Should CNN News be cancelled for its bad advice to the Duggars?

The media never miss a chance to engage in moral preening and they have found another golden opportunity in the Josh Duggar scandal. Duggar, a member of the Duggar family featured in the reality show "19 Kids and Counting," allegedly fondled several young girls while they were asleep when he was 14 years old.

The Duggars, of course, are a Christian family, and what's potentially even worse (in the media's eyes) is that they're politically conservative, so conservative it seems that they are against "LGBT rights."

Now on the one hand, it doesn't take a great deal of foresight to conclude that if you're featured in a reality show about a Christian family with 19 kids and a father named "Jim Bob," it probably isn't going to end well for you. Not with the media constantly trolling for scandalous fodder to gain ratings.

I confess to having no understanding whatsoever why anyone would consent to let reality TV cameras into his home to expose a family to public scrutiny to the extent the Duggars have. I don't see any circumstance in which that doesn't harm your family. And doing it with a family of 19 kids does little more than risk turning your family life into a freak show.

And I'm sorry, but having 19 (going on 20) kids and thinking something embarrassing isn't going to happen that is going to be broadcast across the country by a media trolling for scandals is simply delusional.

Had the Duggars not been reality TV stars, they could have saved Josh the embarrassment he is now undergoing, and saved their daughters the embarrassment of the speculation now swirling that they were among Josh's victims.

Those who live by Hollywood must die by Hollywood.

But let's remember that the media that is now parading its discovery before viewers is the same media that has helped facilitate the sexual harassment crisis in the military by putting women in positions that do little else other than make them more vulnerable to such harassment and who have yet to do any investigation of colleges that facilitate sexual harassment on their campuses by doing the same thing through their policies on campus living facilities, not mention outright verbal encouragement.

Apparently sexual harassment in these situations is just one of the costs we must bear on the way to progressive egalitarianism. Josh Duggar, on the other hand, gives them a stick by which to beat conservative Christians. How can they pass that up?

And in fact the worst outcome of these revelations is that it gives the media the chance to morally grandstand. They want their viewers to believe that they are concerned about the victims. But the victims apparently want to be left alone. Ten bucks says that if someone finds out the names of the victims, CNN will broadcast them to the nation to the abject embarrassment of the very people they claim to be standing up for.

Dr. Gail Saltz, one of CNN's go-to people when it comes to explaining sin away, claimed yesterday that the failure of victims in these kinds of cases to get counselling leads to anxiety, depression, and relationship difficulties later in life.

Now I'm just wondering: How are these problems helped when national news shows parade the violations against them before millions of viewers? It's keeping these things secret, says Saltz, that causes psychological harm. So, what? Broadcasting their victimization before the whole country is good?

Does CNN offer free psychological services to the people they harm through all the attention they draw to the victims of sexual crimes?

And then there is Josh, who, we are given to understand, could have been cured of his 14 year-old stupidity through "treatment." That, at least, is what Dr. Phil thinks. Dr. Phil, whose psychological hammer renders him incapable of viewing anything as other than a nail, thinks it was just a travesty that Josh wasn't given over to psychiatrists.

Christian counseling just doesn't cut it, he told Anderson Cooper last night. Apparently Dr. Phil and Dr. Saltz have discovered the cure to stupidity and sin, although they have yet to reveal exactly what it consists of. Maybe it's a proprietary thing.

Saltz claimed that Josh knowing that what he did was wrong was not enough and that if he understood why he did what he did, the likelihood of him doing it again would be greater.

But wait.

What is Dr. Saltz's success rate with her patients? If Josh never again did what he did to the five alleged victims when he was 14 years old (and there's no indication that he did), then the success rate of the Christian counseling he got would make the record of Dr. Phil and Dr. Saltz look ridiculous by comparison.