Jim Roth’s Website
Spring 2016 Four-Article Assignment
ARTICLE #1
“Televising humiliation” by Adam Cohen
In November 2006, a camera crew from NBC's "Dateline"
and a police SWAT team descended on the Texas home of Louis William Conradt Jr., a 56-year-old assistant district attorney.
The series' "To Catch a Predator" team had allegedly caught Conradt making online advances to a decoy who pretended
to be a 13-year-old boy. When the police and TV crew stormed Conradt's home, he took out a handgun and shot himself to
death. "That'll make good TV," one of the police officers on
the scene reportedly told an NBC producer. Deeply cynical, perhaps, but
prescient. "Dateline" aired a segment based on the grim encounter. After telling the ghoulish tale, it ended with Conradt's sister Patricia decrying the "reckless
actions of a self-appointed group acting as judge, jury and executioner, that was encouraged by an out-of-control
reality show." Patricia Conradt sued NBC for more
than $100 million. Last month, Judge Denny Chin of U.S. District Court in New
York ruled that her lawsuit could go forward. Chin's thoughtful ruling sends
an important message at a time when humiliation television is ubiquitous, and
plumbing ever lower depths of depravity in search of ratings. NBC's "To Catch a Predator" franchise is based on an
ugly premise. The show lures people into engaging in loathsome activities. It
then teams up with the police to stage a humiliating, televised arrest, while
the accused still has the presumption of innocence. Each party to the bargain compromises its professional
standards. Rather than hold police accountable, "Dateline"
becomes their partners - and may well prod them to more invasive and
outrageous actions than they had planned. When Conradt
did not show up at the "sting house" - the usual "To Catch a
Predator" format - producers allegedly asked police as a
"favor" to storm his home. Patricia Conradt
contends that the show encourages police "to give a special intensity to
any arrests, so as to enhance the camera effect." The police make their own corrupt bargain, ceding
law enforcement to TV producers. Could Conradt have
been taken alive if he had been arrested in more conventional fashion,
without SWAT agents, cameras and television producers swarming his home? Chin
said a jury could plausibly find that it was the television circus, in which
the police acted as the ringleader, that led to his
suicide. "To Catch a Predator" is part of an ever-growing
lineup of shows that calculatingly appeal to their audience's worst
instincts. The common theme is indulging the audience's voyeuristic pleasure
at someone else's humiliation, and the nastiness of the put-down has become
the whole point of the shows. Humiliation TV has been around for some time. "The Weakest
Link" updated the conventional quiz show by installing a viciously
insulting host, and putting the focus on the contestants' decision about
which of their competitors is the most worthless. "The Apprentice"
purported to be about young people getting a start in business, but the whole
hour built up to a single moment: when Donald Trump barked "You're
fired." But to hold viewers' interest, the levels of shame have
inevitably kept growing. A new Fox show, "Moment of Truth," in a
coveted time slot after "American Idol," dispenses cash prizes for
truthfully (based on a lie-detector test) answering intensely private
questions. Sample: "Since you've been married, have you ever had
sexual relations with someone other than your husband?" If the show is
as true as it says it is, questions in two recent
episodes seemed carefully designed to break up contestants' marriages. There are First Amendment concerns, of course, when courts
consider suits over TV shows. But when the media act more as police than as
journalists, and actually push the police into more extreme violations of
rights than the police would come up with themselves, the free speech defense
begins to weaken. Patricia Conradt's lawsuit contains
several legal claims, including "intentional infliction of emotional
distress," for which the bar is very high: conduct "so outrageous
in character, and so extreme in degree, as to go beyond all possible bounds
of decency, and to be regarded as atrocious, and utterly intolerable in a
civilized community." Reprehensible as "Moment of Truth" is, it doubtless
falls into the venerable category of verbal grotesquery protected by the
First Amendment. The producers of "To Catch a Predator," however,
appear to be on the verge - if not over it - of becoming brown shirts with
television cameras. If you are going into the business of storming people's
homes and humiliating them to the point of suicide, you should be sure to
have some good lawyers on retainer.
