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BBC Kicked out of School Over Wi-Fi Scaremongering
h2g2bob writes "Ben Goldacre reports that the BBC Panorama team, while scaremongering over the dangers of Wi-fi, were told to leave the school because even the kids could see it was dumb: 'When the children saw Alasdair's Powerwatch website, and the excellent picture of the insulating mesh beekeeper hat that he sells (£27) to protect your head from excess microwave exposure, they were astonished and outraged. Panorama were calmly expelled from the school.' Should we be pleased that the kids can out-think TV producers?"
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You mean children might actually be able to differentiate truth from fiction? But that's unpossible, how can their schools control them then?
*Sigh*
I've seen similar situations -- namely when some high school students saw Bowling for Columbine. Teacher couldn't believe they might actually be able to see flaws in the reasoning...
normally is an icon of good journalism, I see a tendency worldwide that scaremongering for the sake of getting more viewers takes more and more over. Call it how you will but Michael Moore basically brought this excellent into perspective in bowling for columbine.
This scaremongering is one of the causes why people are more concerned over a handful of dead people in the western world per year caused by terrorism than thousands and thousands of people dead caused by traffic. I personally think this scaremongering is a misuse of free speach and the problem is, if a system or right is misused too much in it will end up dead...
...I'd be more concerned if the kids couldn't outthink TV producers. For once, our educational system is doing something!
...the UK version of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? will be a big hit.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Oddly enough, in the U.S., the TV producers have capitalized on their, and a large part of the rest of the world's, own ineptitude.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Those kids are alright. They were skeptical of something that was total baloney. Granted, it may have been obvious drivel, but the fact that they spoke up at all indicates that they will at least speak their minds.
Show me a rigorous, controlled, double-blind study or smegg off.
What a strange bird is the pelican, his beak can hold more than his belly can.
Somebody forward this to Jack Thompson!!! His claim that children cannot differentiate reality and fiction from video games is now null and void!!
That hat seems to me like it'd make a nice tinfoil hat alternative.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Of course most kids would know or suspect the bullshit here, but they would not get astonished and outraged...only a teacher who wants to have a little media attention would. It's fine to glorify children--they are smart as hell--but this example is a little off. Perhaps, rather than victimizing the children, it would be better to ask, "Why did the BBC do this?"
We should be pleased from the standpoint that these kids could clearly see bullshit for what it is. TV news & documentary producers no longer care about accuracy, so long as they can scare their audience and get them worked up over imagined fears.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
Am I the only one who misread that as the "BBC Paranoia team" after reading the headline?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I would be too. £27 for beekeeper hat when tinfoil one is free. Damn scammers.
What makes me pleased about reading this article, is that the school protected it's pupils from the producers pseudo-science, and didn't allow them to continue. Hopefully this will mean in the future these children will know to be weary of sensationalist TV shows & films.
:)
I hope all schools are instilling the same sort of thinking (looking for scientific method) in their pupils, it might result to a smarter tomorrow
Kids can think. Furthermore, they're not going to not hear about either Creationism or Evolution merely because the other is taught exclusively in their school. The whole argument of whether we should allow one or the other or both to be taught is based on the premise that kids are remarkably stupid. You can say to a fourteen-year-old "Most scientists believe X, and much of the religious community believes Y," and it's not going to make his head explode.
So yes, kids can out-think television producers, just like they can out-think boards of education. Look up the relevant Mark Twain quote about school boards.
People don't want to listen to information. Information is like school, and school was boring, right? People want to be entertained, at best they can be convinced to sit through some spectacular show that gives them a few tidbits of "information" between the explosions and stunts.
I can see it in our TV program. About 20 years ago, we had talk shows (no, not the Springer kind. Talk shows where experts discussed controversal topics. And with discussed I don't mean "support the official opinion and nod heads", but real discussion), we had news that deserved the name (with reporters that did dig deeper, and didn't only bring up dirt but real information), and we had entertainment above the pie-in-the-face level.
Then we got private TV and the quality of our public stations went where the viewers are: Basement level.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Bowling for Columbine: a film scaremongering about scaremongering!
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Uh, did anybody read the article? I don't find anything in it about the kids detecting the BS. It was the science teacher who realized that the Panorma crew was pulling a scam and threw them out. Kudos to him, but this episode doesn't tell us anything about the ability of the kids to detect nonsense.
