How to get moderated for making a polite request at Fox News

A friend tells a familiar story:

I see in today's FOX science/tech section, there's a blurb about how creationism is still being advocated in H.S. biology classes. Predictably, the author has equivocated creationism with ID. I sent the author of the article this very brief message, and also posted it on the comments section, but somebody flagged my message and all future attempts to post were thwarted by a moderation notice. [emphasis added]

Here’s the offending notice:

Ms/Mrs Jennifer Welsh, if you will kindly look at the definition of Intelligent Design put forth by its main proponents (www.intelligentdesign.org is a good place to start), you will see that ID does not depend on any religious narrative (as found in the Bible) and thus has no religious premise. In contrast, creationism is a creation account that depends on some religious creation narrative (like in the Bible) and begins with a religious premise (God created). As you can see, ID is distinct from creationism, and is thus not religious or creationism.


Please, stand up for intellectual and journalistic integrity. Please correct your article to reflect the actual definition of Intelligent Design.

My friend misunderstands the nature of popular media. Ms. Welsh and colleagues have zero interest in knowing that design no more means creation, than painting a picture means creating the paint and canvas from thin air before one begins. Evidence of design is not evidence of creation, but it is real and detectible because it adds high levels of information.

But a whole generation was raised on elephant art, chimpanzee trample art, food fight art, “whatever he did is art”. No wonder they wouldn’t understand that design is not creation, just as art is about design, not making a “creative” mess.

Common sense distinctions that seem evident to my friend are way above the pop science media IQ grade.

For example, here’s a generic story: "Origin of life scientist says final answer expected in next decade" (= recycle the story from 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010 ..., same schtick, new white coats)

Success in the pop science business depends critically on either not being smart enough to ask the obvious question or - as I suspect - being smart enough not to ask.

Just go elsewhere for your news.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Social changes that may impact the intelligent design community: Media

American scholar Victor Davis Hanson recently pointed out that the university as a standard setter of any kind is coming under well-deserved scrutiny, along with its instruments, such as peer review and tenure.

But he also mentions the obvious,

Americans no longer count on their news to be filtered and shaped by the Associated Press or the New York Times. Nor do millions have it read to them in the evening by CBS, ABC or NBC anchorpersons -- not with the Internet, cable news and talk radio. Matt Drudge's website, "The Drudge Report," reaches far more Americans than does CBS anchor star Katie Couric.

That’s true, but a broader way of looking at it is, today the news audience decides what is news. When I was young, there were only a few established news sources other than rumour. Now there are hundreds. If CBS anchor star Katie Couric isn’t today’s Huntley-and-Brinkley, it’s because her audience is limited to those who agree with her interpretation of news. Those who don’t can find the basic facts, but differently interpreted, elsewhere.

There was a time when, if you wondered whether the multiverse or the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution or “you’re nothing but a pack of neurons” view of the mind make any sense, you would not have had access to the scholarly literature that provides another look. Or only with considerable effort. So it just sunk in. Now, alternative viewpoints are easy to find.

Put simply, the mere fact that pop science rags are smitten with ultra-Darwinists, cosmology cranks, and mind-is-mud zealots no longer means you can’t find an informed alternative perspective on these issues.
There was never a better time for constructive takedowns of nonsense.

But Hanson warns,

... we also are seeing the waning of an old established order. And the resulting furor suggests that the old beneficiaries are not going quietly into that good night.

No indeed. True to form, they want the government to fund and protect them. Which amounts to saying that old media want the people who pointedly don’t watch , listen, or read them to pay for the right to ignore them.

Flying reptile egg soon to be a major movie ...

Adult pteranodon fossils from Royal Ontario Museum.
Courtesy  Kenn Chaplin from Toronto

Jonathan Amos reports at BBC News (20 January 2011) on a "Fossil female pterosaur found with preserved egg". Wonderful news, and note this:

The egg indicates this ancient flying reptile was a female, and that realisation has allowed researchers to sex these creatures for the first time.


Writing in Science magazine, the palaeontologists make some broad statements about differences in pterosaurs, including the observation that only males sported a head-crest.

"Broad" statements indeed, about the head-crest. They couldn't really be sure unless they could sex a flock, and there's a risk of being led off course.

The state of the egg's shell suggests it was well developed and that Mrs T must have been very close to laying it when she died.

CreationSafaris has an interesting comment on the risks of storytelling:

Actually, it was Daddy Darwinopterus taking his turn sitting on the egg. Back then, you see, pterosaurs shared parenting responsibilities. How do we know? We don’t, and neither do the reporters ...

The sad thing is, this find is so good, why mess with empty speculations?