ARTICLE #2 “Social experiment: Know thy neighbor” by
Peter Lovenheim When I was growing up in upstate New York in the late 1950s and
'60s, people didn't exercise in public the way they do now. You didn't see adults
jogging, biking or power-walking on the street. Except one. Nearly every day, a middle-aged woman of slight
build walked rapidly through our suburban neighborhood, usually with her head
down. No one knew her name, so we called her the Walker. She usually wore a
simple blue or yellow dress, if memory serves, and when it rained she would
wear a clear plastic raincoat with a hood pulled over her head. In the winter
I recall a long, cloth coat, also with a hood; in driving snow she'd cover
her face with a scarf. Forty years later, when I'd moved with my wife and children back
to what had been my parents' home, I was amazed to see the same woman still
walking through the neighborhood. Resolved, finally, to meet her, I approached her one afternoon
in 2003. "Excuse me, " I began.
"I've lived on this street a long time and have always noticed you
walking." Up close, she looked older, smaller and frailer than I had
imagined. "Yes," she said. "I've been walking here a long
time."
Her voice was shaky, but she spoke with a clear diction. She
said she'd walked in the neighborhood almost every day since 1960. "You've walked on our street every day for more than 40 years?"
I asked. "I didn't miss many," she said, smiling. "In just one more year, I'll be 90," she added. Her name was Grace Field. In answer to my question, Grace said that in all the years she'd
been at it, few people had stopped to speak with her. I was, at the time, writing a book about how Americans live as
neighbors and asked Grace if she'd be willing to talk with me about that. She
agreed, and a few days later, I met her at her home. It turned out she lived
in an apartment nearby. She'd never married, lived alone and walked each day,
she said, for exercise. Among the things I learned about Grace was that as a young woman
she had studied at the Juilliard School and was an accomplished harpist and
pianist. What a waste, I thought; if only we'd gotten to know her, Grace
might have made an interesting friend. Maybe she even could have given music
lessons to children in the neighborhood. I had not been particularly interested in neighborhoods until
about 10 years ago when a tragedy occurred on my street: One evening, a man
shot and killed his wife and then himself; their two middle school-age
children ran screaming into the night. The kids soon moved to their
grandparents' house in another part of town. What struck me about this event
— besides the tragedy — was that a family who had lived on my street for
seven years had, in essence, vanished overnight. Yet the effect on my
neighborhood seemed slight. No one, including me, knew the family well. In
fact, as far as I could tell, no one seemed to know anyone beyond a casual,
superficial level. I asked myself: Do I live in a community or just in a house on a
street surrounded by people whose lives are entirely separate from my own?
And I wondered: What if I could deliberately get to know these strangers on
my street — know them in a meaningful way — what would I learn and how might
it change the neighborhood? Admittedly, the methodology I stumbled upon — sleeping over at
my neighbors' houses — seems eccentric. In practice, though, it worked well.
Fully half the neighbors I asked — after we'd gotten to know each other
through initial interviews — said yes. And the connections forged did help
transform strangers into friends and a disconnected group of people into
something more resembling a community. When we discovered, for example, that
one neighbor, a single mom, had breast cancer, we patched together a group of
neighbors to drive her to doctors and help watch her kids after school.
In this age of cheap long distance, discount airlines and the
Internet, when we can create community anywhere, why do neighborhoods still
matter? They matter because we are all mortal, and if we have an emergency, a
friend even 10 minutes away may be a friend too far. They matter because all our resources are finite,
and if you're baking a cake at night and have to drive to the supermarket for
a bottle of vanilla — as one of my neighbors confessed she recently had done
— instead of borrowing from the person next door, you're wasting gas, energy
and your own valuable time. They matter because our society is too fragmented, and if we
want to start rebuilding a healthy civil society by learning to understand
and live peacefully with people whose ideas about religion, morality and
politics may be different from our own, a very good place to start is with
the people in our own apartment building or on our own block.
ARTICLE #3 “How Ignorant Are Americans?” by Andrew Romono They’re
the sort of scores that drive high-school history teachers to drink. When NEWSWEEK
recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship
test, 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent
couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were
unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle
Independence Day on a calendar. Don’t
get us wrong: civic ignorance is nothing new. For as long as they’ve existed,
Americans have been misunderstanding checks and balances and misidentifying
their senators. And they’ve been lamenting the philistinism of their peers
ever since pollsters started publishing these dispiriting surveys back in
Harry Truman’s day. (He was a president, by the way.) According to a study by
Michael X. Delli Carpini,
dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, the yearly shifts in civic
knowledge since World War II have averaged out to “slightly under 1 percent.” But the
world has changed. And unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more
inhospitable to incurious know-nothings—like us. To appreciate the risks involved, it’s important to understand
where American ignorance comes from. In March 2009, the European
Journal of Communication asked citizens of Britain, Denmark, Finland,
and the U.S. to answer questions on international affairs. The Europeans
clobbered us. Sixty-eight percent of Danes, 75 percent of Brits, and 76
percent of Finns could, for example, identify the Taliban, but only 58
percent of Americans managed to do the same—even though we’ve led the charge
in Afghanistan. It was only the latest in a series of polls that have shown
us lagging behind our First World peers. Most experts agree that the relative complexity of the U.S.
