The Morning Meeting with Al Tompkins is a daily Poynter briefing of story ideas worth considering and other timely context for journalists, written by senior faculty Al Tompkins. Sign up here to have it delivered to your inbox every weekday morning.
Before you dismiss the findings of this study, know that it was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse and it involved more than 2,000 children. The study found that kids who play video games for three hours or more per day showed increased cognitive brain functions. But the study does not prove that playing games produces better brain functions, only that kids who do play seem to test better.
“This study adds to our growing understanding of the associations between playing video games and brain development,” said NIDA Director Nora Volkow, M.D. “Numerous studies have linked video gaming to behavior and mental health problems. This study suggests that there may also be cognitive benefits associated with this popular pastime, which are worthy of further investigation.”
University of Vermont professor Bader Chaarani, told NPR that the study suggests a couple hours of video game play may be beneficial.
There is obviously a negative outcome that results from extended screen time on the mental health and the physical health. However, if that kid is spending one, two or three hours on video gaming, maybe there are some benefits, as our data suggests. These benefits could not be seen if that kid is doing or spending time on other forms of screen time, like texting or watching TVs or YouTube, which are considered more as passive screen time forms.
Axios also summarized some of the findings:
- The study is inconclusive over whether games deliver cognitive benefits or if those with cognitive benefits sought out games.
- “While we cannot say whether playing video games regularly caused superior neurocognitive performance, it is an encouraging finding,” the study’s lead author, Bader Chaarani, said in an NIH report of the findings.
- The researchers also didn’t test whether the type of game kids played made an impact and encouraged further investigation to see if, say, action games yield the same results as puzzle games.
- The report adds to a body of research suggesting that playing video games, a pastime often dismissed as frivolous, unhealthy or even dangerous, may impart health benefits and that some games can even be used as medicine.
Should the U.S. government ban TikTok? One FCC Commissioner says “yes”
One Federal Communications Commissioner, Brendan Carr, says it is time for The Council on Foreign Investment in the U.S. should take action that would ban TikTok. Carr’s concern is that the Chinese-owned company, which has 200 million downloads in the U.S., opens Americans to spying by the Chinese. The U.S. government became concerned enough about the security issues that U.S. soldiers are banned from downloading the app. In August, The Washington Post reports, the House of Representatives’ chief administrator warned House staff not to use the “high-risk” app. But many still do.
The FCC does not have the authority to regulate TikTok but as Axios points out, Congress does listen to the commissioner. Carr told Axios in an interview, “I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban.” Other interview highlights:
- Carr highlighted concerns about U.S. data flowing back to China and the risk of a state actor using TikTok to covertly influence political processes in the United States.
- There simply isn’t “a world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it’s not finding its way back into the hands of the [Chinese Communist Party],” Carr said.
- Carr sent letters to Apple and Google in June asking the companies to remove the apps from their stores due to concerns about data flowing back to China.
All of this may sound familiar. In 2020, President Trump tried to ban TikTok then changed his mind and said it should be sold to a U.S. buyer. Neither happened. The Washington Post produced a deep dive into the conflict.
The attack of the apartment scammers
As if it is not hard enough to find an apartment you can afford, the new challenge is that scammers are swindling people, getting them to send a security deposit or advanced rent for units that do not exist or that the scammer does not own.
The Federal Trade Commission describes how some of the scams work:
Some scammers hijack a real rental or real estate listing by changing the email address or other contact information and placing the modified ad on another site. The altered ad may even use the name of the person who posted the original ad. In other cases, scammers have hijacked the email accounts of property owners on reputable vacation rental websites.
Other rip-off artists make up listings for places that aren’t for rent or don’t exist and try to lure you in with the promise of low rent, or great amenities. Their goal is to get your money before you find out.
The FTC has some advice on how to avoid being taken in by hustlers.
How to investigate who is appearing in a county’s court system
The Marshall Project presents us with an example of the kind of reporting that I wish more newsrooms would attempt. The Marshall Project investigated the Cuyahoga County, Ohio (Cleveland) court system and learned:
The vast majority of defendants who appear in Cuyahoga County courtrooms are not there for the first time. A new analysis by The Marshall Project found that almost 70% of the county’s nearly 70,000 criminal court cases from 2016 through the end of 2021 featured a defendant with at least one prior charge on their record. Nearly a third of the county’s court cases involve defendants with at least five prior criminal cases — and (Deshawn) Maines has had more than 30 cases since the early 1990s.
The analysis shows that many of these defendants are not hardened, violent criminals. Police and prosecutors warn that judging defendants just on the crimes they’ve been convicted of can understate their dangerousness, given how many people take plea deals for lesser crimes than the ones they were originally charged with. Still, in either case, most of these defendants are not being accused of committing serious violent crimes that would result in lengthy sentences. Instead, they cycle through the courts every year or two to face the types of charges that earn them probation or brief stints in prison. They serve their time and are released, then wind up back in court again on similar criminal charges.
(The Marshall Project)
The figures show that prisons and jails are not effective in keeping people from re-offending.
The analysis shows that these defendants first encounter the court system as teenagers or young adults — the vast majority of them first faced criminal charges before the age of 25 — typically for crimes such as drug possession, petty theft, burglary, breaking and entering, or receiving stolen property. In many cases, their entire criminal records contain only these types of infractions, committed repeatedly between stints of incarceration.
The Marshall Project’s data shows the need for a more specialized response to criminal behavior, for example, drug courts that attempt to find treatment programs for people with addictions rather than sending them to prison, untreated. Those defendants tend to come out of incarceration only to commit more serious crimes.
One former prosecutor compared the result to the lesson of Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables”: Once you’re in the system, it’s impossible to escape. “Once you have one felony conviction on your record,” said Cullen Sweeney, the county’s chief public defender, “everything is harder for you.”
