stirred a unlike witches' brew for every news wheel.
Kids are highly impressionable. Nosotros know that, but psychology professor Stephen Ceci proved information technology in a study at Cornell University. He told me, "Nosotros are now discovering that if you put kids who were not driveling through the same kind of highly leading, repetitive interview, some of those children volition disclose events that seem apparent but, in fact, are not borne out in authenticity."
Ceci set up an experiment where he and his researchers asked kids silly questions like:
RESEARCHER Have you ever had your finger caught in a mousetrap and had to go to the hospital?
GIRL No.
RESEARCHER No?
At first, the kids say no. Then, one time a calendar week for the next 10 weeks, the researchers inquire the question again.
RESEARCHER You went to the hospital considering your finger got caught in a mousetrap?
BOY And information technology-RESEARCHER Did that happen?
BOY Uh-huh.
By week 4 or vi or ten, about one-half of the kids say, "Yes, it happened." Many give such precise information that yous'd think it must have happened.
RESEARCHER Did information technology hurt?
Male child Yeah.
RESEARCHER Yeah? Who took yous to the hospital?
BOY My daddy, my mommy, my blood brother.
RESEARCHER Where in your house is the mousetrap?
Boy It'southward downwardly in the basement.
RESEARCHER What is information technology next to in the basement?
BOY It'south adjacent to the firewood.
By the time I met that male child, weeks after the experiment was over, he all the same "remembered" convincing details about things that never happened.
STOSSEL Was in that location a time when yous got your finger caught in a mousetrap and had to go to the hospital?
BOY Uh-huh.
STOSSEL Who went with you to the infirmary?
BOY My mom and my dad and my brother Colin, but not the baby. He was in my mom's tummy.
What he told me was even more remarkable considering merely a few days earlier, his father discussed the experiment with him, explained that it was only a exam, and that the mousetrap event never happened. The boy agreed-it was just in his imagination.
But when he talked to me, the boy denied the conversation with his father, and insisted the mousetrap story was true.
STOSSEL Did your father tell you something about the mousetrap finger story?
Male child No.
STOSSEL Is information technology truthful? Did it really happen?
Boy It wasn't a story. It really happened.
STOSSEL This actually happened? You really got your finger caught? This really happened?
Boy Yeah.
Why would the boy lie to me? I said to Professor Ceci that I assumed he wasn't intentionally making up the story. Ceci said, "I think they've come to believe information technology. It is office of their belief system."
Some molestation "experts" thought they'd come up closer to the truth by giving kids anatomically correct dolls. With dolls, the social workers wouldn't accept to inquire so many questions. They could only say, "Imagine you are the doll; what did the teacher bear on?" Lawyers argued that kids "wouldn't make up" what had been done to the doll. But Ceci's colleague Dr. Maggie Bruck conducted tests that showed that they would.
Bruck had a pediatrician add some actress steps to his routine physical examination. He measured the child's wrists with a ribbon, he put a footling label on the kid's stomach, and he tickled the child'due south pes with a stick. Never did the doctor become anywhere near the child's private parts. Then, a few days after the exam, using an anatomically correct doll, Bruck and the child's male parent asked leading questions virtually the md's exam. We caught information technology on tape.
FATHER And then what did he do?
GIRL He put a stick in my vagina.
Male parent He put a stick in your vagina?
GIRL Yeah.
[Then the girl claimed the doc hammered the stick into her vagina. And she said the medico examined her rectum.]
DR. BRUCk He was where?
Daughter In my hiney.
None of information technology was truthful. But when dolls were used, half the kids who'd never had their individual parts touched claimed the physician touched them. The tests made Dr. Bruck question her prior religion in the testimony of children. She told me she thinks dozens of innocent people are in jail.
Dr. Ceci told me their leading questions were mild compared to what the investigators asked: "What we do . . . doesn't come close, for case, to what was done in the Kelly Michaels instance."
The appellate court decision that set Kelly Michaels free garnered only a smidgeon of the media attention her trial and conviction got. Later on she was freed, she told me about her nightmare.
