Legacy media, the blogosphere, and the intelligent design controversy

A friend wonders whether legacy mainstream media are having any better luck yet understanding what the intelligent design controversy is about. I replied saying that I am not sure that it matters, because their circulation is slowly but surely slipping. And so is their cultural significance. They are being replaced by the blogosphere, for better and worse.

Sometimes the coverage will be better and sometimes it will be worse. With the intelligent design controversy, for example, you are usually far better off reading the blogs or listening to audio of both sides than you are reading or viewing typical news coverage. That has been true ever since I started watching the controversy systematically in 2001.

In May of this year, I gave a workshop at the joint meeting of the Canadian Church Press and Roman Catholic Communicators of Canada on the blogosphere. There I noted,

The blogosphere is 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, according to sources, with about 70,000 new weblogs are created every day. A new weblog appears every second. Who blogs? - roughly 60 million, could double in the next year. Many blogs are read by nobody, some by thousands. On the average, about 200 people a day read mine.

Yes, the creation of new blogs will level off, of course. Yes, many blogs just disappear. And yes, many are of indifferent (or awful) quality. But don't mistake legacy media grousing about the blogosphere for prophecy. Don’' mistake what I am saying for prophecy either. Consider rather how the drift to new media impacts YOUR operations.

And I quoted,

“Scan the headlines of 2005 and one question seems inevitable: Will we recall this as the year when journalism in print began to die ?”
- Project for Excellence in Journalism, State of News Media

A newspaper is a boat, a highly evolved mechanism designed and built to float in water. Blogs are bikes, built to cruise in another environment. Now, you can pull a bunch of planking off a boat and add wheels and pedals, but that won't make it as light and maneuverable as a bike."

- Blogads’ Henry Copeland
(LA Times March 7, 2007)


Will print newspapers even exist twenty years from now? Judging by the pile of newspapers that stack up in my recycling bin in mint condition each week, the odds can't be good.

– Patrick Ruffini, The Information Hunter-Gatherers, March 10, 2007

Slowly but surely, the marketplace is coming to be dominated by a rising generation unaccustomed to the touch of newsprint at their fingerprints. It's not just that everything is moving to the Web. It's that the notion of broadcasting to the masses is dying. The audience used to passively consume content; now they're information hunter-gatherers, cobbling together a customized diet of information from the Web and their TiVo. To succeed in this environment, your media has to be interesting every time out or the viewer will time-shift to something else. That's different than the days when your name had to be Dan, Peter, or Tom, and the 6:30 time slot was your megaphone. – Patrick Ruffini, The Information Hunter-Gatherers, March 10, 2007

Generally, a related development is that legacy mainstream media are no longer able to simply control public perceptions to advance an agenda with which its owner, writers, or advertisers feel comfortable. Cornelia Dean of the New York Times was not able to get a persecution going against young earth geologist Marcus Ross, for example, though her article makes obvious the fact that she was trying. Increasingly, legacy media have been reduced to actually trying to find out what is going on in the intelligent design controversy.

Here, I talk about the way in which legacy media have functioned as the best friends of the intelligent design guys, totally against the media people's own intentions and wishes - ensuring that far more people now read ID books than ever would have otherwise. I'd love to write a book some time about how and why that happened, especially about the role of the evil wizards at the Discovery Institute (har, har) who have time and again - apparently effortlessly - made both negative legacy media coverage and the normal behaviour of frantic Darwinists work in their interests.

That is not, of course, a mystery, let alone a plot. I am uncertain about whether it even required exceptional intelligence. It required exceptional realism about one's own environment, of course - I would be inclined to call it hyperrealism, but that sounds too much like art gallery lingo. Anyway, back to work. I don't blog for a living, after all, and I have a couple more stories to put up before I can go back to my day job.

New blogs on the controversy between intelligent design and Darwinism

I am pleased to announce that CreationEvolutionDesign has just joined the list at your right of new blogs relevant to the ID controversy that balance the generally negative (and know-nothing) perspective of major media. Stephen E. Jones of Perth, Australia, is a Darwin doubter who has read more books than anyone I have ever heard of on the subject of evolution. He operated an excellent discussion group at Yahoo for several years. He accepts the evidence for common ancestry but does not think that the evidence really supports the idea that it all happened by natural law acting on chance events. He recently took a biology degree in order to better write his book, Problems of Evolution, which I am really looking forward to. So if you like this blog, and I am not around for some reason, go to that one.

(Note: If this is not the story you were looking for, see the Blog service note below or the stories listed in the sidebar. )


And ... if that is not enough, I have also linked to a couple of other new ones. Notice Darwinian Fundamentalism, featuring blogger Lawrence Selden, who says about himself only this, “I am a macroevolution agnostic. I used to accept evolutionary theory. Then I looked at the evidence. It became clear to me that macroevolutionary theory is built more on a priori philosophical assumptions than on evidence. Microevolution, on the other hand, is supported by the evidence. The distinction between the two is critical and is largely ignored, or not understood, by the media and general public.”

I like his approach. He asks, for example,

When will the mainstream media pick up on the fact that the roles have changed in the current evolution debates? The supporters of Darwinian theory show many of the characteristics of religious fundamentalists, and the critics of the theory are not appealing to scripture or religion, but are basing their arguments on scientific evidence. The Darwinists are lobbying for a "Darwin only" doctrine in public schools and want to ban any consideration of the weaknesses of the theory. The critics are actually lobbying for more teaching on evolution-- exposing students to the evidence for evolution and the evidence against and encouraging them to think critically and analyze the evidence for themselves.

Lawrence, legacy mainstream media do not understand obvious things like that because they have been whacked upside the head by the news revolution created by new media. The legacy media still behave as though 1) they can create truth and therefore 2) facts need their imprimatur in order to be true. Most of the many scandals plaguing the New York Times are rooted in that attitude. Don’t wait for them to change. Go boldly into the future.

And I must also commend to you Real Physics, operated by Meta-Jester, who claims that he aims at Total World Domination, but seems to content himself with great blogging on the ID controversy. For example, he debunks the idea that traditional Europeans assumed that the Earth was flat.

M-J sometimes addresses issues that are not clearly related, but presumably the man who aims at Total World Domination must be a generalist. Speaking for myself, I will settle for dominating the bottom of my intray.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Blog service note: Did you come here looking for any of the following stories?

- The op-ed by Catholic Cardinal Schonborn in the New York Times? Note also the Times's story on the subject, some interesting quotes from major Darwinists to compare with the Catholic Church's view, as expressed by the Cardinal, and an example of the kind of problem with Darwinian philosophy that the Cardinal is talking about.

- the Privileged Planet film shown at the Smithsonian, go here for an extended review. Please do not raise cain about an "anti-evolution" film without seeing it. If your doctor forbids you to see the film, in case you get too excited, at least read my detailed log of the actual subjects of the film. If you were one of the people who raised cain, ask yourself why you should continue to believe the people who so misled you about the film's actual content ...

- the showing of Privileged Planet at the Smithsonian, go here and here to start, and then this one and this one will bring you up to date.

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