Anyone who lisens to the BBC world service is already used to this. Biofuels will cause deforestation and starvation, hydroelectric dams cause the release of greenhouse gases, etc., etc.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
What do you mean doesn't work? I wear mine all the time and I still haven't gotten any excess microwave radiation in my head. Also, no bee stings.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
what about all the other shit that isnt limited to the range of a wifi router?
cell phones aside too, what about all the satelite data from directv,xm radio,etc beaming into my head no matter where i go on the planet.
sure i can find an area with no cell phones or wireless, but im still getting hit with XM radio feeds and all those satelite tv channels that i dont want at all either.
The one point at which the kids are reported to have been outraged was when they looked at his beekeeper (tinfoil) hat, which isn't really the same point. Otherwise, they are reported as having made some valid points (e.g. that they don't get such high levels because they aren't allowed to download files), but they're points of detail that don't necessarily invalidate the whole thing (wifi might be dangerous even if those particular kids aren't in danger - after all, other people do download files). The critical points about the meaninglessness of the thresholds used, the question of what exactly the meter measured, etc. all appear to be due to the science teacher, not the students.
Then the sparks will really fly!
It seems to be the way all these investigative shows go, they run out of decent things to investigate, and chase after stupid things... Not realising that this discredits them so when something worthwhile comes along like say... the strange death of the man who wrote a damning report about the government before it's publication, people will just think it's the same usual paranoia peddling.
The sad thing is that some teachers actually believe this bullshit. For example, Lakehead University's President Fred Gilbert had all wireless internet taken out of the University because he was afraid of the harmful effects of EMF (electric and magnetic fields).
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http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.a
find / -iname life 2>
Media & School Kids aside,
If all this EMR is a tall story, then its interesting that business (in Australia) continue to evacuate building when unusually high levels of cancer (usually breast cancer) are detected in offices adjacent to mobile phone tx/rx.
I also wonder why they put up huge fences, and warning signs around transmission towers?
I'm not keeping my mobile phone near to my reproductive organs any longer than necessary.
I wouldn't dismiss the health effects just yet. Give it a generation with high intensity signals and see how we are going.
N
>I also wonder why they put up huge fences, and warning signs around transmission towers?
So people won't climb them and fall off, or steal the copper ground wires. Lawyers are much more dangerous than the electromagnetic radiation from those towers.
>I'm not keeping my mobile phone near to my reproductive organs any longer than necessary.
It's probably your brain you want to watch out for...it doesn't transmit when it's on your belt (only for 5 seconds every 10 minutes). It's full on when you're holding it up to your ear.
>I wouldn't dismiss the health effects just yet. Give it a generation with high intensity signals and see how we are going.
I agree with you there.
It's a nice change to see a news article about children being intelligent and using critical thinking skills. I am only sorry that this is considered news.
Michael Moore? I think you give the man too much credit! What about William Randolph Hearst, whose scaremongering successfully helped start a war, and for whom the term "Yellow Journalism" was coined? I agree that it's a significant problem, but it's hardly a new or recent phenomenon. (Though I suppose an argument can be made for a primarily American origin, which makes it sad to see the BBC succumbing.)
This is the same BBC Panorama that sent one poor bastard out alone to do a report on Scientology. Maybe it's the same person, and they made him crack.
The "light" spectrum or energy spectrum is vast. Starting at the upper end with Gamma rays (10^-11 meters) on down to radio waves (10^-1 meters).
So if some people want to make their homes free of intruding energy waves, that's their thing and maybe we can learn something.
The above is not an easy task for two reasons. First energy spectrum our society produces. We are quite dependent now and getting more so on these. From cell phones to RIFD to WWV time updates to plain old electric power (ever stuck a tubular fluorescent bulb under a large multi KW power line? Lights up quite well). Second the energy spectrum of nature. We need some of the sunlight spectrum. So how to filter undesired spectra? That would be perhaps UV, gamma rays, or cosmic rays? Each spectra involves different strategy to avoid. The beekeeper microwave hat was an example. Sure protect your brain but leave the rest of your DNA to bake a little bit.
Wait a minute, the above might seem more a bit ridiculous. What would a picture of a planet of energy wave avoiders look like? Should we instead emulate the energy spectrum exposure that our paleolithic ancestors adapted to? Or should we emulate the energy spectrum exposure of long lived peoples like the Okinawans?
Taking my tin foil hat off now, have a great weekend everyone,
Jim
While I still think that the TV Licence is a great way to pay for my TV, and can often produce splendid telly (Life In The Undergrowth, The Day Today, Doctor Who, What The Victorians Did For Us to name but a few), the dragging down of the once-great Corporation to the level of the lowest commercial channels (yes, Reality TV - I'm also talking about you) brings a mournful tear to my eye.
