Prestigious think-tank says - Blame It On TV

RAND corporation identifies a correlation between teen exposure to televised sexual content and teenage pregnancy. My Baloney-O-Meter immediately rings an alarm bell. While disapproving of excessive sexualization of any media production aimed at adolescents I believe the root of the problem at hand is not in TV or any other factor external to the family.

If parents aren't present and prepared to tackle the important issues with their children before they arise trouble is around the corner. I don't know whether RAND included parental education about human sexuality in their calculations, but I'd bet my money this factor would potentially outweigh TV content as an influence on teenage pregnancy rates.

So why does RAND seem to want to spread the blame so widely that no-one's guilty in the end? Here's a probable explanation:

While RAND strives to be middle-of-the-road ideologically, the more conservative scholars at RAND tend to work on military studies, while the more liberal scholars tend to work on domestic studies. Because the military studies are sometimes classified and often more mundane than the domestic studies, the media and members of Congress tend to cite the domestic studies disproportionately. As a consequence, RAND appears liberal when judged by these citations. [...] think of RAND as two think tanks: RAND I, the left-leaning think tank which produces the research that the media and members of Congress like to cite, and RAND II, the conservative think tank which produces the research that they do not like to cite.

The take-home message, therefore, is take all research with a pinch of salt and before blaming TV and the entire world one should look at one's own reflection