If and when The New York Times finally tanks ... what will it mean for intelligent design?

Here's my MercatorNet column about the decline of traditional media (known to bloggers as "legacy mainstream media"). Anyone interested in the intelligent design controversy should think carefully about how the media are changing .

I don't accept the thesis that the old media declined because they were partisan. Rather they became more ridiculously partisan as they were declining.

Single-minded partisanship is - in a free society - usually an outcome of consumer choice. People can get their news from lots of sources. So if they choose your source, you can develop the story as you like.

But - by contrast - how many air traffic controllers are permitted to bug pilots with their opinions about politics and religion? How many weather forecasters would last long if they likewise bugged farmers seeking data on the tornado watch?

So the tsunami of consumer choices in media fuels partisanship - but also opportunity.

The decline of big legacy media means the decline of the Big Controlling Story. You know - four legs good, two legs bad - as George Orwell put it, immortally, in Animal Farm. The story that writes itself for the 12:00 pm deadline, and no one gives a moment's thought to possibilities like:

1. It's not as simple as that.
2. Things may have changed.
3. The old guys might be wrong.
4. We may need to add to our panel of reliable experts (and maybe drop some).

The decline of the tired old Darwin lobby sources in favour of broader ones can certainly help the intelligent design theorists get a fairer hearing.

For more, go here.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Science and media: It helps not to be an arrogant bastard

From the recent Pew Report, we learn:

Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media
Scientific Achievements Less Prominent Than a Decade Ago (July 9, 2009)

While the public holds scientists in high regard, many scientists offer unfavorable, if not critical, assessments of the public’s knowledge and expectations. Fully 85% see the public’s lack of scientific knowledge as a major problem for science, and nearly half (49%) fault the public for having unrealistic expectations about the speed of scientific achievements.

A substantial percentage of scientists also say that the news media have done a poor job educating the public. About three-quarters (76%) say a major problem for science is that news reports fail to distinguish between findings that are well-founded and those that are not. And 48% say media oversimplification of scientific findings is a major problem. The scientists are particularly critical of television news coverage of science. Just 15% of scientists rate TV coverage as excellent or good, while 83% say it is only fair or poor. Newspaper coverage of science is rated somewhat better; still, barely a third (36%) of the scientists say it is excellent or good, while 63% rate it as only fair or poor.

Well, if it's not their job to educate the public, it's not the news media's either. Story of my life: There is only so much you can do in 750 words.

By the way, if news reports distinguished between findings that are well founded and findings that are not, all but 5% of everything written on evolutionary psychology could hit the recycler, bypassing the press.

It would suit me fine. There might be space for something more educational than "The gene that makes you want to shop" and "The brain module that makes you tip more." But is that what the U.S. scientists really want? I've yet to get a straight answer out of many of them.

Overall, the American scientists come off as legends in their own minds, believing they are much better than anyone else worldwide - we heard it from them first, remember?

Associated Press actually corrects error re ID controversy

A friend writes to say that Associated Press actually corrected one of its errors in covering the intelligent design controversy (February 27, 2009):

Associated Press Corrects Misreporting on Iowa Evolution Academic Freedom Bill

The Associated Press has corrected an inaccurate article about the Iowa Academic Freedom bill which had stated that "The bill asserts that teaching religious theories of evolution falls under academic freedom. It would let teachers at all education levels teach religious theories as science and forbid them from discounting non-science based answers from students." The bill, of course, says precisely the opposite, as it expressly states: “This section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.” Thankfully, after being shown the actual text of the bill, the AP realized that it was erroneous to claim that the bill allows the teaching of “religious theories” and it has now printed a correction stating:

In a Feb. 26 story about a legislative bill that protects criticism of evolution, The Associated Press reported erroneously that the measure would let educators teach religious theories as science. The bill would prohibit promotion of religious doctrine, and the question of whether religious-based arguments would be allowed in classrooms is a matter of debate among supporters and opponents.

He comments,

This just shows that when the media uncritically repeats the talking points of Darwinist critics of academic freedom, that the truth is not heard. The AP should be commended for fixing their error.

Most won't, of course, because they have nothing to gain from a full, fair and free discussion of the relevant issues. For one thing, many media people would need to learn things they do not really want to know.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Why newspapers are dying?

The Chicago Sun-Times is the latest to go under the water, and I do not mean a Southern Baptist baptism:

Early motions approved in Sun-Times bankruptcy

By RANDALL CHASE – 22 hours ago

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Lawyers for the Sun-Times Media Group Inc. said Wednesday the company's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing could result in either a restructuring or a sale.

The owner of the Chicago Sun-Times, which filed its petition on Tuesday, listing $479 million in assets and $801 million in debt, is the fifth newspaper publisher to seek bankruptcy protection in recent months.

