Now for tonight's "Behind the News" story:
Reneging on its duty to report the news fairly and accurately, the
mainstream media now resorts to fake scandals and faux-tography to keep
the audience entertained and its numbers juiced up. Nowhere is that more
true than at Newsweek magazine.
Remember last year when Newsweek made the claim that military
interrogators at Guantanamo had flushed a Koran down the toilet? But
when 25,000 pages of documents failed to support the incendiary claim,
Newsweek was forced to retract the account. But not before 16 persons
died during ugly anti-American riots.
Then the Valerie Plame brouhaha came along. Vice president Dick Cheney
and other administration officials were accused of outing Plame, a CIA
operative, to punish Bush's political enemies. Newsweek, CBS, and the
rest of the mainstream media pounced on the story like horseflies drawn
to barnyard manure.
But last month State Department bureaucrat Richard Armitage admitted
that he was the source of the leak. Maybe the sham accusation wasn't a
shining moment for investigative journalism, but it sure made for a lot
of good copy.
Having elbowed their way into the competitive ranks of Glamour and the
National Enquirer, the editors at Newsweek could not afford to rest on
their laurels.
So last week they ran the article,
"Fighting
over the Kids" by reporter
Sarah Childress. Everyone
knows fathers gain child custody only 15% of the time. Yet Childress
makes the claim that family courts are actually biased against moms.
How did Childress reach that conclusion?
Here's the logic: When battered wives ask for a divorce, their husbands
try to wrangle joint custody of the kids. Then to win the sympathy of
the divorce judge, they accuse the wife of parental alienation.
In support of this controversial claim, Childress trots out two surveys.
First she cites a study by Jay Silverman. But Silverman's conclusions
are based on interviews with a grand total of 39 self-selected
Massachusetts women. And he doesn't provide an iota of hard evidence to
back up the ladies' claims. Beginning to sound like advocacy research?
Then Cal State psychology professor Geraldine Stahly weighs in with her
study. But what's the name of the article? Was it ever printed in a
respectable journal? Were the respondents cherry-picked to provide a
pre-set answer? Let's just call it junk science.
George Orwell's classic, Nineteen Eighty-Four, describes Newspeak as a
lingo that does away with dodgy words like "thought" and reduces
everything to polar opposites like good and ungood. This spells the
eventual demise of the English language, which soon becomes known as
Oldspeak.
Orwell predicts, "By 2050 - earlier, probably - all real knowledge of
Oldspeak will have disappeared . Even the slogans will change. How could
you have a slogan like 'freedom is slavery' when the concept of freedom
has been abolished?"
Here's a good example of Newspeak a la Sarah Childress: "Although men
are sometimes battered by their wives, women are the victims in the
majority of abuse cases."
Childress uses the words battering and abuse to mean the same thing,
when in fact true "battering" occurs in only a tiny fraction of "abuse"
cases. But the problem is not just semantic sloppiness, because
Childress' claim is downright false.
University of New Hampshire researcher Murray Straus recently released
his latest
findings about dating violence in American couples. When
severe violence occurs, in 28% of cases it's a female perpetrator and
15% of the time, the man is the aggressor. For the remaining 57% of
cases, both the man and the woman are mixing it up.
Ironically, even though women are more likely to be the abuser, it's
wives who are more likely to level allegations of abuse that turn out to
be false.
According to a
report from the Independent Women's Forum, 85% of
requests for protection orders are made by women.
And to what end? "Everyone knows
that restraining orders and orders to vacate are granted to virtually
all who apply," notes Elaine Epstein, former president of the
Massachusetts Bar Association. "In many cases, allegations of abuse are
now used for tactical advantage."
Now, 47 states have
laws
on the books that require family judges to
consider such allegations or findings when they make child custody
decisions. When
life-altering decisions are based on false or trivial allegations, it's
the children who lose out.
But at Newsweek, nobody seems to be speaking out against Newspeak. And
that's tonight's report. Now back to you, Katie.
Carey Roberts has
been published frequently in the Washington Times, Townhall.com,
LewRockwell.com, ifeminists.net, Intellectual Conservative, and
elsewhere. He is a staff reporter for the New Media Alliance.
