Huffington Post posted a promotional video called A “24″ Christmas: Jack Bauer Tortures Santa Claus.

In it, Santa Claus has been apprehended by the CIA, and Jack Bauer is sent in to torture and interrogate him. Of course, almost everyone is going to click on the video to see if Jack Bauer really does torture Santa Claus.

And, of course, Jack Bauer does not end up torturing Santa Claus. Torturing Santa Claus would make Jack Bauer and “24″ look really bad. And torturing Santa Claus would take away from a central message of “24″, which is that good people are rarely tortured by “the good guys”, instead it is almost always only truly evil criminals who are ever tortured by “the good guys”.

Anyway, I was truly disgusted by this video, and by Huffington Post’s willingness to promote this video, so here is the comment that I attempted to post:

The morally bankrupt Keifer Sutherland makes over 10 million dollars a year promoting torture.

I assume that Huffington Post is against torture, and is against the promotion of torture. So why post a video that promotes the horrible show “24″?

A couple of things about this video:

1. This video takes a lighthearted view of torture. I’m sure victims of torture must find this video hilarious.

2. In this video, Keifer Sutherland (playing Jack Bauer) doesn’t actually torture Santa Claus. The message being that only bad people get the torture treatment.

This is a truly disgusting… and just gives cover to those who feel that as long as they personally don’t support torture, that it is ok to support a show that very effectively promotes torture.

“If torture isn’t evil, then there is no such thing as evil”

Note, Huffington Post is well within their rights to moderate comments, and they should moderate comments to keep out spam and offensive comments. Their comment moderator decided that my comment (posted early on December 19th) was too offensive to allow.

What don’t understand, is why a site like “Huffington Post” which has come out strongly against torture, is so willing to promote and defend pro-torture propaganda such as “24″.

For more on how TV promotes torture see:

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/torture.html

There have been plenty of scientific studies showing associations between Television and academic mediocrity, depression, aggression, poor concentration, obesity, consumerism, civic disengagement, etc.

You would almost think that TV might be bad for you!

For lovers and defenders of TV, how to fight back? Luckily for them, two economists have come to the rescue, providing a statistical study showing that TV really is good for kids.

According to “The Benefits of Bozo“, the Slate article describing their study:

“In a recent study, two economists at the University of Chicago, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, came up with a different way to test the long-run impact of television on kids—by reaching back to the distant past of the information age. When Americans first started getting television in the 1940s, the availability of the medium spread across the country unevenly. Some cities, like New York, had television by 1940. Others, like Denver and Honolulu, didn’t get their first broadcasts until the early 1950s. Whenever television appeared, kids became immediate junkies: Children in households with televisions watched their boob tubes for close to four hours a day by 1950.”

…

“The key point for Gentzkow and Shapiro’s study is that depending on where you lived and when you were born, the total amount of TV you watched in your childhood could differ vastly. A kid born in 1947 who grew up in Denver, where the first TV station didn’t get under way until 1952, would probably not have watched much TV at all until the age of 5. But a kid born the same year in Seattle, where TV began broadcasting in 1948, could watch from the age of 1. If TV-watching during the early years damages kids’ brains, then the test scores of Denver high-school seniors in 1965 (the kids born in 1947) should be better than those of 1965 high-school seniors in Seattle.”

…

“From the 1966 Coleman Report, the landmark study of educational opportunity commissioned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Gentzkow and Shapiro got 1965 test-score data for almost 300,000 kids. They looked for evidence that greater exposure to television lowered test scores. They found none. After controlling for socioeconomic status, there were no significant test-score differences between kids who lived in cities that got TV earlier as opposed to later, or between kids of pre- and post-TV-age cohorts. Nor did the kids differ significantly in the amount of homework they did, dropout rates, or the wages they eventually made. If anything, the data revealed a small positive uptick in test scores for kids who got to watch more television when they were young. For kids living in households in which English was a second language, or with a mother who had less than a high-school education, the study found that TV had a more sizable positive impact on test scores in reading and general knowledge. Evidently, Bozo the Clown was better than we remember.”

The conclusion above gives the impression that this study is actually looking at the test results of kids who grew up watching a lot of TV compared to kids who grew up watching substantially less.

That is actually not the case, instead this study is comparing the test results of whole cities. That is, the authors assume that in a city where a TV station started broadcasting a few year earlier, that children living there watched substantially more TV growing up than children who grew up in a city where a TV station came later.

