Monday, October 24, 2005

Breaking the Science: Misleading Stories

The American Daily

We simply couldn't go an entire day without mentioning the mess at PBS...

Breaking the Science: Misleading Stories
By Mark Rosenthal

Excerpts:

This film seems to be the first step in a pattern that's been played out many times in the past few decades:

1. Determine what conclusions a study would need to reach in order to stampede legislators into passing the laws you want passed.

2. Conduct studies that are carefully designed ignore any inconvenient facts. Popular techniques in this step include: 1) using self-selected rather than randomized population samples, 2) taking care not to ask any questions that might elicit undesired answers, and 3) neglecting to report any results at all from any questions whose answers contradict your thesis.

3. Publicize these studies as if they were impartial research, by planting newspaper stories, publishing in journals whose referees are as biased as the studies' authors, getting corporations to fund advertising that masquerades as a "documentary", etc.

4. Use yellow journalism to scare the public into demanding that legislators pass a law to fix the nonexistent problem.

"Breaking the Silence" seems to be the publicity and hype phase of an even more insidious campaign. The goal this time appears to be stampeding legislators into passing laws that will have the effect of preventing courts from granting any form of custody (legal or physical, shared or sole) to any father over any mother's objection.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services data on child abuse shows that over twice as many children are battered by their mothers (40.8%) as by their fathers (18.8%), excluding cases in which both parents are abusive (16.9%). Source

Likewise the number of children killed by their mothers without the father's involvement is double the number killed by their fathers without the mother's involvement. Yet the filmmakers mislead viewers by interviewing only children victimized by fathers and denying children victimized by their mothers the opportunity to tell their stories.

Labels:

1 Comments:

Blogger Iguana said...

The sad thing is that people are starting to realize that anything that comes out of the gender feminist crowd is pretty much based on made up information. So, they will start ignoring them. The unfortunate consequence might be that people who really need help wont get it.

1:38 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

Listed on Blogwise Blogarama - The Blog Directory Blog Directory