Newsweek’s Daniel Gross explains the Consumer Price Index (here’s the official BLS site) in a very simple video. I could do without the goofy sound effects, but it’s a good, 2 minute explanation of how the government tracks inflation.
Per David Simon’s Berkeley talk, though, the video doesn’t go into why this matters. Perhaps they’ll cover that in the next installment of the Economics 101 series.
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So should the media be prevented from displaying certain types of pictures from the war in Iraq? The Congress says yes. In Europe there is much less control of graphic war pictures and can be considered one major reason for public opposition to the war.
June 22nd, 2004 at 1:22 pm
Good point. Though after a point, everyone experiences compassion fatigue, in this country, I don’t think we’re anywhere close.
June 22nd, 2004 at 1:56 pm
Two points: first, public opposition to this war was pretty great before it even started, before any images really became an issue.
Second, it’s unclear whether images of coffins coming home (a specific type of war imagery) would have much negative impact on public perception of the war… a number of polls have noted that Americans are willing to accept casualties as a consequence of defending this country. They’ve also found that the number of casualties the public will accept is higher than what military commanders are usually willing to plan for.
So, I think that we’re just seeing a hold over of a bunch of guys who got stung by these photos in Vietnam (it seems that half the administration was in government back then). The problem then (as it is now) is that people disagree about the fundamental value of this particular war. The images themselves are, well, not really the issue.