MS. MICHAELS One solar day y'all're getting prepare for work and making coffee, minding your concern, trying to get along every bit all-time you can, being a reasonable, decent, honorable denizen, and the next minute yous are an defendant kid molester with the virtually bizarre- I'd never even heardof such things even beingness done.
STOSSEL They say you inserted objects, including Lego blocks, forks, spoons, serrated knives into their anuses, vaginas, penises-
MS. MICHAELS And a sword. Information technology was in in that location.
STOSSEL -and a sword-
MS. MICHAELS Yes.
STOSSEL -that y'all made children drink your urine, that you made kids take their wearing apparel off and licked peanut butter off them. Information technology's very hard to believe, even so the jury believed information technology and not you.
MS. MICHAELS No one was willing to doubt a kid.
The media certainly wasn't. Professional skepticism took a holiday in the face of "good copy."
The media similar bad news, and tend to believe it.
MYTH: Divorce hurts women much more than than men, and many men abandon their kids.
TRUTH: Both men and women suffer after divorce, and lots of men want to requite more to their kids.
The media (including the men, for psychological reasons involving guilt or other factors best left to Dr. Phil), see men as inviting, politically correct targets. When experts commencement trumpeting statistics that add up to "men are bad," reporters listen.For years, I heard bad things virtually deadbeat dads. They were living it up, while their ex-wives and children had to scrape by. It's a recurring story, and the media regurgitates it regularly. It'south also group slander.
In 1985, Lenore Weitzman, then a sociologist at Harvard, published data showing that men prosper after divorce, while women and children suffer terribly.
Weitzman'southward report was appalling: Men's standard of living rose 42 percentage after divorce, while women's declined by 73 percent. The media couldn't become plenty of this exciting news. Those figures were cited non simply in news stories, merely in 348 social science articles, 250 constabulary review articles, and 24 appeals court cases.Around that time, government officials too reported that Census data showed that near half of the divorced fathers in America didn't pay child support they owed.The evening newscasts and the papers featured both claims uncritically. The stories fit comfortably into the media's "relieve the victim" oestrus. But get the shovel: The stories didn't deserve the airtime or the headlines. A picayune reportorial digging would have outburst the sanctimonious bubble.
Digging was finally done, merely non past the media. Arizona State Academy psychologist Sanford Braver set out initially to examine the reasons for the shocking data. Why were those divorced fathers interim so irresponsibly? How could a dad abandon his kid?
Braver was surprised to notice that the Weitzman figures were wrong, the result of a mathematical error. Weitzman afterwards admitted she was wrong. She said a figurer analyst had made a fault-a error, in this case, heard around the earth.
Braver conducted his own report of four hundred divorces, the biggest federally funded study ever done on divorced dads. His findings turned conventional wisdom, and all those media stories, on their heads. The 42 percent better for men, 73 pct worse for women data wasn't even shut. "Our results," he said, "show that men and women come up out about exactly every bit."
Braver and then found that the Census data nearly deadbeat dads was manner off too. The data came from questions asked of the custodial parent just. The custodial parent was nearly always the mother. "Everything we knew nearly non-custodial fathers" in the Census report, Braver told me, "we knew from custodial mothers." Did some of the angry ex-wives prevarication? Probably, only nosotros don't know, because the Demography workers didn't bother to ask the fathers!
Afterward my conversation with Braver, I went to Washington to meet with Dan Weinberg, the human being who headed up that data collection for the Census Bureau. As often happens to me in Washington, I felt I was in another world:
STOSSEL So the Demography worker says, how much in child support payments were you supposed to receive this year? And the woman remembers . . .
DAN WEINBERG Yeah.
STOSSEL I just have a difficult fourth dimension assertive that these people, many of whom are angry, are going to give honest answers.
DAN WEINBERG Actually-well, the anger may help them remember what they're supposed to receive.
STOSSEL Why not become to the man and ask, is it truthful?
DAN WEINBERG We would be violating the confidentiality of the custodial mother.
STOSSEL Is there whatever cross-check?
DAN WEINBERG No. We don't cheque whatever of it.