Britain used to make really good documentary shows, too - Dispatches, anyone? Q.E.D.? Channel 4's Equinox, I seem to recall, could also be counted on for a refreshing brain-jiggle. You wouldn't catch 'em making anything like that anymore, of course - not when there's slaggy morons to build into role models.
And if they produce a "Deal Or No Deal"-aping enormobrowed-yahoos-receive-unearned-prizes celebration of dimwittedness, I'm fairly certain my head will explode. (Man Alive, I sound old.)
"Knowledge, sir, should be free to all!"
~Harcourt Fenton Mudd
No, I don't mean in your own setting, but in a double-blind one with actual scientists. If she could prove that, it might well be interesting.
As for me, I can't detect wifi, but I can hear very high frequencies, and you might be surprised by some of the annoying electronic gear that gives them off. Now *that* can sure cause a headache, but it's just sound, not radio.
Also, does she get like this around microwaves, too? There are more things to detect than radio, y'know, and if she was really sensitive to radio waves, I'd expect her to have gone batty long ago given all the broadcasts. So I'm not the least bit convinced that you've isolated the actual problem, sorry.
low level microwave exposure is thought to be (mostly) harmless but it's not known 100% and large level exposure is known to have bad effects. Even if there's a 1% chance that longterm exposure could have some effect we don't know about, then it's well worth having studies done. You can dismiss things you think you already know about and be safe most of the time but very occasionally something unexpected happens and these can affect huge numbers of people.
Oh and BBC stuff is copyrighted, posting the entire episode hardly counts as fair usage.
I don't think anyone has reliably claimed that the BBC themselves invented television, but if you want to start arguing for Farnsworth as its inventor, then no to that as well. He (arguably) invented the first wholly electronic television system, but others- including perhaps most notably the famous John Logie Baird- had working television systems before that.
Admittedly these were electromechanical disk-based systems, and a wholly electronic TV system was a major innovation worthy of respect- certainly preferable, and it's unsurprising that it was the system that took off. However, there's a difference between the "inventor of television" full stop, and the "inventor of electronic television"; if there's any doubt that Baird was the former (and that's a can of worms), then Farnsworth definitely wasn't.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I was under the impression that all BBC employees were Oxford profs, who compose poetry during tea, and stand atop mountains to sing opera.
Or are you genuinely comparing reportage of the verifiable doubling of corn prices because of US bioethanol policy and resultant riots in Mexico, the verifiable destruction of rainforest to grow palm oil and soy beans for fuel feedstocks and the verifiable release of methane from rotting vegetation, submerged below hydroelectric reservoirs with the speculative ramblings of a journo with no statistic evidence that 2.4Ghz spectrum microwave emissions cause anything other than mild localized tissue heating?
Doesn't anyone else feel slighted when the article summary is so obviously leading towards a specific conclusion?
Sorry, but the reactions of a bunch of ignorant kids in a peer-pressured environment doesn't convince me that there are no dangers whatsoever of wifi, no matter what slanted language you maliciously use to present the article in.
Whatever might be causing their symptoms, it's apparently NOT electromagnetic waves. See this for details. It may be a very real symptom, but you should be more careful when making claims about WHAT caused it and you need a proper scientific study to rule out any other causes.
Until then, I'm going to have to go with all the published studies showing that, whatever might cause people to feel "EM sensitive", it's not actually EM that's causing it.
Yeah - this is third or fouth article I read in a row having an outrageously misleading summary. Worse, they all seemed to be intentionally misleading. Take the summary of this article as an example. If you've even so much as glimpsed at the article, you cannot come up with such a summary without the intent to mislead the audience. This has got to stop, but the only solution I can think of would be to give all the editors the boot and start over with new ones. In the meantime I'll be looking for a Slashdot replacement.
Tsch, cynic. I find your post ever-so-slightly snobbish. 'People' are like that? Are you and I not 'people', then? It's hardly like slashdot is America's last bastion of critical thought, either.
I find the notion of some 'golden age' of intellectual entertainment 20 years ludicrious at best. I'm sure that whatever measure you set yourself for whatever media you choose (TV, radio, news, books and the internet), there'll be more good stuff available now than 20 years ago. That the ratio of what you like to what you don't has fallen a lot should hardly come as a surprise, and to claim it is because 'the people' are stupid and just want to be entertained is just pandering to the mods.
