Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

A recent study has suggested that autistic adults who have inhaled the hormone oxytocin do better at tasks that involve recognizing faces and throwing a ball around with others. While the sample size was quite small (13 people!), the study still suggests how oxytocin can help Aspie adapt to what neurotypical society expects of us. Unfortunately, the mainstream media has framed its reporting the story in highly problematic ways: this Washington Post article manages to combine most them.

The story’s headline tells us that a “[h]ormone-infused nasal spray [has been] found to help people with autism” but the lead tells us that oxytocin “can help those with autism make eye contact and interact better with others”. Leaving aside for the moment that the reporter seems to be drawing conclusions somewhat beyond what the study actually suggests, there’s still the issue of how helping the autistic is defined. Helping autistics here isn’t about making them happier: it’s about inducing behavior in them which makes other people more comfortable. That is what interacting “better” means.

Further along in the article, the focus shifts from adults to children even though it the subjects of the study are adults, which fits into a more general tendency to make adult autistics invisible:

But Sirigu was among those who said the finding should encourage more research on the potential benefits of oxytocin itself, especially for children. Administering the hormone soon after a child is diagnosed with autism might help him or her develop more normally, she said.

This shift cannot entirely be blamed on poor journalism since the quote is from Angela Sirigu, who led the study. This move to focusing on children also become a move towards focusing on a “cure”, totally ignoring the perspectives who do not believe that autistic tendencies should be eliminated.

Indeed, the reporter seems to have been unable to locate a single autistic person to ask for an opinion, relying instead on “advocates for families with children with autism” (see how removed from actual experience that is?) including Autism Speaks. Would it really have been that difficult to contact ASAN?

Reporters covering stories about autism need to start centering autistic people, autistic perspectives, and autistic needs instead of considering only what neurotypicals want of and for us.

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• ‘Love Hormone’ Oxytocin Shows Promise in Autism (abcnews.go.com)
• Nasal spray raises hope for autistics (telegraph.co.uk)
• Hormone oxytocin offers hope in treating mild autism (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Less Sensitivity to Hormone May Play Role in Autism (nlm.nih.gov)
• Party people: Gregarious types may have more oxytocin receptors (guardian.co.uk)
• Thin Line Between Love and Hate Stops at…Oxytocin? (healthmgmtrx.blogspot.com)
• The 5 Scariest Experiments That Scientists Are Working on Right Now (neatorama.com)
• Autistic People Don’t Like Hugs? Quick, Someone Tell Conor (autisminnb.blogspot.com)
• “A Bunch Of Social ‘Yak Yaks’”: Temple Grandin And Autism [Broad Spectrum] (jezebel.com)
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We’ve all heard about the potential for rumors to spread rapidly through social media, especially Twitter, and you’ve probably seen a false report of a celebrity death or two if you’re at all active in the same. As yesterday’s panic on the Potomac shows us, however, it isn’t only online media that is vulnerable to mistaken reporting. When networks run with unsubstantiated reports, however, the effect is quite different from when such things are spread primarily by citizen reporters tweeting.

Because supposedly reliable news agencies, starting with CNN, were reporting gunshots fired, the DC police department rushed to the scene, while flights at Reagan National Airport were grounded. I’m not sure that a trending topic on Twitter would have had such an impact, yet rumors instigated through Twitter tend to get fact-checked rather quickly through @ replies looking for verifiable sources.

If someone saying “bang bang” over a loudspeaker had started off a rumor about gunfire that was confined to social media, we would all be having a good laugh right now about how silly people were to confuse the two and how gullible the people who passed the story on were. Instead we’re getting a lot of talking-head outrage about the Coast Guard training on 9/11 and letters from networks justifying their coverage decisions. The coast guard is reviewing their procedures.

Now, maybe the Coast Guard should have been more sensitive to people’s fears. That said, the story shows the speciousness of arguing against social media as an information source because it is vulnerable to false information. It also calls into question how we decide which misinterpretations should be anticipated or, failing that, taken seriously.