STOSSEL Merely wouldn't they prevarication merely because they're mad at the human being?
DAN WEINBERG People are basically honest.
The spirit of George Washington'due south cherry tree lives on along the Potomac. I likewise cannot tell a lie: The media both misconstrue and oversimplify the issues of custody and kid support. That reinforces the myth that many divorced dads never carp to encounter their children-the "runaway dads" so love by headline writers.Some men are as as despicable every bit the media portray them, but Braver's report showed that the majority of divorced dads exercise try to see their kids. In many cases, "fathers were impeded in their efforts," Braver told me. "The female parent merely merely said, 'No, you tin can't see your kid.'"
Nosotros videotaped ane such heartbreaking scene. A divorced male parent went to see his five kids for what he idea would be a full-mean solar day visit. He was entitled to that, under a court order, and the courtroom also ordered the mother non to discourage the children from spending time with their father. But she clearly had poisoned his children'south minds against him. The begetter stood only outside his ex-wife's house and begged his children, "Would you like to get out with me today?" "No," said one kid after another. Then the mother ordered the kids dorsum into her house.
What comes through on the record is the unbridled satisfaction of the mother and the helplessness of the father. Just that'south not the pic you lot get from the media. The media automatically cast divorced parents in the roles of villainous father and heroic female parent. Many mothers are heroic, just so are many fathers. But a divorced mother equally the villain? Sky foreclose! That would stand the world of media victimology on its caput.
MYTH: Schools are vehement.
TRUTH: Schools are pretty rubber.
Media bad news bears love crime and violence. Turn on the television or pick up a tabloid, and you will be convinced that you have more to fright than always before. Terrible things are happening, and everyone knows they're happening much more often. These stories are more candidates for the shovel. The gory pictures and the excited copy conceal the actual TRUTH: America is safer than virtually whatever state in human being history.
The Columbine, Jonesboro, and Paducah school shootings during the late 1990s triggered a regular spate of stories about "spreading school violence." But school violence in America had been steadily decreasing. Violent crimes in schools dropped by one-half between 1992 and 2002, although reporting about school violence increased.
The shooting incidents were awful, but aberrations; more Americans die from lightning strikes than from school violence. More kids die in bathtubs. Just the media had go obsessed with schoolhouse violence. In the wake of Columbine, my network aired 383 stories about the tragedy. Sam Donaldson warned wary parents and students about "angry teens turning upwardly in other towns." CBS News correspondent Bob McNamara called school shootings "an American nightmare that too many schools know too well."
Merely information technology wasn't a nightmare that schools knew well. In fact, students are probably safer in school than they are at home or at the mall. Offense statistics show that kids are twice as likely to be victims of violence away from school than they are in school.
The media hysteria encouraged people who run schools to do crazy things, like spend thousands of dollars on security cameras, and hire police officers to guard the doors. Some schools terrified students by running SWAT team drills; cops burst into classrooms and ordered kids downwardly to the floor. The result? Kids in schoolhouse felt less secure than ever before. Though school violence was downward, studies prove kids were more scared. "They tin can't larn under these weather," says Dr. Frank Farley, one-time head of the American Psychological Association.To listen to the media, Dr. Farley told me, you'd take to believe that Chicken Niggling was right: "The heaven is truly falling. America is in terrible straits and our schools are a mess and they're trigger-happy. But they are not vehement. I don't know why there is all this printing coverage, other than the need for a story."
That'south it. The media animal must exist fed. Scares drive up circulation and ratings.
MYTH: "Route rage" is an epidemic!
TRUTH: It's not.
The inventor of the term "road rage" is unknown, only he or she has a lot to answer for. Not every bit much equally the media does, though. In 1997, the American Car Clan Traffic Safety Foundation issued a study on ambitious driving. Newsweek said we were being "driven to destruction," Stone Phillips on NBC said it was "a bigger trouble than e'er," and on ABC my colleague Barbara Walters said "the trend is frightening."
Others were scratching their heads. They didn't see what the media did. Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, which studies media coverage, told me: "If road rage is something that's increasing, we should have more fatalities on the road. There should exist more reports of reckless driving. But these things are going down."
