A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

"What is it, Asshole Day?"

So The Wife mentioned an article she'd read yesterday about TV-watching as a possible cause of autism. Disorders on the so-called autistic spectrum are pretty varied, both in severity and in characteristics, so I sort of take any sweeping causation argument with a large block of salt, especially one I haven't bothered to read.

Then, while checking Eric Berger's SciGuy weblog, I see he's also talking about it. Then I read the line that suddenly brought everything into focus:

Gregg Easterbrook of Slate has a rather inflammatory piece on whether TV viewing by young children could cause autism later in life.

Gregg fucking Easterbrook. The same guy who told women that men force them to have sex because their masculinity demands it and who equated Hollywood's love of violence with the filthy Jew's love of filthy lucre is still getting paid to report on things about which he knows fuck all:

Today, Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders.
[...]
The Cornell study is by Waldman, a professor in the school's Johnson Graduate School of Management, Sean Nicholson, an associate professor in the school's department of policy analysis, and research assistant Nodir Adilov.

Wow, a study appearing on the school's business school website should certainly be given as much credence as an article appearing in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, shouldn't it? I eagerly await the Johnson Graduate School of Management's guidelines on avoiding heart disease and maintaining proper dental hygiene.

But the fact that rising household access to cable television seems to associate with rising autism does not reveal anything about how viewing hours might link to the disorder. The Cornell team searched for some independent measure of increased television viewing. In recent years, leading behavioral economists such as Caroline Hoxby and Steven Levitt* have used weather or geography to test assumptions about behavior. Bureau of Labor Statistics studies have found that when it rains or snows, television viewing by young children rises. So Waldman studied precipitation records for California, Oregon, and Washington state, which, because of climate and geography, experience big swings in precipitation levels both year-by-year and county-by-county. He found what appears to be a dramatic relationship between television viewing and autism onset. In counties or years when rain and snow were unusually high, and hence it is assumed children spent a lot of time watching television, autism rates shot up; in places or years of low precipitation, autism rates were low.

So...rain causes autism? No wait...humidity causes autism. Hold on, I've got it...Doppler radar causes autism. Quick, somebody find a university web page that upholds my assumptions.

Everyone complains about television in a general way. But if it turns out television has specific harmful medical effects—in addition to these new findings about autism, some studies have linked television viewing by children younger than 3 to the onset of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder—parents may urgently need to know to keep toddlers away from the TV. Television networks and manufacturers of televisions may need to reassess how their products are marketed to the young. Legal liability may come into play. And we live in a society in which bright images on screens are becoming ever more ubiquitous: television, video games, DVD video players, computers, cell phones. If screen images cause harm to brain development in the young, the proliferation of these TV-like devices may bode ill for the future. The aggressive marketing of Teletubbies, Baby Einstein videos, and similar products intended to encourage television watching by toddlers may turn out to have been a nightmarish mistake.

I don't think anyone would argue that TV is somehow beneficial to children, but printing up this kind of scare tactic bullshit - bullshit that has no basis in any kind of scientific or medical research, I might add - is typical of Easterhack's irresponsible need to drum up controversy without bothering to devote a scrap of critical thought to his endeavors. ESPN fired him for his Jew comments, and yet people continue to give this douchetastic jagoff money to crap out the occasional column, blog, or rambling football piece stuffed with clumsy puns and creepy cheerleader fetishism.

How the hell do I get that gig?