political system makes it hard for Americans to keep up. In many European
countries, parliaments have proportional representation, and the majority
party rules without having to “share power with a lot of subnational
governments,” notes Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, coauthor of Winner-Take-All
Politics. In contrast, we’re saddled with a nonproportional
Senate; a tangle of state, local, and federal bureaucracies; and
near-constant elections for every imaginable office (judge, sheriff,
school-board member, and so on). “Nobody is competent to understand it all,
which you realize every time you vote,” says Michael Schudson,
author of The Good Citizen. “You
know you’re going to come up short, and that discourages you from learning
more.” It
doesn’t help that the United States has one of the highest levels of income
inequality in the developed world, with the top 400 households raking in more
money than the bottom 60 percent combined. As Dalton Conley, an NYU
sociologist, explains, “it’s like comparing apples and oranges. Unlike
Denmark, we have a lot of very poor people without access to good education,
and a huge immigrant population that doesn’t even speak English.” When
surveys focus on well-off, native-born respondents, the U.S. actually holds
its own against Europe. Other factors exacerbate the situation. A big one, Hacker
argues, is the decentralized U.S. education system, which is run mostly by
individual states: “When you have more centrally managed curricula, you have
more common knowledge and a stronger civic culture.” Another hitch is our
reliance on market-driven programming rather than public broadcasting, which,
according to the EJC study, “devotes more attention to
public affairs and international news, and fosters greater knowledge in these
areas.” For
more than two centuries, Americans have gotten away with not knowing much
about the world around them. But times have changed—and they’ve changed in
ways that make civic ignorance a big problem going forward. While
isolationism is fine in an isolated society, we can no longer afford to mind
our own business. What happens in China and India (or at a Japanese nuclear
plant) affects the autoworker in Detroit; what happens in the statehouse and
the White House affects the competition in China and India. Before the
Internet, brawn was enough; now the information economy demands brains
instead. And where we once relied on political institutions (like organized
labor) to school the middle classes and give them leverage, we now have
nothing. “The issue isn’t that people in the past knew a
lot more and know less now,” says Hacker. “It’s that their ignorance
was counterbalanced by denser political organizations.” The result is a
society in which wired activists at either end of the spectrum dominate the
debate—and lead politicians astray at precisely the wrong moment. The
current conflict over government spending illustrates the new dangers of
ignorance. Every economist knows how to deal with the debt: cost-saving
reforms to big-ticket entitlement programs; cuts to our bloated defense
budget; and (if growth remains slow) tax reforms designed to refill our
depleted revenue coffers. But poll after poll shows that voters have no clue
what the budget actually looks like. A 2010 World Public Opinion survey found
that Americans want to tackle deficits by cutting foreign aid from what they
believe is the current level (27 percent of the budget) to a more prudent 13
percent. The real number is under 1 percent. A Jan. 25 CNN poll, meanwhile,
discovered that even though 71 percent of voters want smaller government,
vast majorities oppose cuts to Medicare (81 percent), Social Security (78
percent), and Medicaid (70 percent). Instead, they prefer to slash waste—a
category that, in their fantasy world, seems to include 50 percent of
spending, according to a 2009 Gallup poll. Needless
to say, it’s impossible to balance the budget by listening to these people.
But politicians pander to them anyway, and even encourage their
misapprehensions. As a result, we’re now arguing over short-term spending
cuts that would cost up to 700,000 government jobs, imperiling the shaky
recovery and impairing our ability to compete globally, while doing nothing
to tackle the long-term fiscal challenges that threaten … our ability to
compete globally. Given
our history, it’s hard to imagine this changing any time soon. But that isn’t
to say a change wouldn’t help. For years, Stanford communications professor
James Fishkin has been conducting experiments in
deliberative democracy. The premise is simple: poll citizens on a major issue,
blind; then see how their opinions evolve when they’re forced to confront the
facts. What Fishkin has found is that while people
start out with deep value disagreements over, say, government spending, they
tend to agree on rational policy responses once they learn the ins and outs
of the budget. “The problem is ignorance, not stupidity,” Hacker says. “We
suffer from a lack of information rather than a lack of ability.” Whether
that’s a treatable affliction or a terminal illness remains to be seen. But now’s
the time to start searching for a cure.
