the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those "Baby Einstein" videos that did not make children into geniuses.
They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect.
"We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds," said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years.
If you're not wise to the scam, what you do is take a dubious connection between music and early childhood intelligence, overstate its conclusion beyond any bounds of plausibility, and sponge up a few hundred million dollars. (Ironically, the real baby Einstein was a late bloomer.)