The news is DESIGNED to be manipulative
Kathy Shaidle has ovaries…so she can say this sort of thing without having to clarify/recant the point once she gets home:
Women are obsessed with…nonsense. They get totally hyper about imaginary “threats,” especially to their children: asthma, peanut allergies, helmet wearing, lead in toys, whatever.
I don’t just mean little old “Miss Pittypat” ladies, who are the worst for this “local news” stuff, tsking and tutting about the latest “case of cancer” or plane crash or missing kid because it makes them feel like they have a life.
Anyone who has every worked in an office knows that women of any age are like this. The women in it (when they aren’t bringing work to a grinding halt with the latest birthday/engagement/pregnancy party or showing you their ultrasounds (ugh) or talking about what they had for breakfast/what they want for lunch/what they’re having for dinner) are always talking talking talking about this crap.
And they haven’t got a scientific bone in their bodies. They don’t understand statistics or degrees of probability or orders of magnitude. Women ARE mostly “incapable of weighing risk against advantage, detriment against benefit.”
The story mentions the “breast implants give you lupus” scare. I have/had lupus, and I sure as hell don’t have breast implants. “One in 100 women with breast implants will get lupus!” But one in 100 women get lupus anyway. Lupus isn’t a “rare” disease, but women don’t know what “rare” means.
Women love these “child molesters are everywhere”/”danger in your medicine cabinet” stories because getting all worked up about them sort of convinces them (and, they hope, anybody watching them) that they really “care” about their children — whereas, if they really did care about them, they’d be at home with them instead of working for half a paycheque at some 90-minute-each-way cubicle job, shuffling pointless pieces of paper between cubicles and complaining about how it’s always too hot or too cold “in this crazy office” because they “need” to have a “career.”
Marie Curie had a career. You probably don’t.
She’s responding to an essay by an “anonymous veteran news anchor” that talks about how the way the news is presented. Said essay alleges that the typical “liberal newsroom treats women of that coveted demographic group as if they were frightened wards of the nanny state, as if they were children incapable of weighing risk against advantage, detriment against benefit. It plies them with a daily dose of all the things one must be afraid of. And it cynically taps into those traits that evolution has bestowed women with in greater quantity than men — compassion and empathy.”
You can see this effect in action withecen a casual glance at the average newscast, which only ever seems to feature three kinds of stories: cutesy featurettes (almost always involving children), “how to/now you know” featurettes that borrow heavily from Oprah’s playbook, or bad news…the coverage of which is almost always “shaped” to include dramatic shot after dramatic shot of how said bad news is affecting children.
Just watch the ongoing coverage of the disaster in Haiti if you need evidence of this. Or, ask yourself: why did I need to know that of the 140 people killed in this or that plane crash, three were infants and two were a pair of five-year-old twins? There’s no useful information conveyed in the extra observation; it’s a statement designed to play off of women’s mothering instincts.
And there’s the equation…both sides of it, in fact. It’s one thing that the news plays these things up and shapes their presentation to have a certain evocative effect. But that effect still needs a soft target to hit.
Think of the way most guys watch news: we grab the facts, maybe form an idea to donate to a relief organization (in the case of Haiti) or add an intention to our nightly prayers (for the souls of those lost in a plane crash), and then either click over to the hockey game or shut the TV off and fire up a computer game. Get the facts and move on: that’s the guy “way.”
The news isn’t targeted at men, though. Even stories about men’s health (prostate cancer, testicular cancer), rare as they are, are targeted at a female audience. The goal of such things is to make WOMEN concerned/paranoid about the health of the men in their lives.
Which is Kathy’s point, I think: yeah, the news is manipulative, but that manipulation works because it’s intended target instinctively eats that stuff up anyway.
