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Both ABC and CBS covered the survey on homecare for the ailing elderly. Both attributed the statistic of an average annual cost of $5,500 per household per patient to the National Alliance for Caregivers. At least CBS' Sandra Hughes added Evercare as the survey's second sponsor; ABC's David Wright (no link) did not even list the corporate partner. He should have--and Hughes should have identified Evercare's business, since it directly benefits when families plan for the expense that it was publicizing. Instead, it required a Google search for evercarehealthplans.com to find the firm identified as "a leading provider of health plans for people who have long-term or advanced illness, are older, or have disabilities."
CBS ran a second family-oriented story that was also substandard. Daniel Sieberg's feature kicked off a series on The Secret Lives of Teens. He found an anonymous upper middle class midwestern family: daughter Jane, 16, mother Cindy and father Tom. Tom and Cindy are using Spector computer software to spy on Jane. Without her knowledge, they read her e-mail, her instant messages, her Website postings; they steal her passwords to log on to her accounts; they execute screen grabs of every Website she surfs to; they receive e-mail alerts when she reads or types words such as "beer, bitch, boob, cheat, smoke, steal, whore…" Cindy confessed that when she discovered Jane had visited a site with the headline "I am a Naughty Slut" that "quite honestly it repulses me." Tom explained the reason for the surveillance: "The amount of drinking and a lot of the boasting about sexual activity."
So what did Sieberg make of all this? That Tom and Cindy should relax and get a life? Hardly. He validated these intrusions on the grounds that Jane's life "is a far cry from generations past when parents knew what their kids were up to." Sieberg cannot really believe that today's teenagers are the first generation to boast about sex and to drink alcohol behind their parents' backs, can he? Then he states that "these days parents have good reason to worry" by stating Pew Survey statistics that, it turns out, provide no reason to worry: 55% of online teens have posted profiles; 79% of those include a photo; 32% have been contacted by a stranger. The only benefit Sieberg could cite was that Tom and Cindy spotted an invitation to a party with "a big fire, food, music, a huge dance party and a crazy amount of drinking." The party was broken up anyway by local police but because her parents asked Jane to skip it she was not there for the cops to send home.
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