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 harmful, don’t just ban kids. Regulate the harms,” Feb. 25).
This isn’t the primary time widespread media has been illogically blamed. In 1954, psychiatrist Frederic Wertham printed “Seduction of the Harmless,” a e book 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 clarification and regarded Wertham as a crank. Marvel Comics editor Stan Lee recounted that Wertham “stated 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,’ folks took what he stated severely, and it began a complete campaign in opposition to comics.”
Spencer Grant, Laguna Niguel
