Backed By The CDC
September 22, 2014 12:41 PM   Subscribe

The Atlantic pulls back the partition on Hollywood, Health, and Society, a CDC-funded clearinghouse for popular media to better understand modern medicine - and modern medical legislation like the Affordable Care Act.
posted by NoxAeternum (5 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
This seems like a great service to the entertainment industry. I'm sure they'd rather get stuff right than struggle to describe weirdly fictional things and have know-it-alls blog about how wrong they got stuff; and I'm sure that the CDC would rather them get it right the first time rather than release press releases ineffectively correcting the bad information that 10 million people got from last night's episode of House.
posted by entropone at 1:46 PM on September 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


I'm glad this exists... But I wish it were funded by the MPAA (and its television equivalent). I mean it's a service that is being used by the entertainment industry and paid for by the US taxpayer.

Still, if the alternative is nothing at all, I guess it's better the taxpayer paid for this than to have much more misinformation disseminating.

I promise I'm not actually a libertarian.
posted by el io at 2:28 PM on September 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


But Levi Russell, spokesman for the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, said inserting storylines about the law into TV shows is a little “creepy.”
Well, references to the Affordable Care Act are present in the article, but it's only one of the examples, and no one is "inserting" storylines about specific legislation with a partisan agenda, unless it's the writers and producers, and they can feel free to continue to do so with varying levels of inaccuracy whether or not this CDC-run agency exists.

If only daytime television (Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz) ran their information past the CDC, we'd... oh hell, they'd be out of business.
posted by mikeh at 2:46 PM on September 22, 2014 [3 favorites]


I understand the US government has been funding anti-drug messages in US shows for decades. That's creepy, this is potentially creepy.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:52 PM on September 22, 2014


In the link for the next post, "Spoiler Alert", we see many scenes with characters being killed (an obvious trope), most frequently with a single gunshot to the chest... I wonder if somebody could tell Hollywood's writers how often this provides neither an instant nor even a certain death, because it is a trope that bothers me. Oh, waitasecond, any factual information on guns will get the NRA all up in your business, and these quick-and-easy kills in the media really do help sell a LOT of guns.
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:27 PM on September 22, 2014


« Older No worms were harmed in the making of this video   |   Spoiler Alert Newer »


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