Michael Medved drowns by numbers - author of "Hollywood Vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values - Cover Story

Humanist, Jan-Feb, 1993 by Brian Siano

"This book will undoubtedly outrage a heavy majority of show-business professionals. I am painfully aware that one of the consequences of its publication will be my potentially permanent estrangement from some of the thoughtful and well-intentioned people in Hollywood I have been proud to call my friends. In their view, I am a traitor . . . and the criticisms I raise here are misguided, offensive, even dangerous."

Michael Medved uses this traditional crank's gambit at the very beginning of his new book, Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values. Medved styles himself as a maverick prophet-heretic - Lot to Hollywood's Sodom - while the rest of the movie industry is a bubbling slime-pit of fanatical "loony-left" figures who refuse to provide the public with the family-oriented films it demands. A dust-jacket blurb by conservative economist George Gilder sums up Medved's critique in a nutshell: "Hollywood is forfeiting both profits and paying customers in a crazy campaign to foist its own loony lifestyles and muddled world views on the American people."

Central to this demonization of the film industry is Medved's citation of market data. "These statistics," he writes, "available upon request from the Motion Picture Association of America, tell a dismal tale of an industry that has needlessly and and stupidly sacrified the majority of its available audience." These statistics, for Medved, are the equivalent of Galileo's telescope: the facts that the "loony-left" fanatics in Hollywood refuse to consider.

This is Medved's one great reach for empiricism. The thesis presented in Hollywood vs. America is not just a matter of opinion, he argues, but qualitative, statistical fact. Thus he can dismiss any objections to his book as the predictable whinings and ravings of liberals and loony-lefties, because, after all, he has facts that back him up.

On close and skeptical examination of this Gordian knot of statistics, one finds disturbing instances of inadequate documentation, unsupported assumptions, skewed interpretations, and sweeping claims based upon tiny sample sizes, as well as at least one instance of outright misrepresentatirn. Medved's use of statistics is so incompetent - and his ideological agenda so extreme and uncompromising - that one has a hard time believing that this was not intentional.

In Hollywood vs. America, Medved charges that the movie industry is guilty of fraud on a massive scale. "I am increasingly convinced," he writes, "that industry leaders deliberately emphasize the numbers on |box office grosses' in order to deliberately mislead the public (and themselves) and to disguise the depth of their dilemma." But nowhere in the book does Medved reprint the MPAA data in a direct and concise manner. Unless readers are willing to call the MPAA (at 212-840-6161) and request the material (U.S. Economic Review and Incidence of Motion Picture Attendance), or raise a few critical questions, they have to take Medved at his word.

Discussing the MPAA data for the year 1990, Medved writes: "Significantly, 45 percent of all Americans are identified as |infrequent' moviegoers (less than twice a year) and a full 33 percent declared that they never go to the movies." This ambiguous sentence strongly implies that, according to the motion-picture industry's own data, 78 percent of the American public either stays away from movie theaters entirely or ventures in, at best, maybe once or twice a year. But this is not true, according to Medved's own source - the MPAA figures. The actual breakdown is depicted in Table I (I have added the figures for 1989 and 1991 to provide context).

             Table I
     Americans as Moviegoers
Frequency of attendance          1989   1990   1991
Frequent                         24%    21%     21%
  (at least once a month)
Occasional                       32     34      34
  (once in 2 to 6 months)
Infrequent                       10     12      12
  (less than once in 6 months)
Never                            32     33      32
Not reported                      2      1      1

Notice that, in the figures for 1990 that Medved uses, only 12 percent of the public is identified as "infrequent" moviegoers. So where does Medved get his 45 percent figure? My guess is that he added the "infrequent" and "never" categories to, gether and caued this new total "infrequent." This allows Medved, in effect, to count the 33 percent "never" category twice and leave the misleading impression that the "infrequent" and "never" categories, combined, constitute 78 percent of the public.

Why this misrepresentation? Because, if you re-examine Medved's assertion that Hollywood has "needlessly and stupidly sacrificed the majority of its available audience," the MPAA data show just the opposite. In the MPAA's 1990 figures, the "frequent" and "occasional" categories - the people who still go to the movies on a regular basis - constitute 55 percent of the public. Last I checked (and nine out of 10 statisticians agree), 55 percent is a majority.