And then what was the bear witness for all these stories? I went to the AAA Foundation, and confronted their master spokeswoman almost their claim that road rage had increased by 51 percentage.
STEPHANIE FAUL That'southward what information technology appeared to wait similar from our study. That's all I can tell yous. We saw an increase in reported cases.
STOSSEL Reported in the press?
STEPHANIE FAUL Yes, reported in the press.
STOSSEL It might be that reporters just started liking the ingemination, road rage?
STEPHANIE FAUL Well, as well they similar the idea of violent decease by strangers! It'south a very common topic in the news reports.
STOSSEL [quoting from her press release] "Reached epidemic proportions. A bigger problem than ever." Does the study justify that?
STEPHANIE FAUL Well, yes and no.
STOSSEL "A neglected epidemic."
STEPHANIE FAUL Yeah, that's a-that'due south a flake stiff.
STOSSEL The impression from the reporting is that there's greater danger out there.
STEPHANIE FAUL Yeah. Considering that'south what sells papers, of course. I mean, yous're in the media. You know that if yous get people excited virtually an consequence, that's what makes information technology highly-seasoned every bit a topic.
Get out the shovel! This is circular logic: The written report was based on media mentions of aggressive driving. Nosotros in the media loved the catchy phrase "road rage" so much, we kept doing stories on it.
Robert Lichter suggested it all got started this fashion: "People were yelling at each other in their cars and making obscene gestures and even getting out of the car for years. Journalists simply plant a term for information technology. So final year, you went domicile and said, 'Somebody yelled at me from his car.' This yr, you become home and say, 'I was a victim of road rage.'"
Then the AAA writes a study based on the spurt of stories-and new headlines are built-in. Media incest!
In one case the media had a tricky phrase for information technology, route rage became an "epidemic."
MYTH: Using your cell telephone at the gas pump could cause an explosion.TRUTH: Don't tap dance either.
The media is alarmed:
cell fone fireball (New York Daily News)
buying gas? don't bear upon that telephone! (Toronto Star)
The facts are more reassuring. Cell phones are a source of static electricity, and anything that supplies a spark-yet minuscule-can ignite a burn if the spark is near fuel vapors. If you are pumping gas yourself, with a cell phone in your hand that rings at the wrong fourth dimension, theoretically you might be in danger. Merely at that place is no evidence that cell phones are causing fires.
Withal, the media keeps pumping out the stories. In 2004, the Poughkeepsie [Northward.Y.] Periodical ran this headline:
jail cell phone ring starts fire at gas station
The story quoted the local fire chief, Pat Koch, as saying gas vapors were ignited by the ringing of a cell phone. But-hold the presses and get the shovel!-only days subsequently, Koch changed his tune: "Later on further investigation . . . I take concluded that the source of ignition was from some source other than the prison cell phone . . . nigh probable static discharge from the motorist himself." To its credit, the Poughkeepsie Journal gave its follow-up story equally much play as the original. The media rarely do that.
The University of Oklahoma really has a "Eye for the Study of Wireless Electromagnetic Compatibility," which researches the effects of electronic devices on our lives. The centre examined incident reports and scientific data, and concluded that there was "virtually no testify to suggest that prison cell phones pose a hazard at gas stations." The researchers went even further: "The historical prove," it said, "does non support the need for further research."
Any static electricity, any spark-producing activeness, is dangerous near vapors. So rubbing your rear end confronting a fabric car seat on a dry winter day is more risky than using your cell phone about the fumes. Don't dance near the pumps with metallic taps on your shoes either!
MYTH: We have less gratuitous time.
TRUTH: We accept more.
"We're fried past work, frazzled by the lack of time."-Newsweek, March 9, 1995. "Life couldn't get any busier."-The Advocate (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), May 19, 2005. "Tin can your life get any busier?"-Saint Paul Pioneer Press, September 20, 2004. "Life is condign busier for many Americans."-Times-Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana), May 28, 2000.
