This one is for Greg, who remembered “Small Fry” from the old Jack-In-The-Box commercials:
Quite a sobering - and largely accurate - article from Emily Yoffe at Slate.com about the enormous rise in out-of-wedlock births, and some of the causes and resulting problems. At the end comes this justified slap at oh-so-progressive types - think Murphy Brown - who are loathe to criticize, condemn, or otherwise judge:
But perhaps in our desire not to make moral judgments about personal choices, young women wholly unprepared to be mothers are not getting the message that there are dire consequences of having (unprotected) sex with guys too lame to be fathers.
There is a scene in the teen pregnancy movie Juno in which the title character, a 16-year-old who has decided not to abort her unplanned baby but to give it up for adoption, is having an ultrasound. The technician, thinking she has on the examining table another knocked-up teenager planning to raise her child, makes disparaging remarks about children born into those circumstances.
We are supposed to loathe this character and cheer when Juno’s stepmother puts her in her place. But I found myself sympathetic to the technician. Why is it verboten to express the truth that growing up with a lonely, overwhelmed mother and a missing father is a recipe for childhood pain?
Dan Quayle was right, for the most part. And notice that Wolf Blitzer, when interviewing Quayle, tries to somehow get Quayle to regret his remarks about the Murphy Brown issue, and asks him if he would like to “rephrase” them. Quayle, smartly, says that he would not.
Here’s an idea for a new TV network - if you’ve got the money to launch it, please - PLEASE - run with it. It will be called MPTV, which stands for “Missing Persons TV.” It will feature round-the-clock coverage of every missing person that captures the nation’s collective attention. A few months ago, the plot would have revolved around Stacy Peterson; two weeks ago, it would have featured the “missing pregnant Marine” (a media-coined phrase that made me sick). This week, it will cover the latest and/or most attractive young lady that has been reported missing.
Believe me - I am not mocking or otherwise picking on the missing people or their families - it’s the cable-news networks that I’m attacking. I’m sick of the non-stop coverage of the missing-person-of-the-week on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, when the fact is that these stories are almost invariably quite local in nature. The wall-to-wall coverage of every facet of these news stories just amazes me.
UPDATE: just in case the point wasn’t clear — the purpose of “MPTV” would be to remove all missing-persons coverage from the cable-news channels (not replicate it)!