Posts by Craig Young
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Insofar as McMansionisation and Family First go...they've got a small business donor and sponsor list on their Family Forum conclaves that doesn't seem to include any real estate firms. McCoskrie himself is an encapsulated fundie who used to be a Radio Rhema talkback host and tends to think the world is more sock con than it really is.
Craig Y
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Why do I suspect FF is going to similarly canvass Auckland City Council members over this agenda of theirs?
Craig Y
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Heh. Well, I've always said FF's Bob McCoskrie was the Patricia Bartlett of the early twenty first century and are only the Society for Promotion of Community Standards with better haircuts, without cardigans and no hornrims. Hardly surprising their agenda almost completely ignores real family needs, is it?
The mooted public nudity ban is probably related to SPCS' vendetta against Kapiti Coast nude beaches and Steve Crowe and the Erotica Expo parade, as well as covertly designed against any Pride parades with racy content.
Craig Y -
Is there any critical analysis of Bankses entourage available anywhere, H?
Craig Y
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Digressing briefly across the ditch...bluidyhell. Does anyone believe that this Bob Katter bloke isn't an utter tosser outside his native Far Right -oops, Far North- Queensland?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Katter
Craig Y
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Incidentally, fundie pressure group Family First has ranked the Akld Supercity candidates. Can't say I'm too impressed with the neanderthal attitudes expressed about street sex work and brothels, given that both are legal under the Prostitution Law Reform Act 2003. As for public nudity, ho hum, wowserville.
If I were an Auck, I would have some major concerns about Andrew Williams and Colin Craig...
http://www.valueyourvote.org.nz
Craig Y
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Has anyone else noticed the mysterious absence of ACT and Rodney Hide from any media coverage related to the quake? One wonders why. Normally you can't shut the aforementioned pack of populist opportunists up.
Craig Y
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Someone needs to call ACT and their New Right cronies over what New Right attacks on public sector capacity under the Republican House of Representatives and Bush Presidency meant for their Federal Emergency Management Administration in the context of Hurricane Katrina.
http://www.gaynz.com/blog/redqueen/archives/933
In fact, someone needs to ask ACT, the Business Roundtable, the Centre for Independent Studies, Centre for Political Research and their fellow travellers and apologists precisely what their stance on disaster relief policy is. As well as the Welfare Working Group. According to Sue Bradford, their report time has been rolled back. Oh. I wonder why...
Craig Young
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Further to the Park Dietz role as a credible authority in Johann Hari's aforementioned article, I looked up his Wikipedia reference and found that he's a controversial figure. He gave false testimony about the non-existence of a Law and Order (US) episode that allegedly contributed to the tragic Andrea Yates maternal child drowning incident, in which a mentally ill woman was alleged to have drowned her offspring. The series producers then responded that no such episode existed at the time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Dietz
And there's also his involvement in the Anita Hill sexual harrassment trial as a witness for the defence, against Ms Hill.
So. Is there a media effects relationship between intensive news coverage and/or police procedural genre realist dramatic genre depictions and events like the Yates tragedy, reports of suicide and/or mass shootings like the Blackburn tragedy?
Or are there collateral socialisation influences from other institutions that lead to such events?
Craig Young
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This reminds me of a recent Johann Hari article, in which he criticised the reporting of the Blackburn serial shooter Raoul Moat. In it, Hari relies on the same media effects model of intensive coverage as a causal factor in social behaviour that is at stake here:
This is what Hari had to say about the media effects of reporting suicide in that column:
"The evidence is clearer still when it comes to suicides. We have known for a long time that when the media reports on a high-profile suicide in detail, there will be a significant surge in the suicide rate. In the month after Marilyn Monroe killed herself, the suicide rate in the US rose by 12 percent. There are over 42 scientific studies showing that this is part of a general trend: the more intense and detailed the coverage, the more copycats you create. In the week after an episode of Casualty prominently showed a character taking an overdose, the overdosing rate in Britain rose by 17 per cent.
It works the other way, too: when the media shows restraint in reporting suicide, there is a dramatic decline. For example, from 1983 to 1986 there was a huge rise in people hurling themselves in front of trains on the Vienna subway system. Each jumper provoked a rash of lurid news stories recounting the victim's life at length. Finally the press, urged by the Austrian Association for Suicide Prevention, agreed to stop reporting on suicides. Within a year, the rate had fallen by more than 50 per cent, and it has never gone back.
Obviously, the media doesn't make people suicidal: nobody is that distressed by an episode of Casualty. But it does provide people who were already feeling suicidal with several tools – a method for doing it, a role model, and a narrative where suicide seems inevitable and suffering finally ends. This helps to erode their internal resistance. It pushes many that last fatal inch."
Hari cites a Dr Park Deitz as an authority in this context earlier in his column.
Craig Y