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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