Let's throw around some numbers. The total exposure to radiation is ((Exposure Time) * (Exposure Power)) / Distance^2 WiFi and mobile phones transmit at frequencies very close to one another so we can probably assume that they add up. Mobile phone handsets transmit at roughly one order of magnitude more power than a computer with WiFi when they are used at maximum power. Let's say 1 W and 0.1 W respectively. A typical mobile phone antenna is used approximately 0.05 m from human tissue for 5 minutes per day (or something similar). The computers on the kid's school tables does transmit the whole school day (5 hours), but does not transmit at every millisecond (unless the kids are downloading educational movies at maximum speed all day). Even if they have a room full of laptops the main source of radiation for each kid would be the laptop closest to that particular kid (because of the square law). Let's say the closest laptop is transmitting at an average of 0.01 W at 0.5 m distance for 5 hours. Mobile exposure per day: (5 minutes * 1 W)/0.05^2 = 2000 WiFi exposure per day: (300 minutes * 0.01)/0.5^2 = 12 Unfortunately, the typical activist's response to this kind of reason is probably something like: "Well, in my personal opinion the multi-national corporations blah blah blah commercial blah government blah blah violating yadda yadda corporate-sponsored biased old fashioned science blah violations violations violations give me money".
Damn right. I miss the olden days...
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
power meter, I'd certainly use a big file in order to bring the needle up to a constant reading... so peak Tx power = average Tx power. Analog meters don't work so well on millisecond transmissions. Good science, badly explained. And in your case, badly understood.
Tech Public Policy stuff
$50 for an insulating mesh beekeepers hat. I have some left over 1/2" hardware cloth from making a dirt/stone sifting screen. I spent $6 for a 3' x 5' roll and I have enough left over to make my own version of his beekeepers hat. I wonder if his hat outperforms my tinfoil hat that I use in the presence of DC current...
Step 2. "When people start asking, 'Is Mind-Fogging juice safe?' you give a lot of money to PR agents and have them stand guard over the media, propping up stories and studies which make people asking the question look like alarmist idiots, while working to remove funding and media attention from those trying to answer the question honestly."
Step 3. "Offer misleading scientific facts to the public such as; 'Mind-Fogging juice cannot possibly burn brain cells, because there simply is never enough concentration during the use of the Exciting Product to cause brain cells to burn.' --all while studiously ignoring the fact that Mind-Fogging juice at low dosages has a narcotic-like effect which causes the brain to function poorly."
Step 4. "As one of many on-going efforts in this campaign, promote 'The Dangers of Mind-Fogging Juice' expose stories which are over-the-top and stupid. Then you let the public feel as though they are coming to their own conclusions about the relative safety of Mind-Fogging juice, while patting themselves on the back for feeling more clever and informed than the purveyors of such stories. --This is easy to do scince, like any religion, the consuming public is more than willing to hear only calming reports about their beloved Exciting Product and to use any excuse to not think about any possible problems."
Step 5. "Sell even more Exciting Products which use Mind-Fogging juice, since this makes people even less able to sort truth from fiction."
Step 6. "Repeat as needed."
-FL
Well where is the science that proves that Wifi or mobile phones are safe ?
I haven't seen any credible science in either side or has science been ignored and we are left with opinion.
And there I was thinking the biggest risk was the wife.
Thanks!
668: Neighbour of the Beast
The first link is broken.
Thanks for paying that TV fee. A long series of trucks brings it to my house for me for free.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I just got a kitten. I had thought about waiting until I wasn't in the current frathouse-type environment. I have 2 other roomates and people are over all the time visiting. I was worried my kitty would end up warped and twisted from this environment. Then I realized that my roomates cat has turned out to be the best cat ever. We're pretty sure its all the people coming and going, different activities, and all the attention it gets. Its very friendly, and has 3 different people to train it to use the scratchpost and not the couch. I am sure my kitten will turn out great. People are pretty much the same.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Did you call Professor Xavier and see if she registers on his Cerebo device as a mutant? If not maybe she was bit by a radioactive Wireless Router and gained its powers and she is a mutate instead?
:)
Does she go by the nickname "Wifi Woman"? Did she learn how to connect to a Wifi network yet to mentally surf in her head?
You'd better hurry before Magneto or Doctor Doom tries to recruit her for their groups.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Come to think of it, why limit it to politics?
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
and instead of forcing us to buy a TV license, network TV is free as in free beer. PBS is free but lays out a guilt trip on you unless you donate to it. They are the channel that shows educational programs, documentaries, and also borrows from the BBC some shows like Doctor Who, BBC World News, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Black Adder, etc.
