False Comparisons. Two items.
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News or American Idol? CNN Headline News today reported that more people watch American Idol (33 million) than the major network newscasts (28 million), then posed a man-on-the-street interview question to New Yorkers as to which they would prefer to watch, "the news" or American Idol. Almost all said "news". CNN leaped to conclude that they were just not owning up to their real preference. Very sloppy logic.
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The leap CNN made is false in at least two regards: first, more people are home when American Idol airs; and second, the major networks are not the only source of television news.
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Many years ago, NBC Nightly News reported that Americans are working longer hours and facing longer commutes, leaving the house earlier and arriving home later than ever before in recent history. Within about six months thereafter NBC and the other two major networks moved their evening news shows a half hour earlier. Yes, you heard me: earlier.
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ABC, CBS, and NBC had theretofore run a half-hour news show at 7:00 p.m. Six months after the story appeared that Americans are getting home later than ever, all three networks moved their news shows earlier, so they now air at 6:30, when part of their old audience isn't even home from work yet. Network executives knew that they would lose some of their audience but moved their evening newscasts earlier anyway. Why?
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There was speculation at the time that the networks wanted to stop airing evening newscasts altogether, because of expense and logistics, but were bound by tradition and public opinion to keep them going. They wanted to turn over that half hour to local news or entertainment, which are far more profitable. But they couldn't justify doing so, especially in lite of the FCC and public expectation that broadcasters would operate over "the people's airwaves" as custodians of a public trust.
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So they contrived to reduce the audience, as to justify plans to terminate evening newscasts altogether by claiming that people don't want to watch. (Note that the newer networks (Fox, UPN, the WB, Paxson) did not institute evening newscasts when they came online.)
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It didn't work. Enuf people still watched that the old-line networks couldn't abandon the audience, and the people within networks prevailed who felt there was an absolute obligation to the public to maintain evening newscasts even if they didn't make a ton of money.
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Why, then, didn't the networks move their shows back to 7 p.m. to recapture the viewers they lost, as better to fulfil their public duty? Because, you see, if any of the three networks stayed at 6:30, that one stood to take a substantial proportion, if not an actual majority, of viewers away from the others. That's why all three went to 6:30 to begin with: one went earlier, and the others, fearing their audience would be wiped out if they stayed at 7:00, moved theirs too in rapid succession. (I think it was NBC that went to 6:30 first, because I noted at the time the irony of NBC being the network on which I saw the report about people getting home later being the network that first moved its show earlier.) So they would all have to move their news show back to 7, or none would. Thus is it that decades later, when people are working still longer hours and bearing even longer commutes, so getting home even later, the network news shows are still willfully precluding millions of Americans from watching them.
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The second element to the falsity of the comparison of news vs. American Idol is that cable news channels like CNN Headline News, the original CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News Channel, in English, and the evening newscasts of Univision and Telemundo in Spanish, all add dramatically to the number of viewers of news. What is the real total, then, of people who watch news regularly? Hard to say.
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One website estimates that the daytime viewership is about 1.3 million and evening viewership 2.2 million. I don't know how they can calculate that, given that the cable channels offer 24-hour news and that same website says:

Looking at audiences each month, fewer than 700,000 people watched cable during any given daytime moment between October 1997 and July 1998, and fewer than 1.2 million watched in prime time.

That's at "any given ... moment". How do they calculate the 24-hour total? I don't know. But if a total of even only 1.3 million watch in the daytime and 2.2 million watch at nite, that's 3.5 million combined. Add that to the 28 million who watch the over-air networks' evening newscasts, and you get 31.5 million. Add to the news figure, which is for national and world news, all the local newscasts, over-air and cable, and the total number of news viewers doubtless exceeds American Idol's 33 million — by a lot.
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It is only in looking for figures on local news audience that I found an express acknowledgment of my main point here, at the website State of the News Media 2006:

Some of the decline in viewership, however, has nothing to do with channel preference but probably has to do with changes in the way people live. Americans wake up earlier and commute longer. Indeed, as the chart above shows, roughly one-third of the news audience is no longer available to watch news because they are either commuting during the evening newscast or asleep by the time the late news begins. One sign of this is the fact that, according to news professionals, the most likely growth area for local news in most markets has been early morning news, before 7 a.m. This is why many stations now produce more hours of news, starting as early as 5 a.m. in larger markets. The trend has included stations in large markets pushing the start of their morning news programs earlier and earlier, while midsize markets are adding morning news where they once aired syndicated shows.

