Defund PBS

    Paula Kerger, CEO of PBS, wasted no time in condemning President Trump’s May 2 executive order cutting federal funding for the public broadcaster. Defunding her organization, she declared, “threatens our ability to serve the American public with educational programming.” Only days earlier, however, PBS had aired just the kind of ideologically biased documentary that demonstrates why Trump is right, for a change, to defund the network.

    The documentary, Critical Condition: Health in Black America, focuses on a real and important problem: on average, health outcomes for black Americans are worse than those for people of other races. But instead of addressing the real causes of this crisis—namely group differences in diet, exercise, and health literacy—the documentary settles on the frighteningly false and simplistic narrative peddled by activists that all differences in health outcomes must be caused by racism.

    The documentary largely focuses on racial differences in maternal mortality—in particular, on differences in the incidence of preeclampsia—as evidence of systemic racism. But the biological predisposition for preeclampsia in black women, well-established in the medical literature, is never mentioned. In other words, the documentary misleads black mothers and gives a high-five to crappy social science over the rigorous research that could actually reduce racial disparities.

    The documentary also fixates on racism, of course, in its discussion of medical algorithms, claiming that adjusting for race in tests of biological functioning serves no purpose other than reinforcing race as a biological construct. This is...what’s the diplomatic word I’m looking for...oh, yes...bullshit. Race-based adjustments demonstrably improve the precision of these clinical algorithms. For example, African ancestry is associated with lower lung volumes and higher levels of muscle mass. When clinical algorithms don’t acknowledge these realities, they result in less accurate diagnoses of asthma, kidney disease, and other conditions. I mean, I’m not the smartest guy at our breakfast diner…but even I understand that. 

    The antidotes that the documentary proposes for the alleged systemic racism in medicine are equally… um…unscientific. (Look at me, Mom! I didn’t use the word “bullshit”.) This presentation gives a fawning depiction of “implicit bias training” at Charles Drew University of Medicine, accompanied by a call for medical schools to increase their adoption of such activities. But research shows that implicit bias is neither detectable, nor fixable. Trainings on this topic are thus completely unproductive—though they do serve to enrich the “diversity industrial complex.” Man, I wish I had come up with that phrase.

    The documentary also calls for a greater focus on the racial composition of the health-care workforce. It arrives at this conclusion by citing research that allegedly shows minority patients receive better care from racially concordant doctors. This is yet, in this humble laymen’s opinion, another false claim that relies on a combination of cherry-picked studies and ideologically driven, methodologically unsound research. 

    Further, the false conclusion to which this flimsy evidence would lead us is the re-segregation of medicine: black patients would see only black physicians, white patients would see only white physicians, blah, blah, blah, blah. I really hate stupid. This is racial demagoguery masquerading as medical science.

    It is bad enough that we have government-owned/public television and radio networks. Please, leave that to the totalitarian regimes of the world. But until we are free of this blemish, remember that the above documentary is far from the only example of PBS putting radical and racial ideology (ideology that dehumanizes both blacks and whites) ahead of its mission to educate without partisan fear or favor. Nevertheless, its timing has beneficially performed at least one public service, by proving that American taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to fund the network.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com