Food For Thought - Veterans Day Edition

Well despite implications made by my last post, I actually have been very busy at school. My latest academic conquest has been a research paper for my Racism and Racial Identity class. Students were charged with exploring any topic that relates to racism and the concepts we're covering in class.

My program encourages students to find ways of relating research assignments back to possible professional goals and interests. Right now one of the career paths I'm considering after school is work with veteran populations—possibly as a therapist in the VA. So I decided to explore racism in mental healthcare for veterans. The full title of my paper is:

Racial Disparities in Access to Mental Health Services Among U.S. Veterans

Here's a little excerpt:

What become apparent are two faces of the same beast—two equal contributors to the racial inequity in access to mental health services among veterans. There is arguably a systematic flaw in the design of VA healthcare. The service connection method in no way addresses the socioeconomic differences that are entangled with racial and ethnic differences. Non-White veterans receive less care, and because they tend to be poorer they are more negatively affected by lack of service. Yet systematic problems aside, the presence of widespread individual bias is clear, too. Clinicians treat White veterans and non-Whites differently in diagnosis and treatment, almost always to the detriment of minority populations.

Through this research I got to learn about some of the flaws in the VA, and I also got to see the many ways in which the VA exceeds and outperforms other mental healthcare providers. The bottom line, though, is that there is a disturbing pattern of neglect towards veterans of all races and ethnicities, and especially towards veterans of color.

Right now over 130,000 veterans are homeless. In this year, a quarter million veterans will have experienced homelessness at some point in time. Many, many of these individuals suffer from untreated mental illnesses that prevent them from taking care of themselves. And veterans of color represent the poorest, most neglected men and women in this population.

As Veterans Day passes by I think we can all explore ways of caring for the ones that keep us safe. Honestly, I can't think of words to fully describe my gratitude towards these servicemen and servicewomen, so I won't try.

If you're interested, you can read my complete paper.

Also, consider donating to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

And I promise, my next blog post will be a little more lighthearted!

Earning my advanced social science degree and all I wrote was this stupid blog post

Most who know me well know that I'm an admitted news junkie. That said, I'll preface this blog post by saying I don't plan to write a lot about politics or current events here. If you want to talk politics I'd be more than happy to buy you a cup of coffee and discuss elections or healthcare or whatever. But I'll leave those conversations to the coffeehouse chat and not the blog.

Nonetheless, I do from time to time muse about where I get my news from. Newspapers and news magazines, political blogs—heck, even Twitter has become a legitimate news source these days.

But right now I want to focus on the major television news networks: CNN, Fox News, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and PBS. They are the most immediate and accessible news sources for the most Americans—so it seems their quality of reporting should be the best.

Note how I intentionally and painfully abstained from sarcasm just then.

Now it may be partly due to my new job—where I spend hours at a time working with a multitude of psychological assessments that measure various dimensions of human nature—but I feel like we need a method to quickly and roughly compare the all around caliber of these news networks.

So I'd like to introduce into the completely nonexistent field of news assessment a new measurement of my own design. I have tentatively titled it

The Jon and Kate Battery of Stature

The “J/K B.S.” operates on the following assumptions:

1. News sources will, from time to time, provide news coverage to the existential imbroglio that is the marriage of Jon and Kate Gosselin
2. Varying news sources will cover Jon and Kate in varying degrees (depth, scope, and sheer volume of unnecessary reporting)
3. Those news sources who cover Jon and Kate the most are probably the least deserving of your time and mine
   

Thus, we can expect an inverse relationship between the amount of Jon and Kate coverage and the overall quality of news.

I've operationalized and applied the J/K B.S. to the aforementioned news networks by searching their websites for the phrase “jon and kate” with the following results.

1. PBS News – 10 results
2. CBS News – 71 results
3. CNN – 187 results
4. ABC News – 365 results
5. MSNBC - 32,90o results
   
6. Fox News – 397,709 results

I'd like to think that this assessment of Stature might approximate the quality of journalism across American television. It suggests face validity, however more quantitative investigation may be appropriate.

P. S. – I strongly recommend The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS if you only have one hour to spare for news. If you have two, I'd throw in the Daily Show and The Colbert Report for good measure.

This blog post is dedicated to Will, for guilting me back onto the blog-writing wagon.