Posted 9:55 AM by Blah blah

Another example of mistreating a kid:

A Boy Genius? Mother Admits Faking Tests (NY Times):

"Justin Chapman was the smartest little boy in the world.

There were documents to prove it: An I.Q. test, given when Justin was 6, recording his score at 298- plus, the highest on record. A perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT. Another intelligence test, taken when he was 3, on which he maxed out the scale.

Based on such achievements, Justin enrolled in an online high school at 5, and at 6 he took courses at the University of Rochester in New York.

He met with Gov. George E. Pataki of New York. He was featured in a BBC documentary about child geniuses. He spoke at conferences about the special needs of highly gifted children....

But in an interview with The New York Times after a newspaper raised doubts about Justin's accomplishments, Ms. Chapman admitted that many of the records attesting to his superior intelligence were a sham. Ms. Chapman said she falsified the records of the I.Q. test given when Justin was 3. The SAT scores, she said, belonged to a former neighbor's son. She also said Justin had studied the manual for the Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale before taking the test in April 2000.

She said that Justin was unusually bright and that she was trying to open doors for him that would otherwise have remained closed.

'I didn't plan on it,' she said. 'It just happened, and I let things get out of control.'

The Rocky Mountain News reported on Feb. 13 that Justin had been hospitalized for psychiatric problems and had been taken from his mother and put in foster care, facts confirmed by documents provided to The Times. The article raised questions not only about Ms. Chapman's claims about her son but also about the methods used to assess Justin's I.Q. by the experts who pronounced him profoundly gifted."

[Hmm. I was considered "gifted" as a kid and went to special schooling. I wonder what that really means...]

Letterman Offer Was News to Chief of ABC News (NY Times) Peer behind the fierce competition and office politics of network TV news. To me, this is a sign of the hurt that media conglomeration, such as Disney owning ABC, would do to the quality of news. The ABC executives who handled this were clumsy and arrogant:
__________________________
David Westin, the president of ABC News, told his top executives yesterday morning that his bosses had blindsided him and failed to tell him that ABC wanted to remove his most prestigious program, Nightline, to make room for David Letterman.

People at the division said he was ashen and spoke of "the tremendous blow" the move would be for ABC News, with "ramifications for the entire division."

The fate of Mr. Letterman's show, which ABC is trying to lure from CBS, remained unclear yesterday, partly because Mr. Letterman left for a weeklong vacation. Still, that ABC was even considering taking aim at Nightline was seen as an ominous sign inside the news division, the latest of a number of slights and the most striking indication yet that the network's parent, the Walt Disney Company, would not hesitate to cut back on news to improve its balance sheet....

Disney executives were unflinching early yesterday. They insisted that they would not let what they considered to be a sentimental attachment to an aging news program get in the way of righting the corporate ship. Investors have expressed impatience with Disney's lagging share price as ABC, which it acquired for $19 billion in 1996, has lost more than 20 percent of its ratings from last year and fallen to third place.

ABC executives think that Mr. Letterman can help lift the network's fortunes, and they have little patience for the news division, which they have at times described as a beehive of sanctimony and overpriced star egos.

Mr. Letterman, 54, has made it clear that he will not go to ABC if his arrival directly leads to the departure of Mr. Koppel, 62. Still, ABC executives were making it clear that, regardless of the Letterman outcome, they do not necessarily think Nightline belongs at 11:35 p.m.

The question swirling around ABC News was whether network executives had risked irrevocably straining their relations with Mr. Koppel and the news division for a bid that was a long shot anyway or if they even cared....

Emotions were raw yesterday. In the world of network news, ABC's division is known as a particularly fractious place, where various fiefs reign, led by the anchors Peter Jennings, Ms. Walters, Diane Sawyer and Mr. Koppel. But it has been known to unite when its empire as a whole is threatened....

There was a degree to which ABC and Disney executives seemed confused by the fierce reaction from the news division. The corporate line was that Mr. Koppel could look upon a move from his time slot as an opportunity to do more in prime time, something executives said they were considering. They have said that they would not want the Nightline brand to go away entirely and that they do value Mr. Koppel's superior interviewing skills.

Lost in the debate, they said, was the focus on what really matters Mr. Letterman could do a lot to increase ratings and revenues in late night while perhaps driving a larger audience to Good Morning America, a big money maker for the news division. If viewers turn off their television sets on ABC, the theory goes, they will awaken to the network's morning show when they turn the sets back on. [Do they expect we are so lazy we can't even change the channel in the morning?]

ABC and Disney need help. The network's big television hit, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, is a shadow of its once dominant self. ABC entertainment executives failed to develop any big hits to capitalize on the brief success of Millionaire.