Month: July 2003

From My Blog to John Leo’s Column

Update:

After I wrote this, John Leo sent me a nice e-mail apologizing for not citing me. As I responded to him, this article was actually written semi-tongue-in-cheek. I realize that professional journalists don’t always have time to track down who was the first to point out this or that error.

Henry Hanks sent me an e-mail today alerting me that John Leo had picked up my report about the BBC’s convenient editing of stories at its web site.

Leo writes,

The BBC, probably the most relentlessly anti-American organization in Britain, recently altered a transcript of one of its own stories, thus misquoting itself. The story dealt with Park Jong-lin, a 70-year-old veteran of the Korean War who “served in the North Korean army fighting against the imperialist American aggressors and their South Korean accomplices.” In the altered version quote marks now surround “imperialist American aggressors” and the BBC’s reference to “accomplices” was changed to “allies.”

Prediction: Because Internet bloggers now watch the wayward BBC carefully, more touched-up transcripts will come to light. The BBC, by the way, falsely reported the Jessica Lynch rescue as a made-for-TV special faked with U.S. soldiers firing blanks for the cameras. (Change that transcript!)

This is the fourth or fifth time something I’ve blogged about here has wound its way into a national story which is kind of cool. But come John, if bloggers are doing such a good service how about throwing us a little love with a link or at least a mention when you incorporate our scoops into your column?

I’ll even make it a quid pro quo and promise to always link to your column when I incorporate parts of it into my blogging.

Source:

Mangled quotes take on a life of their own. John Leo, Universal Press Syndicate, July 27, 2003.

L. Brent Bozell at His Worst

It’s people like L. Brent Bozell III who pretty much prevent me from ever characterizing myself as a conservative. Frankly I agree a lot of the time with the Media Research Center, but then Bozell goes off with stuff like this criticizing Bravo’s recent spate of homosexual-oriented programming,

Such programming “may be acceptable for that element in our culture that’s already earning an advanced degree in Sin Acceptance,” he wrote. “But it’s also acceptable to the gang at NBC, and the suits upstairs at General Electric?”

Sin Acceptance? Ugh. Look, I just want lower taxes so I can better afford my sinful cable bill. All that social conservative nonsense is so 1982.

Source:

Gay-Themed TV Gains a Wider Audience. Bernard Weinraub and Jim Rutenberg, New York Times, July 29, 2003

Family Reunion Time

This weekend Lisa and I went to the family reunion of my father’s family. Okay, family reunions probably aren’t that big of a deal to most people, but due to the odd circumstances that followed after my parents’ divorce, these were people I hadn’t seen in 25 years or so.

Then out of the blue I get a call from one of my Great Aunt’s asking if I’d like to come to the family reunion. A paper flier ensues and the next thing I know I’m uncomfortably trying to make small talk with people who for a number of reasons I didn’t really spent too much time with as a child, and then not at all since around the time I was 13 or so.

The really odd thing about being in the middle of this sort of situation is how people perceive you. I happen to have a very close relationship with, shall we say, the instigator of our little family feud, and people tend to assume that must mean I agree with or at least have some sympathy with this person’s antics, which could not be further from the truth.

My Great Aunt was apparently a bit concerned that she might not get a friendly reception when she called me.

Anyway the lesson is that family feuds really suck, especially when you’re just one degree from the epicenter of the confrontation. Unfortunately, sometimes people who create these situations really are irreasonable and intractable and there’s not much you can do about it.

Should Indian Women Who Kill Their Babies Be Punished?

Should women who kill their babies be punished? That might sound like an absurd question to ask, but in fact a group in India is arguing that women who commit female infanticide are themselves victims and should not be punished.

The BBC reported this month on the controversy in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It cites surveys suggesting that the infanticide rate among female infants is as high as 1.6 percent of all live female births. In some areas, the BBC claims, the rate of infanticide may approach 15 percent.

The standard response, not surprisingly, is to arrest, try and jail women who the state can prove have killed their infants (the BBC mentions that two such cases resulted in life in prison for the convicted women). But the Campaign Against Female Infanticide maintains that the women involved are themselves victims of violence and threats from family members and that punishing them simply exacerbates the problems with poverty that their families face.

The BBC quoted retired Bombay judge Justice Suresh as saying that women have no choice but to kill female infants,

The decision to kill the baby is made by her husband and parents-in-law. If she disobeys, she has to face the wrath of the family.

