Posted on 02/11/2023 9:40:00 AM PST by Steely Tom
In the context of another thread here at Free Republic, I chanced to use the term "moral elephantiasis," which I remember from a long ago reading of National Review. Out of curiosity, I typed those two words into Google, in quotes, and found a number of interesting things.
One of the things I found was the full text of the original article which I read, at the age of 23 or so; that article had been read into the Congressional Record by then Georgia Congressman Larry McDonald. I transcribed the article (with significant help from the PDF OCR algorithm), and place it in the comment below.
The point of this exercise is to illustrate the long history of many of the media effects and manifestations we complain about today.
The issue is both simple and complex, and even to understand this much is valuable, since it supplies one with some degree of sane perspective on the problem. The simple part of the issue is this: scientifically untrained reporters are scaring the population to death with the idea that incalculable numbers of products are on the market which are inducing cancer and other dread diseases. The complex part of the issue is this: there is no substance on earth which, when ingested in varying amounts by human beings, will not cause problems for some of them, ranging from temporary discomfort to death.
Until quite recently, this was understood by the literate population at large. Anyone who has ever read the instructions accompanying even the most innocuous drugs, knows that virtually all have warned that the product should not be taken under x, y and z circumstances. As for prescription drugs, the warnings about dangerous side effects for some percentage of takers have always been complex and intimidating, and characteristically, doctors have been cautious about prescribing them and have warned patients about the risks involved. Nonetheless, in certain situations, only such dangerous drugs can save lives, and the risks must be taken.
The calculated risk is applicable to substances other than medicines. About 20 years ago, a magazine carried an article which I remember vividly. In fact, I thought it so clever, I clipped it, and used it for several years as required reading in a journalism course I gave, to illustrate originality in the use of research. The reporter involved was struck one day, by the realization that almost everything on earth was dangerous to somebody. So he reviewed all the medical literature he could get his hands on, and came up with the most incredible list of dangerous products anyone had ever seen.
It turned out that practically everything touched, breathed, tasted or swallowed caused disease and death in somebody, somewhere. The reporter's straight-faced moral was this: If you want to stay alive, don't touch, breathe, taste, or swallow anything. The magazine's editors at the time, thought it was hilarious, rea:ders thought it was hilarious, and it was hilanous.
Twenty years ago, semi-literate hysterics had not acquired a dominant voice in the culture, and did not see an apocalyptic threat existence under every bush. What's more, all sane human beings knew that the very act daily living involved risk.
Today, a small handful of newspaper people whose professional training customarily renders them incapable of judging the validity of biological research-are rushing in where angels fear to tread, and dragging the whole uneducated population with them. These "investigative" geniuses have simply rediscovered what that reporter discovered 20 years ago. Better yet they have caught on that this makes a fascinating new way in which to demonstrate their increasingly revolting righteousness. "What?" they shout (in an acute spasm of what Irving Kristol has called "moral elephantiasis") "a product exists that risks the well-being of some percentage Of the population? Ban it! Kill it! Off with its head! How dare the Government allow U.S. industry to subject any portion of the population to any risks at all?
And so we see Dan Rather rushing around frantically digging up examples of people who may — or may not — have been made severely ill or killed by some product or other interviewing sobbing wives, reporting on certain experiments, largely failing to report on the harsh critiques of those experiments, and leaving the overriding impression that American industry is engaged in a wholesale slaughter of the innocents . That was the technique used in a documentary shamelessly entitled "The American Way of Cancer." And that is what went on in a Face the Nation program on Dec. 28, when the entire news panel ganged up on Federal Drug Adminlstration head Alexander Schmidt, Aggressively fought his assessments of certain bodies of scientific research; challenged the conclusions of large groups of scientists; demanded to know why certain medicines which posed definite risks for some percentage of their takers were not banned; and repeatedly insisted on the idea that individual should be required to sign consent papers before accepting treatment utilizing such drugs. (And never mind what such incredible bureaucratic impositions would do to the practice of medicine.) These reporters were not simply seeking news. They were assuming the intellectual prerogatives of scientists, and displayed an intellectual arrogance that is never found in real scientists. Their ignorant hubris and hostility was outrageous.
Now, I don't mean by all this that serious risks and dangers don't exist. They do. And I don't mean continuous scientific assessment of the effects of dangerous drugs is not necessary. It is. And I don't mean that the public should not receive valid medical in- formation. It should. All I mean is that the networks should stop this scandalous process of allowing the scientifically untrained to air ill-informed, unbalanced, and terrifying opinion to a scientifically untrained public. At an absolute minimum, interviewing should be conducted by scientifically qualified people. No documentaries on medical controversies should ever be aired that do not include representatives of all the schools of thought involved. And no reporter who cannot write a decent essay, acceptable to the National Science Foundation, on the principles of scientific epistemology, on valid hypothesis formation and on what constitutes adequate scientific evidence for a hypothesis within the full context of available knowledge, should be allowed near such an assignment. If he can't do that, he can no more assess competing scientific studies than a pig can fly, and he should be sent back to his usual beat collecting handouts and scavenging for gossip and leaks about political personalities. That's all he's been train for, and that he is good at doing.
She was a contributing editor to Reason magazine from the 1970s until her death in 2001, where she wrote psychological studies of former President Bill Clinton and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The latter prompted Justice Thomas to declare that Efron had been the "only person" to understand what was going through his mind during the hearings that made him a household name, according to Reason editor Virginia Postrel.In 1984, Efron published The Apocalyptics, described as "an exposé of shoddy science and its effects on environmental policy," which systematically examined the regulatory "science" behind the banning of chemicals in consumer products, debunking the alleged "cancer epidemic" claimed to exist by many in the media.
