[mezentius]

I work in Hollywood. Like USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, the UCLA Center for Scholars & Storytellers is just another example of a political advocacy group using a university as cover for ideological messaging, under the auspices of “research.”

Note that both Annenberg and S&S rarely, if ever, publish the raw data used to draw these suspiciously blunt conclusions about media representation (in this case, about supposedly “dated and unrelatable romantic tropes”); they merely crank out glossy press releases designed to be regurgitated by overworked trade-magazine bloggers. Underneath these are lousy “self-reporting” surveys with data carefully massaged to fulfill an intended purpose.

There’s a lot of snake oil peddled in town, but this stuff irritates me the most, as it is often reported uncritically and discussed without any reflection on why these “studies” are conducted, or who funds them.