In Washington, being publicly discredited is no bar to employment for the industrious and well-connected. If you are sufficiently shameless, being a disgraced former official needn't prevent you from reincarnating as a highly paid lobbyist or think-tank pundit or deputy something-or-other. There seems to be no getting rid of some people.
A similar case is that of notorious junk science peddler Paul Cameron. He keeps generating his slanderous statistics about gay people, and uninformed reporters and editors keep eating up the stuff. The latest reminder came on July 5 as I was checking out the latest issue of Bay Windows online. Near the top of the screen, in the EDGEwire newslink box, was the headline, "Family Research Council Study: Gays Die Young."
The study in question is by Cameron and his son Kirk. While the EDGE article uses verbs like "claims" and "purports," provides "balance" by reporting contrary views, and points out the anti-gay nature of the Camerons' Family Research Institute, it respectfully cites the Camerons' Ph.Ds without mentioning that the senior Cameron was expelled by the American Psychological Association in December 1983 for using unsound methods and misrepresenting others' research.
For decades, Paul Cameron has been the favorite "expert" of anti-gay obsessives. His institute publishes pseudoscientific reports filled with false claims, such as that child molesters and sex murderers are disproportionately gay. His work has been used by syndicated columnists, members of Congress, and Pentagon officials. Therein lies the problem: Paul's preposterous pamphlets would vanish without a trace if others did not keep recycling them or if reporters were more careful about checking their sources.
Perhaps Cameron's most oft-quoted claim is that gay men have a dramatically shorter life expectancy. After Cameron disseminated brochures claiming that the average male homosexual life span was 43 years, many people repeated it in print and on television as a serious statistic. Problem is, there is no scientific basis for his claim. Cameron arrived at that figure by examining obituaries in gay newspapers during the height of the AIDS epidemic and averaging the reported ages of death.
Even assuming that the readership of those papers was representative of the entire gay community and that the obits were representative of all gay deaths - both assumptions are questionable - this method excludes everyone who did not die. That is like surveying the obituaries of soldiers killed in Iraq and concluding that the average life expectancy of soldiers is in the low 20s.
Readers of EDGE who are unfamiliar with Cameron might get the impression that he is a serious researcher, however flawed his methodology and conclusions. In actuality, as the Box Turtle Bulletin website reports, Cameron refers to homosexuals' "parasitic lives," decries equal rights as "Super Rights," accuses homosexuals of running a "shadow organization" in the U.S. military (which would come as a surprise to the more than 11,000 service members discharged under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"), and calls homosexuals a threat to Western Civilization. The latter assertion is especially ironic considering that Cameron approvingly cites the work of the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp.
The Camerons are not the only phony experts used by irresponsible news organizations. On the same day as the EDGE story, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) issued an alert denouncing a June 21 report by The O'Reilly Factor in which Fox News Crime Analyst Rod Wheeler described a nationwide epidemic of lesbian gangs. Without citing sources, Wheeler claimed that the Washington, D.C. area alone has more than 150 lesbian gangs, that they recruit children, and that many gang members use pink-painted Glock pistols. (This last stray bullet of wild invention hit the gay gun-rights group Pink Pistols, which has nothing to do with gangs and whose name is not intended literally.)
As GLAAD reports, Detective Patrick Word, president of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Gang Investigators Network, stated, "There is no evidence whatsoever of a lesbian gang epidemic in this region … our membership reports only one lesbian gang." According to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Wheeler is a "food defense specialist" for the American Institute of Baking who was suspended by the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department in 1994 after testing positive for marijuana use.
One advantage enjoyed by phony experts is that those who interview them and report their published claims are seldom prepared to challenge either their claims or their professional credentials. At best, dissenting views are quoted, as in the EDGE story, but with little context to facilitate an informed evaluation.
When counterposed quotes from newsmakers are substituted for investigative reporting, the implication is that there are no objective facts to be ascertained. Amazingly enough, the resulting "he said, she said" standoff is treated as a reason for boasting - as with Fox News Channel's slogan, "We Report, You Decide." This gives uninformed gut reactions the same standing as specialized expertise.
We are fortunate that groups like GLAAD, Box Turtle Bulletin and SPLC are active in refuting anti-gay propaganda disguised as news, but there are far more news outlets than they can handle, in an expanding array of media. All of us who are consumers as well as subjects of the news must be vigilant. When you find a reporter giving credence to the work of an anti-gay "expert," call the reporter and the editor on it. Instead of merely berating them, use the occasion as a teaching moment. First, though, be sure to do more careful homework than the reporter.
4 Comments for “Exposing Phony ‘Experts’”
posted by Jamesaust on
This was the same ass satyrized in “Tangled up in Bleu” on the “Daily Show with Jon Stewart” a while back.
(Unfortunately, Comedy Central’s corporate overlords are so obsessed about squeezing every last penny out of their intellectual “property” that their own website (a) makes it difficult to locate the archive of this segment and link to it, and (b) appears to be only one-half of the segment) Here’s a link to this laugh-out-loud satire:
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=75563&ml_collection=&ml_gateway=&ml_gateway_id=&ml_comedian=&ml_runtime=&ml_context=show&ml_origin_url=/shows/the_daily_show/videos/jason_jones/index.jhtml&ml_playlist=&lnk=&is_large=true
posted by Craig2 on
Here’s the ratbag’s website so we can spy directly on him:
http://www.familyresearchinst.org
Warning: Don’t eat before consulting this website. Your stomach will regret it.
Craig2
Wellington, NZ
posted by Brian Miller on
The good news about Cameron is that most reputable news organizations know about him now — to the point where if one of his shell organizations is trying to perpetuate one of his BS stories, all you’ve got to do is mention to an average newsman that it’s a Paul Cameron organization and he stops heeding it.
posted by The Gay Species on
The “problem” is deeper than Mr. Cameron. The “problem” is the entire Psyche Industry and its lack of a coherent theory, a conceptual scheme, validation of its claims, AND THE MEANS TO ARBITRATE BETWEEN THEM. No other “social project” is so amorphous, ambiguous, without theoretical foundations, empirical support than the Psyche Industry. Even Religion and Astrology have terra firma that it lacks. UNTIL the Psyche Industry chooses to become scientific, individual gurus will do and say whatever they please as long as they been “ordained” to divine the mental metaphysics of their own suasion. Pick your guru and like a lemming follow.
Let’s also NOT forget that the Psyche Industry professed to “cure” the homosexual “pathology” until its Peer-Review Council of Hawaii, 1973, when scientists and philosophers demanded PROOF of these claims. They changed their orthodoxy by popular vote of the Peers in holy convocation — not because they became enlightened, but because they were CHALLENGED.
Those CHALLENGES should persist of the whole fraudulent enterprise.