On Wednesday, Judge Christopher Sontchi approved first-day motions in the case, allowing the company to pay employees and vendors, and to use its existing cash management system.

And here columnists Floyd and Mary Beth Brown attempt to cope with the death of newspapers, assigning blame:

We think the newspaper's killer is more profound and not only the result of technology changes. A politically correct and liberal-biased newspaper industry that engages in censorship is the real reason for the industry's woes and decline. Many so-called "mainstream" newspapers are biased in favor of political liberalism, thus driving those who want a more complete reporting of the news to the Internet.

I dispute this diagnosis.

Many people hardly notice the slant of news any more. Perhaps they should, but that is another matter. Most people in Canada have listened to socialist-slanted news for decades and paid no attention to the slant, whether they support it or not. They just accept that socialism is how news will always slant, and we must accept it. But so?

In my own view, the critical thing to see is that modern news gathering methods do not offer a special advantage to the professional, as opposed to the amateur. Not when you can video record on your private cell phone or buy a camcorder on your charge card and load up your results on YouTube.

It's a different world now. That's just a fact. ...

Of course, some people are amateurs in their approach to news gathering. But that's always been true - and some apparent amateurs have enjoyed vast cred and six-figure jobs.

Example: Dan Rather should have realized that in a hard-fought election campaign, the bait he was offered in 2004 - that George W. Bush was supposedly a bad pilot in the US Air Force in the early 1970s - was just too easy.

Someone would likely have snaffled that treat in the previous election cycle - 2000, not 2004 - if it had been any good.

So Bush may not have been a good president - well, people will debate that for decades. But he was apparently a good pilot. He flew planes, and didn't crash them. And if you are a pilot, what else matters?

What's really happening seems fairly obvious to me: There is no longer a system that controls who can enter the news gathering profession.

So people who want to be in this field must learn to live with that fact. And justify why we should be paid for our work while others do it only for glory or for advancement in some other career or for getting up other people's noses ...

I think that a case can certainly be made for professionalism. But it must be made with the full awareness that there are many talented amateurs out there.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

Intelligent design and the old media - a tour of the old media attic

Last night, the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C. offered a panel discussion on the theme of the book, edited by an old friend Paul Marshall, Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion.

In the book, which covers a wide range of issues, one of the listed author contributors, Roberta Green Ahmanson, talks about what happens when journalists morph into censors of the news that involves the intelligent design controversy:

In the Columbia Journalism Review, Chris Mooney and Matthew C. Nisbet argued that intelligent design did not deserve to be covered at all. Their concern was not whether any reporters had implied that intelligent-design arguments were true; rather, he argued that some journalists had actually reported what the arguments were. Mooney and Nisbet insisted that such arguments were really religious arguments and were, therefore, not only nonscientific, but could not be counted as arguments at all. They concluded that intelligent design is "a sophisticated religious challenge to an overwhelming scientific consensus." Therefore, "journalistic coverage that helps fan the flames of a nonexistent scientific controversy (and misrepresents what's actually known) simply isn't appropriate."(p.168)

In their view, journalists are not to report what is happening but only what they have decided it is "appropriate"for their readers and listeners to know.

Wow. Why move to a surviving communist regime when you can have the same censorship services at home in the West ...

See also:

Popular media and the intelligent design controversy: When reporters write what they "know"

Religion and the media: Why it doesn't pay to be just plain vindictive

The intelligent design community and the media revolution - an old hack's thoughts

Popular media and the intelligent design controversy: When reporters write what they "know"

Last night, the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C. offered a panel discussion on the theme of the book, edited by an old friend Paul Marshall, Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion.

By the by, in Chapter 8, "Getting Religion in the News Room," Terry Mattingly discusses a recent "dropped ball" in coverage of the intelligent design controversy:

Consider one of the most loaded terms in religion news - "fundamentalist". In a New York Times story, reporter Jodi Wilgoren described the beliefs of Discovery Institute fellows highly critical of Darwinian evolution. In the final-edition version of the story, Wilgoren wrote: "Their credentials - advanced degrees from Stanford, Columbia, Yale, the University of Texas, the University of California - are impressive, but their ideas are often ridiculed in the academic world. ... [Most] fellows, like their financiers, are fundamentalist Christians, though they insist their work is serious science, not closet creationism." But the group included Episcpalians, Catholics, Jews, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Baptists, and several strains of Presbyterianism. What does the world "fundamentalist" mean in this context? (p. 148)

It means a person to whom Jodi Wilgoren considers herself immeasurably superior, even though she has probably not got the least idea why anyone would doubt the Big Bazooms theory of evolution. Mattingly continues,

On top of that, a bible of journalism - the Associated Press Stylebook - warns against using the divisive term in precisely this manner. It states: "fundamentalist: the word gained usage in an early 20th century fundamentalist-modernist controversy within Protestantism. In recent yeas, however, fundamentalist has to a large extent taken on pejorative connotations except when applied to groups that stress strict, literal interpretations of Scripture and separation from other Christians. In general, do not use fundamentalist unless a group applies the word to itself."