Recently with the advancements of Cable and Satellite TV, for a monthly fee, we can see the Discovery, Science, Natural Geographic, Biography, DIY, BBC America, Sci-Fi Network, Animal Planet, etc that show the same type of shows that PBS shows with more variety, an option to use a digital video recorder to record the shows we like and save it on a hard drive for replay later, so we actually get more for our money with Cable or Satellite TV than PBS offered.
PBS used to have Sesame Street and Electric Company for kids, but now we have Noggin, Discovery Kids, The Disney Channel, and even some Nickelodeon shows are educational at times. PBS only shows kids shows at certain times of the day, but the others are 24 hours a day.
Yeah, you might say they show commercials, and PBS and the BBC don't, but with the DVR we can fast forward through the commercials.
I often wonder if paying for a TV License and risking bad reception for network TV is any better than the Cable or Satellite TV with great reception for about the same price as a TV license but with more channels and more features?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
and 10 years later down the line it shows that Wifi wasn't harmless after all. There haven't been (long)enough studies done on the subject, so it's quite possible that wifi (and whatever other signals) have a bad effect on the body... So just plainly ignoring it by saying that it really is harmless is a very naive thing to do..
But you can't let WiFi into schools! it will eat children and attack our cities!
the local FM radio station puts out about 100,000 Megawatts.
As in 100 gigawatts? Not unless it's powered by the world's ten biggest power plants combined. You're off by about six orders of magnitude...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There's nothing wrong with being sceptical, in fact it should be the default position for any rational person.
Forget Wifi, with all the junk inside a CRT display and most of us over the years with our nose twelve inches away I'm surprised nobody thought about the dangers of CRT displays. They even had a high pitched whine when they worked normally, it was worse when the flyback transformer was about to go kaput.
People claim all sorts of bullshit. It's generally a good idea to maintain scepticism until it's put to a controlled test.
In TFA, the radio detecting woman was put to a a test, and scored just slightly higher than she could be expected to do by random chance. Others were also tested, but they refused to reveal their results.
Man, that was one crazy report. I couldn't even watch all of it.
Only in England could something like that happen. That was just ludicrous. And SOOOO English.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
It's cheap, widely available, makes my life easier, is convenient, and, not to mention, pretty cool.
It MUST be bad for me!
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
I dont know if its barely audible frequencies or what, but i can walk into my living room (around a corner and the entertainment center is still facing away from me), and know exactly what is turned on, tv, dvd player, wii (dvr/cable box is always on, which bugs me because of this, although my computers dont) even if its paused/muted whatever. I distinctly remember this from my parents house too. My sister would always leave the TV on after turning off the dvd player and i could tell that it was on when i was coming down the stairs (1 wall seperating the stairs and back of the tv).
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I hear most often the screen getting "updated". Every time a high-pitch-tone is coming out of the CRT each time I get full screen updates or whenever I play a game on it. Same on television; I can hear this mostly when pressing FORWARD/REWIND of having static on the screen. It's often hardly noticible.
A lot of people call me crazy whenever I hear electronics whispering like that; it's not only with CRT's but also with some TL lightbulbs, transformers and even some CPU's give this distinctive sound. If I stay in the same room with a television with static on it for more than a hour I get headaches because of the continuesly-changing-waves in this high-pitch sound.
I am thirty and got this already since my mid-teens I am hearing these sounds; the bad thing is, these sounds are getting WORSE by the day!
And no, I don't need a shrink to evaluate these sounds; since it ain't voices talking to me. (I think) *grin*
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
It's entirely reasonable to reject out of hand crackpot rantings.
Was it a Scientology faith school?
On of the symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome is heightened perceptual sensitivity through weaker filters, which would otherwise help with such things as "cocktail party hearing".
Wikileaks, no DNS
The point isn't that WiFi is identical to light bulbs - it's ridiculous to miscronstrue him so - but that in the popular imagination "radiation" means scary ionizing radiation associated with nuclear fission and suchlike, while WiFi is "radiation" only in the same very general scientific sense that the light from a lightbulb is, and so to use the word 19 times in the programme (rather than, say, "radio waves") is scaremongering.
Xenu loves you!
>People don't want to listen to information. Information is like school, and school was boring, right? People want to be entertained, at best they can be convinced to sit through some spectacular show that gives them a few tidbits of "information" between the explosions and stunts. Not me! I get my information from Slashdot comment sections!
