Beer, tobacco, and guns “are products with very long histories that are risky if misused,” muses Joseph Bast in the “Heartlander” (June), newsletter of the Chicago-based Heartland Institute. “We used to tolerate that risk in exchange for the benefits derived from their proper use. To encourage proper use, we held individuals responsible for their actions. As a society, we now seem to take those benefits for granted, and we run to government for help when the benefits no longer rise to meet our needs. We have lost the will to hold people accountable for their mistakes.”
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“Science fiction has a really bad track record of actually predicting the future in any definitive way,” acknowledges Gary Wolfe, a humanities professor at Roosevelt University and a leading science fiction critic (“Roosevelt Review,” Summer). Just for starters, SF authors have predicted nuclear war, regular space travel, and household robots–but they failed to predict home computers and the Internet.
You are watching Channel 11–God knows why. William Hoynes of Vassar College analyzed 276 public-affairs stories broadcast by the Public Broadcasting System between November 30 and December 13 of last year and compared the results to his 1992 study, in a report sponsored by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (www.fair.org/reports/pbs-study-1999.html). He found that 36 percent of all on-camera sources represented business or Wall Street (almost double the 1992 percentage)–the proportion rises to 75 percent in stories about economics. Over 78 percent of all sources were men (77 percent in 1992). Only 6 percent of sources were from the general public (12 percent in 1992), and only 5 percent were “citizen activists” (6 percent in 1992). Just 5 percent of all stories focused on international affairs (12 percent in 1992). And on the domestic scene, “not a single representative of organized labor appeared in public TV’s discussion of corporate mergers or of layoffs.”
