O’Reilly writer Andy Oram makes the case that the assertion President-elect Barack Obama’s victory is in large part due to his campaign’s effective use of the internet is an overstatement, to say the least.  Oram counters that when all is said and done, the mainstream media is what had the most significant impact on the elections.

I feel I have to temper the hype over how the Internet has changed elections. There’s no doubt that the Internet provides enormous potential, and that people have been using it in burgeoning numbers over the past four years to search for information, share ideas with friends, and form online coalitions. But several key observations show that the tipping point hasn’t arrived.

He goes on to give three points that illustrate why he feels this is the case:

1. Fund-raising proves the primacy of the mainstream media
2. Viral videos also prove the primacy of the mainstream media
3. Elections themselves have no Internet component

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A new RAND Corporation study that purports to show a link between teen pregnancy and viewing TV shows with strong sexual content seems just like the kind of publicity-engendering publication that researchers love as a way to help attract research dollars. Indeed, a look at the study’s abstract reveals language so tentative as to bring the whole exercise into question. Under “Conclusions,” it reads:

This is the first study to demonstrate a prospective link between exposure to sexual content on television and the experience of a pregnancy before the age of 20. Limiting adolescent exposure to the sexual content on television and balancing portrayals of sex in the media with information about possible negative consequences might reduce the risk of teen pregnancy. Parents may be able to mitigate the influence of this sexual content by viewing with their children and discussing these depictions of sex. [Emphases added.]

So there is a “link” — so what? That doesn’t necessarily imply causation, which could just as easily run the other way: One could just as easily conclude that more libidinous individuals seek out sexual content. Yet such a banal statement would not get headlines. Still, I must give the authors credit with qualifying their language so much as to dilute the link’s significance.

At long last, David Simon’s grossly overrated, overwrought, overwritten, television series “The Wire” is getting the bad reviews it deserves. [Full disclosure: I've had my personal differences with Simon and, at one point, he took to writing be hugely nasty emails to me for daring to suggest that maybe his own reporting on inner-city life sometimes ran contrary to his own nihilistic left-wing ideology. He even once called me a profane name in a print interview. Why he, a big time television producer and best true crime writer of his generation would feel threatened by things I wrote in small circulation political magazines is beyond me.]

The show went unwatched largely because it was never much good: Its plots were almost impossible to follow, much of the acting was pretty bad, and the writing — well, Simon seemed more interested in showing off his knowledge of inner-city lingo than in telling a story. I watched the first two seasons because the show, for all its flaws, did show a good understanding of police officers and police life. But I never thought it was great.

Nonetheless, television critics loved it and typically gave it rave reviews. But viewers, smarter than the pointy-headed critics, tended to stay away. Frankly, the shows’ “blame the system/blame the cops” liberalism tended to stoke the most primitive and discredited left-wing prejudices. Some libertarians with an anarchist bent liked it because Simon favored legalizing drugs but presented his pro-legalization arguments with some degree of nuance.

In fact, the show was the most anti-libertarian treatise ever to emerge from American television. It got credit for being “complex” and “multi-layered” because it depicted all social institutions — churches, unions, police, business, schools, and newspapers — as irredeemably corrupt and, really, not better than street gangs. In short, it depicted a society where it seemed like nobody other than an inspired central planner could fix things.