WATCHDOG GROUP TO FIGHT 'PARANORMAL PROPAGANDA' IN TELEVISION, FILMS

June 21, 1996 / July 6, 1996
Source: Buffalo News, Sec. C, pg. 2
By: Mike Vogel, News Staff Reporter

Weird science and alien philosophies gained a new enemy Thursday, as an international congress of skeptics convening in Amherst announced the formation of a new media watchdog group.

The new Council for Media Integrity, drawing on top scientists and communicators, will fight what one organizer termed "paranormal propaganda" pushed by mass media organizations.

"We're concerned particularly with television and film, although other aspects of the media perhaps should be discussed," said University at Buffalo professor Paul Kurtz, before screening a handful of examples involving UFOs, past live regressions, conversations with the dead and alien autopsies.

Often, the shows, including those broadcast by major networks, are presented not as entertainment but as docudramas, he said.

The new council will monitor programming in what Kurtz called "the borderlands of science" and offer solid scientific counterpoints "to this growth of belief in the paranormal and pseudoscience."

"Our purpose is to provide balance," Kurtz said.

The UB faculty member is chairman of the Amherst-based Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which convened the first World Skeptics Congress at UB and the committee's nearby Center for Inquiry Thursday.

Sessions run through Sunday, with key speakers including Nobel laureate Leon Lederman, Harvard scientist and author Stephen Jay Gould, syndicated radio medical commentator Dr. Dean Edell and others. The conference theme is "Science in the Age of (Mis)information."

Some viewers may dismiss television and film explorations of fringe scientific claims as entertainment, but George Gerbner, University of Pennsylvania communications professor, said all too often they are taken as fact.

"Entertainment is the most important educational process in any culture," Gerbner said, warning that the seven hours and 41 minutes of daily television time in the average household contains not only anti-science messages but also a glut of violence and crime that feeds feelings of vulnerability and paranoia.

Australian broadcaster and columnist Phillip Adams added that today's mass media may have a limited future but computerized communications could be worse. The Internet, he said, provides "a delivery system for pathological states of mind."

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