ARTICLE #4 Boys Mow Lawns, Girls Do Dishes: Are Parents Perpetuating the Chore Wars? By Sue Shellenbarger I've always considered myself tuned-in to the gender politics of
the Chore Wars -- the household battles between husbands and wives over who
does what at home. Imagine my surprise when I realized I'm guilty of perpetuating
this conflict into the next generation. While reporting on the topic, I saw
that I myself expect different things of my son, 16, and my daughter, 18: I
want him to handle more fix-it jobs, while my daughter does more cleaning. The latest research suggests I'm not alone. The way parents
are divvying up and paying kids for chores suggests this is one family battle
that will extend well into the next generation and beyond. A nationwide study by the University of Michigan's Institute
for Social Research shows boys ages 10 through 18 are more likely than girls
to be getting paid for doing housework -- even though boys spend an average
30% less time doing chores. Boys are as much as 10 to 15 percentage points
more likely than girls at various ages to be receiving an allowance for doing
housework, says the institute's newly completed analysis of data on 3,000
children ages 10 through 18. Boys may be handling more of the kinds of chores that are
regarded as a job that should be paid, such as lawnmowing,
speculates Frank Stafford, the University of Michigan economics professor
heading the research. Chores such as dishwashing or cooking, often regarded
as routine and done free, may fall more often to girls. (The analysis is
based on aggregate samples, and doesn't compare treatment of siblings within
individual families.) Also, girls ages six through 17 perform two hours more of
housework each week than boys, the institute found. That echoes previous
studies showing a similar gap, and mirrors an even bigger gulf between adult
women's and men's housework time. Women now do about 19.4 hours a week to
men's 9.7 hours, according to research by Suzanne Bianchi, a sociology
professor at the University of Maryland, and others. "Girls hang around
with their moms, boys with their dads, and they follow the patterns they grow
up with," says Constance Gager, assistant
professor, social and family dynamics, at Arizona State University. Like me, many parents are unconscious of any gender gap among
their own kids. Ann Barlow regards her family as gender-neutral, saying she
and her husband treat their son, 13, and their daughter, 16, pretty much
alike. "I don't think we discriminate," the San Ramon, Calif.,
mother. But she acknowledges that they do different tasks. "We stick my son with taking out the garbage," she
says. "I never even thought about it. It's just, 'Chris, take out the
garbage.' " Her son also cleans the garage
and handles household repairs more often than her daughter. And her daughter
spends about an hour more each week doing housework -- three, compared with
two by her son. He uses humor to slip off the hook, Ms. Barlow says.
"He'll be the first guy to weasel out of his chores. He'll say, 'Oh, I
dropped a plate, you probably don't want me to handle those any more.' " Some research shows that as adults, women are content doing
more housework if they perceive the setup as fair. If a husband is working
longer hours outside the home, for example, wives may willingly shoulder more
chores. But with kids, in addition to doing more housework, daughters
are spending more time than sons performing paid jobs -- 1.9 hours a week for
girls, vs. 1.3 hours for boys, Dr. Bianchi and others report in a 2006 book,
"Changing Rhythms of American Family Life." Dr. Gager,
who found a similar pattern in a 2004 study, likens these girls to
"supermoms -- they're superkids who do it
all." In many busy households, housework simply isn't a high
priority any more; couples' combined housework time
is down 25% from the 1960s, Dr. Bianchi says. In the resulting war against dustballs, many families value pragmatism over gender
politics. Raoul and Jackie Pascual acknowledge that
chores haven't been evenly distributed among their three children. A
daughter, 22 and living at home, has always handled more cleaning than their
son, now 19, or another daughter, 14. Their son takes out the trash and helps
with such jobs as assembling furniture, says Ms. Pascual,
of South Pasadena, Calif. But the Pascuals aren't
concerned. "It doesn't make a difference" who does what, Mr. Pascual says, "as long as it's done." Housework is a problem at Mike Grandin's house, but gender
politics are the least of his worries. His daughter, 18, cooks meals and
helps out more at home than his son, 15. But neither clean up messes to Mr.
Grandin's satisfaction. The San Francisco stockbroker says he winds up doing
a lot of the dishes and tidying up while his kids stay busy with
extracurricular activities, studying and jobs. His response is gender-blind:
"I come down just as hard on either one when they leave a mess."
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