Victimhood again. Reporters love reporting that life is getting worse. News stories tell the states we're "running ourselves ragged," and that Americans "have no free time." Pick up a mag and read all nigh it: not plenty time for romance, for relaxation, for our kids. Busy, busy, busy-less time than ever before. Except, information technology's not true.
When I went looking for real data, some scientific measure of how nosotros spend our time, all paths led to the University of Maryland. There, sociologist John Robinson records how people spend their days. Outset in 1965, he's had people fill out diaries so he could summate how much free time people really have.
STOSSEL I assume since 1965, we've lost free time.
JOHN ROBINSON It'southward non the case. There is a discrepancy between what people say and what they study when they keep a time diary.
His time diaries show that since 1965, nosotros've gained almost an 60 minutes more free time per twenty-four hours. Researchers say it's because Americans today work fewer hours, marry afterward, accept fewer kids, retire earlier, and take better tools, like washing machines and microwaves.
The thought that we piece of work harder than our ancestors is pure nonsense. Until 1890, half of all Americans worked in agriculture. People romanticize farms, but the former-fashioned family farm meant backbreaking labor under a broiling sun. Work began at dawn and continued past dark. Work in mines and factories was worse. Modern jobs are much easier. Our ancestors would be ardent to run across how much fourth dimension we spend playing golf, watching TV (an average three to four hours per twenty-four hour period), and going to our kids' soccer games, while complaining nearly how much we piece of work.But don't tell that to whatever magazine editors you know; you wouldn't want to ruin a perfectly proficient thing for them. The free-time myth is expert for circulation.
MYTH: Gas prices are going through the roof.
TRUTH: Gasoline is a bargain.
The media periodically go upset nigh "record" gas prices.
"The price of gasoline has risen again to a tape loftier!" said 1 newscaster in 2004. "The high prices are making it harder for some to keep their heads to a higher place water," said some other.
Drivers assume what they encounter at the pump confirms what they've heard on TV. One told me the prices are "scary." A woman said gas was "going upwards and upwards and up, and it's the most expensive information technology's ever been." And she was on a cycle.
The media were saying that gas prices were at tape highs for ane simple, uncomplicated-minded reason: They are economically illiterate, and so they didn't account for aggrandizement. That makes the numbers look bigger than the costs actually are. Such reporting is silly. Not adjusting for inflation would hateful that the movies Meet the Fockers and Blitz Hour 2 outgrossed Gone With the Wind.
It's not as if the reporters would take to piece of work at doing calculations to figure this out. Non only are there instant inflation calculators on the Spider web, but the U.S. Department of Free energy accounts for aggrandizement in its annual report of gas prices. At the fourth dimension I'1000 writing this, the average price of gasoline in the U.S. is $2.26 per gallon. Once you lot account for aggrandizement, that means gas today is sixty-vii cents a gallon cheaper than it was in 1922, and sixty-9 cents cheaper than in 1981. True, after Hurricane Katrina the price did reach an average of $two.87 per gallon-just that still is lower than the record boilerplate set in March 1981 of $3.12 per gallon.
Past failing to business relationship for inflation, the media take some Americans so alarmed that they tin can't think straight. "What costs more than," I asked customers at a gas station, "gasoline or bottled water?" The respond I got from almost anybody was gasoline.At that very gas station, h2o was for sale at $1.29 for a 20-4-ounce bottle. That's $six.88 per gallon, three times what the station charged for gasoline.It gets sillier. I asked gas station customers, "What costs more, gasoline or ice foam?" Over again, about people said gasoline cost more than. But at $3.39 a pint, "premium" ice cream costs most $27.00 a gallon.
We should marvel at how inexpensive gasoline is-what a bargain we get from oil companies. Later all, it's easy to canteen water, just retrieve about what it takes to produce and evangelize gasoline. Oil has to be sucked out of the basis, sometimes from deep below an ocean. To go to the oil, the drills often have to curve and dig sideways through as much every bit 5 miles of earth. What they find and so has to exist delivered through long pipelines or shipped in monstrously expensive ships, then converted into three or more different formulas of gasoline and transported in trucks that price more than $100,000 each. So your local gas station must spend a fortune on prophylactic devices to make certain you lot don't blow yourself up. At $2.26 a gallon (near forty-vi cents of which goes to taxes), gas is miraculously cheap!But what we heard from the clueless media was, "Gas prices are at record highs!"MYTH: We are running out of oil fast.