This is a huge assumption to make. For example, the study is comparing cohorts where a TV station arrived in their city in 1948 with cohorts where a TV station arrived in 1954. As their own graph shows in 1948 only about 20% of households even had TVs, and by 1954 that percentage had only increased to about 30%. (Remember, back in the 1940s and 1950s, a TV was an expensive luxury item.)  So basically the test results are diluted (unevenly) by a large percentage of kids who lived in homes without a TV (despite living in a city with a TV station).

Also, there is no real evidence that children, in the 1950’s, living in households with a TV instantly started watching over 4 hours of TV per day (as the Slate article argues). There is some evidence that in homes with a TV, that by 1950, the TV was on for 4:35 per day. Just as by 2008, the average American home has their TV on for 8:18 hours per day. I don’t think that anyone is arguing that today, kids watch over 8 hours of TV per day.

Never mind the economic, cultural, and demographic differences among the compared cities. Never mind the fact that it took years from the time a TV station first arrived for most households to even get a TV. And never mind, that most new TV stations had few channels making it hard for even the most dedicated TV fan to actually watch large amounts of TV right away. These are huge confounding factors.

The authors acknowledge some of these factors, and do attempt to take them into consideration when doing their statistical calculations. Nevertheless, there are a large number of known and unknown confounding historical factors making it impossible to come to any kind of accurate conclusion. This explains why this “working paper” was never published in a peer-reviewed journal (note it was released in January 2006, so there has been plenty of time for peer-review). This lack of peer-view did not stop Slate from publishing an enthusiastic and uncritical article describing this non-peer-reviewed study, as “Proof that TV doesn’t harm kids”.

This non-peer-reviewed study is called Does Television Rot Your Brain? (it can be downloaded at http://www.nber.org/papers/w12021.pdf by registering at SSRN.com) and was written by Matthew Gentzhow and Jesse Shapiro. If you go to Jesse Shapiro’s website he does not list “Does Television Rot Your Brain?”.

Instead of using a large number of assumptions and estimates to try to compare a large group of kids (some of who grew up watching various amount of TV) with another group of kids (some of who watched slightly less), why not just do a longitudinal study?

Actually, researchers at Otago University in New Zealand did exactly that. What they found was this:

“These findings indicate that excessive television viewing is likely to have a negative impact on educational achievement. This is likely to have far-reaching consequences for an individual’s socioeconomic status and well-being in adult life.23 Although we cannot prove that watching television is causally related to poor educational achievement, the associations between viewing time and educational outcomes were strong and independent of the known confounding influences of intelligence, socioeconomic status, and childhood behavioral problems. Furthermore, this study fulfills many of the other criteria often used to infer causality in an observational study, including temporal sequence, dose-response relationship, and biological plausibility. However, we cannot rule out the possibility of reverse causation. This is likely to be at least part of the explanation for the strong association between television viewing during adolescence and leaving school without any qualifications. By adolescence, some individuals will be poorly motivated toward schoolwork and may, for example, fill their time by watching television instead of doing homework. This is less likely to be the explanation for the strong inverse association between television viewing in childhood and attainment of a university degree. The finding that childhood viewing was a better predictor than adolescent viewing of not obtaining a university degree makes reverse causation  unlikely and indicates that excessive childhood television viewing has a long-lasting association with poor educational outcomes.” Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine (July 2005)

Note: a Slate commenter makes the following excellent point “Thinking back to the 1940’s and 50’s it seems to me highly unlikely that – even in America – TV programmes would have been available throughout the day(when children were around) and even more unlikely that the stay-at-home mothers back then would have parked their children in front of it for long periods. I feel this is reading back the behavior of today’s families into the past.“

See also a number of studies looking at the effects of TV on school results:

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/school.html

As for the issue of Correlation versus Causation see:

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/causation.html

It turns out the new flat-screen TVs use significantly more energy than the old-style TVs.

Here’s one excellent solution:

The obvious solution to the problem of energy-guzzling TV sets (“TV sets may get greener,” Oct. 22) is simply banishing them from our homes.

TVs are not required for life. My household has been TV-free for many years now, and yet I manage to live a full, active life and stay engaged with the issues as an educator and citizen.

Doing away with TV also immediately eliminates so many of the corporate messages telling us we are inadequate if we are not buying more and more things.