On the other side is Tamil Nadu’s Women’s Commission who argues that while penalties against women who commit infanticide may be too severe, that removing any and all punishment would send a signal that female infanticide was acceptable.

But, according to the BBC, the anti-infanticide activists “say even milder punishment could leave the mother with social stigma and cause several psychological problems.”

If you have a society in which “milder punishment” from the state leaves social stigma and psychological problems distinct and more severe than the stigma and psychological problems attendant in killing one’s child, then Tamil Nadu has even larger problems than the anti-infanticide activists will admit.

Source:

India rights campaign for infanticide mothers. Sampath Kumar, The BBC, July 17, 2003.

Significantly Higher Death Risk for Girls than Boys in India

The BBC reports on studies in India suggesting that infant girls have a substantially higher death rate than infant boys, even from diseases that should be relatively easy to treat.

The BBC notes that in 2001 that for every 1,000 male babies born in India there were just 933 girls born. This might sound horribly askew but in fact is just barely above the world average sex ratio. Worldwide the average is 105 boys for every 100 girls. Some countries have truly out-of-control sex ratios, such as parts of China where there are 140 boys born for every 100 girls. But in India, using the BBC’s figures, there are 107 boys born for every 100 girls. This could easily be explained by even moderate use of sex-selective abortions.

The BBC cites research from Delhi over a five-year period, however, that found the death rate for girls was almost one-third higher than for boys. In cases of “sudden, unexplained deaths,” 75 percent of victims were girls. The researchers behind the study believe that infanticide of female infants may explain the difference.

Which is not surprising — if parents are willing to go out of their way to ensure they abort a female fetus for cultural reasons, it’s not surprising to learn that females which are brought to term might receive substandard care and fewer resources.

This seems to be confirmed by the Delhi research which found that death rates among boys and girls for unpreventable deaths were roughly the same. But in the case of deaths from preventable diseases such as diarrhea, the death rate of girls was twice as high as that of boys.

Sources:

India girls ‘more likely to die’. The BBC, July 18, 2003.

Tucker Carlson and False Rape Accusations

CNN’s Tucker Carlson recently wrote a book, Politicians, Partisans and Parasites, which includes an account of Carlson being falsely accused of raping a woman. Carlson’s reaction to the false accusation is illustrative of how even a patently false accusation can potentially ruin a man’s life, especially thanks to the nonsense touted by advocates that such false accusations are so rare as to be negligible.

Tucker writes about learning of the accusation,

For an hour I sat on the front steps thinking about my life, my wife and my three children, my job, and how it was all going to end because of something terrible I didn’t even remember doing.

In the end, Carlson spent thousands of dollars defending himself against the accusation. Fortunately for him it turned out that the woman who had accused him was not only had a chronic mental disorder, but she accused Carlson of raping her in a city that Carlson had never even visited.

The sad part is that Carlson not only felt he couldn’t talk about the accusation, but also did not take legal action against the woman’s lawyer because of the effect that even word of a false accusation might have on his career. As Carlson admits,

I always assumed, like every other journalist does, that all sex scandals are rooted in truth, period. You may not have done precisely what you’re accused of, but you did something.

Carlson is quite correct that this is the stigma attached to even false rape accusations. Another conservative journalist, John Fund, has seen his career derailed after also being falsely accused of assault by a mentally unstable woman.

Unlike Carlson, Fund was unable to keep the accusation from hitting the press, and his career has suffered notably from it.

An important, and still unresolved, question is just how common are false accusations of rape. On the one hand are the radical feminists who repeat the claim that making a rape accusation is so serious that women rarely lie about it. They typically use Susan Brownmiller’s claim that only two percent of reported rapes are false, although they rarely point out that there is a paucity of evidence to back up this claim.

In a column about the Kobe Bryant case, Wendy McElroy pointed to a study by a Purdue researcher who examined reported rapes at a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987 and found that fully 41 percent of all reported rapes were later determined by police to be false accusations.

Sources:

‘Crossfire’ Co-Host Dishes Liberally. Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, July 16, 2003.

False Rape Charges Hurt Real Victims. Wendy McElroy, iFeminists.Com, July 22, 2003.

An alarming national trend:
False Rape Allegations. Eugene J. Kanin.