TRUTH: Not and then fast!
"It's going to exist a catastrophe!"
When they're not complaining nigh the price of gas, doomsayers would have u.s. believe that nosotros are called-for oil at an "unsustainable" charge per unit.
Camera-hungry politicians know that predicting doom gets them Idiot box face up time. "It's inevitable that this is just the beginning of this gasoline crisis!" Senator Charles Schumer told me, as Hurricane Rita approached landfall in 2005. The New York Democrat is notorious for his hunger for media coverage. (A Washington joke: Where is the most dangerous place to be? Between Chuck and a camera.) Schumer told me that after Rita hit, the cost of gas would rise to "five dollars a gallon."
He was eager to spend your coin to cure his panic. Schumer wants a new "Manhattan Project" that would employ huge amounts of tax coin to fund "contained free energy sources." I reminded him that the last time government tried that, it wasted billions on the totally failed synfuels project. That was a $20 billion Carter administration plan to develop a cheap way to make synthetic natural gas from coal. Schumer said that synfuels was a failure because "political leaders" chose it, merely this time Congress would accept "nonpoliticians" decide which projects to fund.
Sure they would.
If nonpoliticians are going to make up one's mind which projects to fund, why do nosotros need Chuck Schumer? We already have a system in which nonpoliticians determine what projects to fund. It's called "the market."
If the price of a butt of oil stays high, lots of entrepreneurs will scramble for ways to supply cheaper energy. They'll come upwards with culling energy sources or better means to suck oil out of the ground. At fifty dollars a barrel, information technology's even profitable to recover oil that's stuck in the tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Peter Huber and Mark Mills point out in their volume The Bottomless Well that those tar sands lone contain enough oil to see our needs for a hundred years.
But the media don't pay much attention to that. Not running out of oil is not a very interesting story.
MYTH: A full moon makes people crazy.
TRUTH: I was crazy enough to report that.
We media people routinely and mindlessly corroborate myths nigh scientific discipline and nature. People already believe that a full moon influences people in weird, negative means, and reporters are quick to confirm it. Here are samples of what the clueless media has said nearly the total moon:
"The moon's effects are legendary . . . Few of us can escape the power of the moon."-Hugh Downs, 20/20, November 8, 1984. "Spokane Canton sheriff's deputies have no need to check their lunar tables to know when it's a total moon out there."-Spokesman-Review, October nineteen, 2005. "A Florida researcher studied murders in Dade Canton, and found more murders were committed during full moons than any other time. So tonight, watch out."-John Stossel
Yep, I confess: I actually said that on Good Morning America years ago. The Dade Canton report seemed plausible-people might beverage, political party, and therefore murder more people when the moon was total. Information technology was only much later that I discovered the study was flawed. Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic mag, embarrassed me by explaining that "Researchers went back, reanalyzed the data, and discovered that there'south goose egg unusual going on."
Shermer said xxx-six other studies show there is no full-moon outcome, just people still believe at that place is ane because our memories play a trick on on u.s.a.. Our brains look for patterns, and when we find one, it sticks. We remember something unusual that happened on a total moon.
"We don't remember the unusual things that happen on all the other times considering we're not looking for them," Shermer told me. "These things go on all the time, and there's no total moon, they're not looking for information technology, they don't call back it. We remember the hits, we forget the misses." (Meet as well Chapter 9, The Ability of Belief.)
Next time yous encounter the "more than violence during full moon" headline-get the shovel.MYTH: We're drowning in garbage!
TRUTH: In that location's plenty of room.
"New York Metropolis produces 20,000 tons of solid waste every day and the Sanitation Section is running out of places to put it. It argues in a new study that the only place left is the sky."-The New York Times, April 21, 1984. "Nosotros're going to be drowning in garbage."-William K. Reilly (quondam EPA ambassador), from Newsday, February 1, 1989. "A Earth Drowning in Litter."-BBC News, March 4, 2002.
