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Just when a corporate giant like the New York Times begins to restore your faith in the main stream media, along comes another Sunday episode of Meet The Press to leave you stopping in mid-toke to scream at your TV.
The channel cannot change fast enough when someone like John McCain is being asked, for some damn reason, for his opinion on foreign policy, yet not being asked how the hell he thought that bringing us Sarah Palin was a good idea. This week, however, the topic turned to pot, and guest panelist and Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus gave us all a renewed hatred for out of touch journalists.
Wooden-puppet-who-just-wants-to-be-a-real-boy, and host of Meet The Press, David Gregory, brought up the recent announcement by the New York Times regarding their decision to endorse the nationwide legalization of weed in a series of articles and discussions to be released over the course of this week.
Almost leaping out of her seat to contradict her journalistic adversaries, Marcus quickly opined that while she doesn’t “have a huge problem with letting states experiment”, she added, “But I think for states to decide to go the full legalization route is a problem precisely for my mommy reason.”
Menopause? Bad digestion? Horrible choice in jeans? No…the kids! She’s worried about the kids!
“It is a vast social experiment,” Marcus told millions of viewers regarding the states where various forms of marijuana legalization have occurred. “We do not know the outcome except that the best evidence is that you lose — if you use marijuana as a teenager regularly — eight IQ points.”
Any decent producer would have inserted a record-scratch effect and cut her mic.
Any decent host would have at least asked her to provide a source for such a claim.
But alas, “If it’s Sunday, it’s Meet The Press”.
Had host David Gregory asked for Marcus’s source, and if she actually knows the real source of that oft-debunked stat, then the millions of impressionable viewers would have learned that those figures were taken from a 2012 study done on people born in a small village in New Zealand…in the 1970’s.
That study looked at IQ tests taken by this miniscule sampling of people when they turned 13 years old. Over the next two and a half decades they were periodically interviewed by researchers to determine if they were currently on drugs. Super-duper scientific. Then, when they turned 38, they had their IQ’s tested again.
The researchers then omitted anyone from the results who admitted to using “hard drugs”. Then they purposely pulled all known high school dropouts into their control group. Of that highly pared down slice of an already ridiculously insignificant sample, they found that those who admitted to smoking weed every week before the age of 18 did indeed have lower IQs.
Of course, to be fair, Gregory and Meet The Press never afford that kind of time to allow the truth to be told. They surely didn’t allow enough time to continue the narrative by telling the viewers at home that just one year after this silly study in New Zealand, reputable economist Ole Rogeburg put out a study of his own showing that disparity in socioeconomic status has the same effect on IQ levels…and dropout rates!
Simply put, kids from poorer households tend to show lower IQ levels. Pretty damn relevant to the discussion. Certainly more relevant than polling the honesty of 124 alleged potheads from down under.
Instead, the lowbrow discussion on Meet The Press devolved even further into a series of half baked puns and G-rated wisecracks about weed, and as always, nobody left the NBC set offended. Even the supposedly unbiased website PolitiFact called Marcus’s statement “Half True”.
“Half True”?
This is exactly what is wrong in this country today – that half-liars even get a seat at the table.