Franken’s latchkey lunacy (Goldberg)

Franken distorts again. This time, a chapter in Bernie Goldberg’s book, Bias, titled “The Most Important Story You Never Saw on TV

Bernie Goldberg wrote that the media only gives one side of the story a fair shake when it comes to issues like child day care.

Here’s what Goldberg’s actual point was:

The problem is that they don’t let the other voices on. The ones who say that most toddlers are better off with their own mothers than with day-care workers and that most adolescent kids would do better if a parent were home after school.

…

Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation found that ‘nearly 80 percent of the preschool children using any form of day care come from married-couple families with two income earners.’ I don’t remember ever hearing that on the network news.

…

a government study… concluded that toddlers who are put in day care for long stretches of time tended to be more aggressive and defiant, regardless of the quality of the day care… On CBS, Dan Rather called the study ‘controversial’–twice.

If the media were open-minded, there would be a true debate about this issue.

Since Franken has a problem with Goldberg’s argument, what might you guess his counter-argument would consist of? Does Franken claim that a “true debate about this issue” already exists in the mainstream media? No. Guess again. Does Franken argue that Dan Rather did not really call the study ‘controversial’? No.

So just what does Franken do? He types the word “latchkey” into LexisNexis to see what comes up. He then sorts through the results to find which ones are referring to latchkey kids. Franken’s methodology is more than a little strange considering Goldberg’s complaint wasn’t that the media never mentioned latchkey kids–but Franken, being a verifiable nut, takes the results of the search and runs with it for no reason:

Bernie has a chapter called “The Most Important Story You Never Saw on TV.” It’s about latchkey kids and working moms. And it is an important story. But if you haven’t seen it on TV, it’s because you haven’t been watching CNN (11 stories), CBS (11), NBC (3) or ABC (10).

So what does Franken prove? Nothing. But his audience doesn’t know that, because he never mentions what Goldberg was actually saying. This does not stop Franken from gloating:

When I see something only thirty-five times, I know the media is trying to keep a lid on it.