This myth got jump-started with a existent-life incident that took on a life of its own. In 1987, a clomp full of New York trash was supposed to be shipped to a landfill in Louisiana. Simply on the way to Louisiana, the shipper tried to save coin past dumping his trash in North Carolina. Suspicious local officials turned him away, and chosen the media. The complaints of "We don't want New York's garbage!" got so much publicity that by the time the "garbage barge" reached its original destination, the Louisiana dump wouldn't accept it anymore. That brought more than publicity.
Tv news crews rushed to the scene. Before yous could say "Fabricate a crisis to raise coin," activists around the country had added "the garbage crisis" to their agenda. Said Cynthia Pollock of the Worldwatch Institute, "We are now budgeted an emergency situation!" That got more publicity.
Only it wasn't true.
The EPA says that, although some cities accept to ship garbage to other states, overall landfill chapters is actually increasing. Dump operators keep finding new ways to pack the trash tighter, to make information technology decompose faster, and pile information technology higher.Some landfill owners actually compete for our trash; they make money off information technology by putting grass on elevation of information technology and building ski slopes and golf game courses.
And America has huge amounts of open infinite. Non that we are going to fill it all with garbage-all of America'southward garbage for the side by side five hundred years would fit into one landfill ane hundred yards high. And it wouldn't even be the size of one of Ted Turner'due south ranches.
The fact that we have plenty of room-gets no publicity.
MYTH: The world is as well crowded.
TRUTH: That's garbage too.
We've heard this ane for decades. News articles warn of "the population flop," a "tidal moving ridge of humanity," and plead "No more babies." Clueless alarmists similar Ted Turner warn, "There's lots of problems all over the earth caused by also many people." It's truthful that the world population today is more than half-dozen billion people, but who says that's too many?
We could take the entire earth population, movement everyone into the country of Texas, and the population density there would even so be less than that of New York City. I said that to Turner, who and so looked at me as if I'd unwrapped a dead fish.
TED TURNER Information technology is a catastrophe that'south just a time bomb that'south waiting to happen.STOSSEL But people are our greatest wealth. More people is a good thing.TED TURNER Upward to a point. Up to a signal. And you, as a newsman, should damn well know that. Eventually yous stand around in a desert with nothing to swallow.That's absurd. The media runs pictures of starving masses in Africa and blames that on overpopulation. Ane writer, worrying well-nigh Niger, said that we must "reduce birth rates drastically, otherwise permanent dearth . . . will be the norm." But Niger's population density is nine persons per foursquare kilometer, minuscule compared to population densities in wealthy countries similar the United states (28), Japan (340), the Netherlands (484), and Hong Kong (6,621). The number of people isn't the problem.
Famine is caused past things like ceremonious wars and government corruption that interfere with the distribution of food. Sudan had famine when government militia forces stripped the state of cattle and grain. In Niger, 2.5 million people are starving because nutrient production is managed past the state. The absence of holding rights, price controls, and other cruel socialist experiments under manner in Republic of malaŵi, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Lesotho are starving millions more than. In Zimbabwe, it's Robert Mugabe's kleptocracy that's doing the damage.
The number of people isn't the problem. Improved technology now allows people to grow more food on less land. The UN says the world overproduces food today.More than 125,000 babies will be built-in before you finish reading this book, but they're not a burden, they're a blessing. They're more brains that might cure cancer, more hands to build things, and more than voices to bring us cute music.The clueless media, in pursuit of the scare du jour, practise us a nasty disservice by focusing on the wrong things. Considering of the constant parade of frightening stories, huge amounts of money and energy are spent on minuscule risks. In the concurrently, millions dice of malaria, thousands die from bacteria, teachers are jailed, fathers are kept from their kids, and nigh everyone is frightened needlessly.In that location are real issues in the world. The media ought to focus on them.
Excerpted from MYTHS, LIES, AND DOWNRIGHT STUPIDITY by John Stossel. Copyright © 2006 John Stossel. All rights reserved. Available wherever books are sold.
Source: https://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1898820&page=1
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