Occam's razor does not translate, logically, philosophically, or linguistically, as "reject crackpots", even though people insist upon misusing it. I suggest looking it up.
Occam's razor is the principle that the explanation which requires the fewest assumptions is the best one. So in general, Occam's razor cannot be used to accept or dismiss an experimental result. It can only be used to select or dismiss a model to explain a result (even though it is not guaranteed to choose the correct one if one has insufficient evidence).
Since there are several known mechanisms by which Wi-Fi wavelengths can affect biological tissue (despite these not being known by the typical geek crowd on Slashdot), if there are genuine negative health effects, this does not require any new assumptions.
Therefore Occam's razor cannot properly be used here.
Occam's razor states that you should avoid multiplying entities, or take the simplest explanation. Occam's razor *does* imply that you should ignore crackpots, as by definition there is a simpler explanation than what they spew: they're full of shit. There are lots of people full of shit in the world, but very few or no aliens, psychics, doomsdays or cancer causing cell phones.
Occam's razor doesn't say anything about new assumptions. It only says that you should take the simplest explanation that covers all the data. "She's full of shit" is very simple, and given we've not actually detected any harm from wifi it covers all the data. This is compounded by the fact that we've debunked similar crackpots regarding pretty much every major technology of the last century.
Pidgins don't detect radiation. They and other migrating birds detect the planet's magnetic field, which is wholly unrelated to wifi or any other EM radiation.
If you'd watched the video, you'd have seen that they did study her "sense". She was able to guess correctly just slightly better than she would have been expected to do so by random chance. There were others who also claimed to to be sensitive that they tested, but they refused to release the results for them, implying they did much worse.
There was further study, and it concluded that she was full of shit, yet the reporter choose to ignore it.
Reference the peer reviews and replicated studies that conclusively show damage from wifi. The fact that this BBC show completely failed to do so implies that there are no such studies.
That doesn't even remotely say what you think it does. I'm done with you.
I could get a bit more snobbish and claim that it could well be that I consider the TV program of 20 years ago as better, because I was 10 years old and thus on par with the intellectual requirements of TV programs.
But I don't think it's that simple, one good counter argument is that there are from time to time reruns (in the "we have to play some rate-killer culture program to keep our license" section, funny enough) of old shows, and in general, they offer better entertainment and information. Maybe most of all because information was not mixed with entertainment and entertainment wasn't mixed with advertising.
Advertising has never been mixed with information, at least some things stay the same.
But to be blunt and honest, what I disagree with is that the ratio of "good" vs. "bad" program has to be worse. Why does it have to be? Do we suddenly have more "stupid" people that need this incredible amount of stupid, cheap entertainment? Or are they more valuable than people who enjoy to watch a sophisticated dialogue between two people who actually know what they're talking about and don't try to create some kind of hype? Actually yes, I am surprised that we have an incredible amount of daily soaps, court TV shows and Springer-type talk shows, but you have to look for a good documentary like for a needle in a haystack. Why?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What would Jim Royle say???
"Investigative journalism my arse.
Panorama?
More like Paranoia!"
You can watch the program on the BBC site, and YouTube if you like. Sometimes there programs are quite good, other times they tend towards resembling a "Brass Eye" episode.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
The first link in the article just takes me to a page that says, nothing to see here. Nice one Zonk, you suck.
You say information is like school. Thats an interesting point, think of all the good teachers you remember. They somehow managed to provide the information in an entertaining and enthusiastic way. It's insulting to people to say they need simply entertainment, what people need is solid information provided in a way that is engrossing and good to read or watch.
I remember my good teacher (note the singular) and that he managed to make history interesting. Not entertaining, but interesting. He managed to have me see how history events are never isolated but always a result of previous events.
I attribute this, though, to the fact that history has always been interesting to me. And that I do actually enjoy learning new information. I learend the only thing nobody can ever take away from me is what I know.
I have to say, though, that I cannot see the same attitude in many other people. Most people I encounter want to be entertained, not informed. Given the choice between a documentary that gives them insight and a thrill show, many would choose the latter.
And I won't agree that documentaries have to be boring. Recently I had the pleasure to enjoy one about a few historic figures, and they hired reenactment groups to create a good display of the time those people lived in and created a very good "storyline" around the whole information. Can't tell me that's uninteresting, honestly. Even if you have no idea about the 11th century, the whole "show effects" already offer a fair lot of value.
Still, the rates for our equivalent of American Idol on another channel were higher by magnitudes.
So please don't tell me people want information rather than braindead entertainment. Read the TV rates.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.