response to "TV is good for you" by Joel Waldfogel

Central argument: Cable television in rural India is having a distinctly helpful effect on women, by educating them and influencing them to get greater autonomy.

I disagree with Robert Jensen and Emily Oster who did a survey on the effects of cable television in India. I think that Indian television only corrupts the minds of innocent women. Additionally the argument that the survey proposes contains a fatal logical fallacy, it contains the “post hoc ergo ergo propter hoc fallacy”. A quickly developing country like India, where television has already become an integral part of urban life is rapidly expanding into more rural cultures. The soap operas shown on cable are addicting and often distract rural women from their daily routine, it encourages them to avoid important chores, and basically makes them lazier.

Becoming lazy may not sound all that bad, but in rural India where the peoples bread and butter comes from occupations such as farming which require intensive labour, becoming lazy could have fatal effects on the families and livelihood of these farmers. Watching Indian television also advocates urbanization; it shows tales of fantastic job opportunities and possibilities of leading a prosperous life in the cities. This in itself is a lie as villagers further populate the overpopulated and crowded cities, they fail to find adequate jobs and therefore end up living in one of Mumbai’s slums. The article mentions a popular Hindi television show “kyki saas bhi Kabhi bahu thi”, and makes a false analogy, another logical fallacy. It makes the assumption that all Indian television shows are about rich families living in Mumbai where woman are well educated and equal to men, there are other Indian television shows such as “Gullal” and “Bidai” which are based upon rural life and do encompass topics such as marital violence, and sexism. Though the Bollywood television industry generates over $2.5 billion every year, it is not necessarily good for the public of India.

Another error in the writers argument is the “post hoc ergo ergo propter hoc fallacy” or because X happened before Y, Y happened because of X. Many statistics that are represented in the writers essay depend on this logical fallacy. Statistics such as After a village got cable, women's preference for male children fell by 12 percentage points. The average number of situations in which women said that wife beating is acceptable fell by about 10 percent” and “When cable came to town, boys' rates of school attendance stayed the same, while girls between the ages of 6 and 10 were 8 percent more likely to go to school. India is a rapidly developing country where changes like these are bound to happen, just because someone put television in a rural environment doesn’t mean that all these changes took place because of television. What about other, more obvious factors like an increasing frequency of schools in villages in India, workshops held in villages to help women gain more autonomy etc. saying that television brought about such serious changes in villages is almost as absurd as saying that “before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons, hence nuclear weapons came about due to women getting a vote.”