To the editor: Visitor contributor Jessica L. Schleider makes a convincing argument that blaming social media for kids’s issues is an oversimplification of the problem (“If social platforms are dangerous, don’t simply ban children. Regulate the harms,” Feb. 25).
This isn’t the primary time fashionable media has been illogically blamed. In 1954, psychiatrist Frederic Wertham revealed “Seduction of the Harmless,” a guide claiming comedian books led to juvenile delinquency. A part of his reasoning? He’d seen boys in reform college studying comedian books, a basic instance of placing the cart earlier than the horse.
The psychiatric group was largely not impressed with such a simplistic rationalization and regarded Wertham as a crank. Marvel Comics editor Stan Lee recounted that Wertham “mentioned issues that impressed the general public, and it was like shouting hearth in a theater, however there was little scientific validity to it. And but as a result of he had the identify ‘physician,’ individuals took what he mentioned critically, and it began an entire campaign towards comics.”
Spencer Grant, Laguna Niguel