I was a child and never heard of that Dan Rather documentary, nor in the years since or the prodigious research for my books.
We’ve all loved to hate Dan Rather, but after reading this and the interview below, I now wonder if he wasn’t the last true television journalist [ahem; no argument that he was a lib and deserved what he got], taken out by having been baited with the Killian docs (an assertion I made nearly 20 years ago and prompted an exchange which got me my 2nd zot on FR).
In a brief trip down memory lane, I can’t think of a single tv news head who asked hard charging questions who didn’t also get taken out...save for Tucker (and look how successful he was at combatting the covid jackboots).
Now we’re in a new era of cancer epidemic, post-jabs, and everyone who asks hard questions - climate, jabs, uke-related, hunter, elections - gets taken out.
Trump was their prize.
Things which make you go ‘Hmmmmmmm’...
They tried repeatedly to take out Rush Limbaugh, but in the end he took himself out with billowing clouds of aromatic first-hand cigar smoke.
Honestly, I think Rush was smarter than Trump. Nothing against Donald Trump, he did a good job as far as it went, although he made some very bad hires, and didn't really understand what he was in for when he won the Presidency.
When the first reports leaked that Rush’s hearing loss was linked to an oxy addiction, my first thought was ‘they got him’.
Check out the link. I bet a lot of people (including these idiot journalists) don’t get that it’s making fun of this type of thing
I don't remember the story of his oxy addiction, only that one of his housekeepers was involved in some way. It is true that it was around the same time as he lost his hearing.
If he lost his hearing because of the oxy addiction, that's news to me.
If you want a good laugh check out any PBS “science” programming.
Invariably they find a black woman to narrate and her title is “science spokesperson”.
She can’t say more than ten words in a row without repeating the “climate change” mantra.
You can’t make up this stuff!
"But where can I find such a non-orientable manifold?"
Why, ACME Klein Bottles, of course!
I've seen hundreds of ads for prescription meds with dozens of side effect warnings for each.
I've never seen an ad for the COVID-19 so-called vaccinations mention even a single side effect.
Odd that, no?
I've never seen an ad for the COVID-19 so-called vaccinations mention even a single side effect.
Odd that, no?
Yes, and it's worth noting that when Edith Efron wrote this article, the country was in the middle of the "Consumer Rights" fad, when (as I recall it) began around the time that Watergate died down (1974) and continued well into the eighties. I remember it because an outspoken attorney from the place I lived (and still live) was one of the early activists promoting consumer rights and protections. Many things sprang from this movement, many laws, many political careers, much agitation and corporate kowtowing and flagellation.
The attorney I mentioned gained something of a national reputation for a time, although her light was soon eclipsed by other more vocal and perhaps more extreme personalities, some of which became household words. But things worked out for her rather nicely; she was appointed to the federal bench by Bill Clinton in 1998, retiring in 2022 after 24 cushy years.
Anyway, and to get to your point, it's amazing how the "consumer rights" fad — and a fad is what I think it was — was amazingly forgotten, to the point of nonexistence, during the COVID vaccine era, with its public shaming and even career disruption aimed at anyone who made even the slightest attempt to say "let's slow down here, let's just wait a minute..."
I don't recall a single "consumer rights activist," some of whom today hold high political office, emitting so much as a peep in defense of those — many younger than themselves — who asked for their own "consumer rights" (as consumers of health care services) to be protected by the government, at any level.
Including in hyper-health-conscious California, which was a leader in the "consumer rights" movement back in the 1970s.
Including the dangerous and toxic Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO), a colorless and odorless chemical compound, also referred to as water.
See post #6 on this thread.
Good post.
I was researching when the leftist anti-vaxx advocates started to recant...it looks like it was about 2011 or so...
No facts had changed—but Big Pharma started bribing and bullying their way through “opinion leaders”.
Fear was used on a culture-wide basis to manipulate an entire population. It made me think for the Nth time about how the Nazis were able to take over an advanced, well-educated country and turn it into a murder machine. I believe we saw the same dynamic at work during the COVID persecution years.
Starting with the epidemic itself, and the riots across the country, and the disappearance from store shelves of staples like toilet paper and medical alcohol (isopropyl alcohol). The universal forced wearing face masks, the social distancing, all the rest of it... used to make people feel disoriented, like strangers in their own towns and country.
I'm not the only one to say that it looked a lot like a dress rehearsal for something worse, a trial run by big government and the Deep State to see how much they could get away with.
Apologies. An old head injury in 2009 still causes some memory issues.
I was referencing my own conclusions on the basis of reports, not reports thereof.
I never believed what he told listeners about what caused his memory loss (autoimmune). He was probably lied to by the medical establishment.
I was and remain convinced that ‘they’ tried to take him out by addicting him and facilitating his addiction.
Oh, I know. Trust me.
NPR isn’t any better.
“Consensus” is an IQ test.
Agreed—I think it was a “dress rehearsal”.
In my state (CT) and my age group (65+) 97% of the people got vaxxed.
That is insane and very scary—they got brainwashed and browbeaten into doing something really stupid.
It is kinda obvious they would gladly line up for trains to the concentration camps given 24/7 propaganda telling them it was for their own good.
I plan on outliving all of them.
the networks should stop this scandalous process of allowing the scientifically untrained to air ill-informed, unbalanced, and terrifying opinion to a scientifically untrained public.
“the networks should stop this scandalous process of allowing the scientifically untrained to air ill-informed”
That sounds racist to me....
;-)
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