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• Coast Guard to review exercise after scare (cnn.com)
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• What Happened (talkingpointsmemo.com)
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It is bad enough when an article on domestic violence ignores the victim, treating her as if she were nothing but the receptacle of a man’s unfortunate acting out, but this CNN story is far worse in that it sets the murderer up as a sympathetic figure. The headline itself, “Man goes from heroic husband to hammer-wielding wife killer”, sets Michael Ratley up as a tragic hero, a good guy brought down by a single flaw, an image supported by the defense referring to the murder as a “single, horrible snapshot” in a well-lived life. There is little mention of what that “snapshot” meant to the woman who was killed.

The heroism described in the headline refers to Ratley carrying his wife and child out of a burning trailer in December 2006, a little over a year before he would murder his wife. After describing this, the article asks “What changed a heroic husband into a hammer-wielding wife killer?” Notice that the structure of this question suggests that he was passive: something acted upon him to create a change. In fact, there didn’t even have to be a change. An abusive man desiring control might well save his wife from a fire. If you need to be in control, you certainly don’t want people around you dying randomly. (Then again, do we know how that fire started? The reporter didn’t bother to say.)

After relating his “heroism” and “fall”, the bulk of the article goes on to describing the feelings of the murderer’s family and how they came out to support him. The conclusion even uses his response to his family’s emotions as a way to illustrate his empathy:

His grandmother began sobbing. Family members comforted her until Cindy Ratley sat down next to her. The two cried and embraced for a couple of minutes. Michael Ratley looked over, saw his grandmother upset, and he, too, began to cry.

Somehow I doubt the empathy of a man capable of beating a woman to death. Was he crying because he saw his grandmother’s pain or merely because he knew he was going to be punished by losing all control over his life? The reporter’s opinion is problematically clear.

A recent poll suggests that while most Americans still believe that dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right thing to do, that belief is weaker among younger people. In reporting this story, the Associated Press provided a very slanted interpretation of the reasons for the generational difference. The only opinion cited was that of Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute who said:

Voters who remember the horrors of World War II overwhelmingly support Truman’s decision . . . Support drops with age, from the generation that grew up with the nuclear fear of the Cold War to the youngest voters, who know less.

Because of course there can be only two reasons to think that it was wrong to use a bomb that killed thousands of people instantly and left others with burns so severe that their skin hung off of them and their hands looked like claws: fear and ignorance. Actually, given that the fear comes from the possibility of nuclear annihilation and that Fat Man and Little Boy played a role in encouraging the nuclear arms race by demonstrating the power of such weapons on populated areas, it seems that it is a rational fear.

But let’s talk about ignorance: the fact is that it cuts both ways. I have no firsthand knowledge of the horrors of World War II, but I have taken the time to see them from a perspective that the vast majority of people who think the atomic bombings were just fine have not. I have been to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have heard the stories of the hibakusha.

Yes, I lack firsthand knowledge of the horrors of World War II, but I also lack exposure to the racist propaganda that fueled the U.S. war effort in the Pacific. I have not, at least not to the same degree as older Americans, been trained to view the Japanese as other-than-human and thus acceptable to kill en masse. I know that the Japanese did not operate with a hive mind during World War II, that people were often forced into the post-defeat mass “suicides” that have been used to support that idea, that there were dissenters who were jailed, that Christianity was one of the religions suppressed by the government during WWII yet Urakami Cathedral was at the center of the Nagasaki blast. One of the common justifications for the nuclear attacks was that a land invasion of Japan would have meant an obscene number of casualties because every Japanese citizen would have fought to the death; the truth is, however, that there were many people who would have gladly surrendered.

It is utterly offensive to suggest that those of us who see the atomic bombings as a crime do so out of ignorance. Worse than suggesting it is when a news organization with a duty to present stories objectively provides such statements as the only possible interpretation.

In this case, it is not the young who are most ignorant.

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