So let's not dumb-down the American public more than is warranted. We watch lots of news, when we can.
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Monkey Business on AIDS. CNN reports today that a new approach holds promise of preventing infection with "HIV" the so-called "AIDS virus":

Scientists have long believed that a vaccine is the best way to stop the spread of AIDS, but efforts to invent one have miserably flopped. [Why is that? You're not supposed to ask. The answer, however, is plain: you can't vaccinate against injuries, and AIDS, in the Western world, is a drug injury.]

Now they may have found something already on pharmacy shelves that seems to prevent infection.

It's a combination of two drugs that have shown such promise in early experiments in monkeys that officials just expanded tests of them in people around the world. * * *

Specifically, six macaques were given the drugs and then challenged with a deadly combination of monkey and human AIDS viruses, administered in rectal doses to imitate how the germ spreads in [some] gay men.

Despite 14 weekly blasts of the virus, none of the monkeys became infected. All but one of another group of monkeys that didn't get the drugs did, typically after two exposures.

Problem: monkeys don't get AIDS.
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HIV has no effect on them whatsoever. That is why the "test" had to inject "monkey and human AIDS viruses".
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It is a simple, hard, unalterable rule of science that you cannot permit two variables and claim results for only one of them.
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If you inject one germ into a test subject and a medication shows good results, you may develop evidence of effectiveness. If you inject two different types of germ that produce similar symptoms, administer a medication, and see positive results, you cannot know if both germs were countered or only one. Nor can you know which one. Except we can in this case know that injecting HIV – Human Immunodeficiency Virus – into a monkey is irrelevant to the health of the monkey, because in no event would HIV cause immunodeficiency in monkeys! It's called "Human Immunodeficiency Virus" because it (supposedly) produces immunodeficiency only in humans, NOT in monkeys, chimpanzees, guinea pigs, rabbits, cats, dogs, or any other animal standardly used to test medicines. This is, indeed, one of the telltale signs that the assertion that HIV produces AIDS in people is so dubious as to be extremely suspicious. This was well understood as long ago as 1990.

No one has tried injecting HIV into a healthy human being, but scientists have stuck all kinds of mice and rats and monkeys and chimpanzees, and none of them got anything resembling human AIDS.

Same story in 1996:

Several species of animals are paying the price of scientists['] refusal to drop their age-old methodology in the face of our new and complex virus. One favourite is the chimpanzee — not presently used in British laboratories because of its status as a[ ] threatened species. These primates have 98% of our genetic make-up — they are as close to humans as it is possible to be. More than 100 chimps have now been deliberately infected with HIV and not one of them has developed the opportunistic infections and cancers associated with AIDS. They do not even carry the HIV virus in all the body fluids that AIDS patients do. And they are kept, in isolation, in the highly unnatural environment of a research laboratory, suffering physical and psychological stress [which can in itself weaken the immunological system].

As recently as last October, science accepted that HIV does not affect monkeys. Rather, a supposed monkey 'version' of HIV, Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV), is used in AIDS studies as a model. All "studies" of SIV as regards their usefulness in understanding HIV are speculative and absolutely unscientific, akin to using studies of the atmosphere of Mars to speculate about the atmosphere of Earth. But you wouldn't know that from CNN's uncritical passing along of the medically worthless crap it broadcast today.
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This is the kind of evil lie that "science" has been shoveling about AIDS for decades. But people in general are so lacking in scientific sophistication and so trusting that they believe every syllable uttered by scientific and government liars. Wake up, people!
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,323.).
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:55 PM