There are so many other wonderful things to do instead of watching TV and shopping. Yes, there is good content on some networks, but there is good content out in the non-virtual world as well.

Killing our TVs could help save energy for things more essential to life.

RUTH E. MALONE Oakland

Originally uploaded by yes, spaz.

Lately my anti-TV blogroll has increased substantially.

For some fun reading on TV, anti-TV and Instead of TV check out these new blogs:

Ellen Currey-Wilson – Confessions of a TV-Addicted Mom Trying to Raise a TV-Free Kid

I’m missing all of my shows

Plato’s Cave – The Effects of Television on Humanity, Culture, Society, & the Human Body

Television vs Children – TV is not child friendly and parents deserve to be informed

TV Free Living – Get Out and Live

TV Stinks – finding life away from the television

And, of course, don’t forget these great websites:

Bowling Alone

Instead of TV

Screen Time – Center for Screen-time Awareness

Screen Time – Forum

Trash Your TV – Your Complete Guide to a TV-Free Lifestyle

Turn-off Your TV – Kill Your Television

Unplug Your Kids – Living a TV-free life … with a few crafts and books thrown in!

White Dot – the international campaign against television

White Dot – Forum

Regarding screens in public places, there is a whole website devoted to the subject.

Check out: Media by Choice

For me “screens in public places” was not such a big issue, perhaps because where I live, blaring screens everywhere is not such a problem. But reading the excellent Media by Choice gave me a new perspective. I especially liked the description of the Ray Bradbury story in the Welcome page.

Congratulations to the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) !

Note: for a list of studies looking at the effects of TV on very young children see: http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/young.html

CCFC successfully pressured “the Walt Disney Company to offer a full refund to anyone who purchased a Baby Einstein DVD in the last five years.”

This is in addition to their ”2006 Federal Trade Commission complaint” which forced Disney to stop making false claims that Baby Einstein DVDs were educational.

From The New York Times article on the Baby Einstein Refunds:

Last year, lawyers threatened a class-action lawsuit for unfair and deceptive practices unless Disney agreed to refund the full purchase price to all who bought the videos since 2004. “The Walt Disney Company’s entire Baby Einstein marketing regime is based on express and implied claims that their videos are educational and beneficial for early childhood development,” a letter from the lawyers said, calling those claims “false because research shows that television viewing is potentially harmful for very young children.”

Perhaps “Baby Einstein” should be renamed “Baby Bozo” !

But it was the comments that were the most fun, here are a few that I especially liked:

I watched some of these videos with my grandson. All it teaches is how to watch television.

Einstein did not watch TV as a child. Neither did he play video games or text anyone. He played outdoors and did a lot of hiking in the mountains. So if parents want little Einsteins, maybe they should take away the TV, the cell phones and the video games and tell their kids to go take a hike.

There’s been evidence that these videos actually inhibit mental development. Studies also suggest that face to face interaction between a baby and a live person is far more beneficial. A parent’s reaction to a baby’s noises or attempts at speech is where the true benefit for linguistic development lies.

Make them offer refunds on all Disney productions that decreased intellect. No shortage of those.

For years I’ve also heard that putting any child under 2 in front of the tv can harm their later ability to concentrate and learn. I’m wondering, did the Baby Einstein videos not just not help – but possibly have harmed – the babies who watched them?

Fantastic news. I’ve been angry about those video’s for years already. I hope this is the start of recognition for the fact that tv does not make children (of any age) smarter. Children learn by playing, by interacting with the world and by imitating adults.

Folks, the fact that your child watched these videos and is now well-adjusted and above average means nothing. The evidence says that they would have been well-adjusted and above average without the videos as well – and that the only effect was that you very slightly increased their chances of having attention problems later in like. Anecdotal evidence is pointless here – in general, kids shouldn’t watch TV before age 2. Period. If your kid is doing well, great! Odds are, they’d be doing just a little bit better without the videos.
People managed to raise their children (and even bathe) 50 years ago without everpresent TV. Work a little less, buy less junk, and spend more time with your kids. It’s not impossible.

Remember when George W. Bush praised the founder of Baby Einstein at one of his State of the Union speeches? Just like “the ownership society” where everyone can get a mortgage or “being greeted like liberators”, is there anything he said or did that didn’t seem to get seriously questioned in the end?

See also:

http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org/news/2009/12/noesinteins.html

http://tvsmarter.wordpress.com/2008/03/01/baby-einstein-videos-no-longer-educational/