Apparently, the Times had to retreat on this one, and it offered a correction in the digital archives. Mattingly comments further,

To avoid having to make that correction, all that was neecdd was to consider the Associated Press Stylebook or allow members of the group to describe their own ideas and beliefs, rather than using labels assigned to them by their enemies? (Pp. 148-49)

Well, I don't know. Given that the whole point of the Times's coverage is to suck up to the DI group's enemies and to reassure those enemies that nothing is happening - nothing that can't be contained by propaganda and crackdowns - why not just continue to use the labels? And when the group's enemies can no longer pay for the persecution, hit on the government!

Think that won't happen? Look here where Jonah Goldberg notes,

... journalistic Brahmins, who last year would have spontaneously combusted at any hint of government meddling in the Fourth Estate, now openly debate whether we should revive the Federal Writers' Project to give jobs to scribes thrown out in the cold by newspaper downsizing.

I myself have had to leave at least one prominent Canadian writers' organization because members are obviously far more interested in writers' welfare than intellectual freedom. So yes, it is in the air.

Never mind, I have a trade for Terry Mattingly: Here Wilgoren's colleague Elisabeth Bumiller substitutes "biblical" for "biological" when interviewing a Discovery Institute fellow - and can you guess the results?

Honestly, as I have said here, I think legacy media will either go under or get legislation that forces everyone to listen to them. In which case, further discount anything you hear from them.

The intelligent design community and the media revolution - an old hack's thoughts

When assessing media coverage of the intelligent design controversy, the first thing you should do is forget what defenders of legacy mainstream media say about their media. You've already heard it all anyway: "We're objective." "We're not biased." "We only report the facts." Et cetera.

Not only isn't that true, but it couldn't possibly be true, as I will explain below. And it wouldn't be a good thing if it were true.

Modern media grew up self-consciously aware of their key role in promoting materialist ideas. You know the sort of thing: "Science has shown/research has demonstrated/studies have shown" .. what? The Big Bazooms theory of evolution?

Due to the rise of citizen-directed, Internet-based, new media, they currently face a crisis of sinking readership and advertising revenues.

They may respond by trying to keep control over who defines what is news and who reports it. In that case, citizen-directed media - the sort that most of the intelligent design community uses now - might have to fight for their existence.

Having given some thought to these matters, I offer some reflections and recommendations:

Part: 1: Here is what happened up to about 2000: Believing that materialism is the truth, many journalists assume that their role is to promote materialism at the expense of traditional, spiritually oriented ideas about human nature.

Part 2: Now, what changed after 2000? New findings that don't support materialism became common, and so did new media that bypass old media. Old media contemplate restrictions on new media.

Part 3: What forms could restrictions on new media take? (Basically, any form that could possibly slow them down, but some are discussed here.)

Part 4: Recommendations for the next decade. For example, "Start new media now, before you need a licence. (When new laws are introduced, people who are already key players on the scene are usually "grandfathered.")

CNN deep sixes whole science team

This from Curtis Brainerd at Columbia Journalism Review (December 4, 2008)

CNN is not the only television network that has been slashing science jobs. According to The Washington Post, “NBC Universal made the first of potentially several rounds of staffing cuts at The Weather Channel [last week], axing the entire staff of the “Forecast Earth” environmental program during the middle of NBC’s ‘Green Week,’ as well as several on-camera meteorologists.” Gannett has eliminated roughly 1,800 jobs this week at newspapers around the country, though it’s unclear which beats have been most affected. And Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine recently nixed its bureau in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where NASA launches its rockets and shuttles. Cowing, at NASAWatch, says that he is simply shocked “that at a time when science and technology should be on everybody’s lips, this expertise is suddenly not in demand.”

Remember this, folks, when they tell you that they support Darwinism because they "believe in" science.

If local charities believed in the poor the way these people believe in science, Toronto's poor would be a bunch of skeletons lining the sidewalks ... not a bunch of people with caps out in the street.

Well, at least we can still hear Wolf Blitzer freaking out about supposed apocalypses. My cup runneth over, but not with anything I want to drink.

Popular media: Proposed bailouts? Oh, please, no.

Michelle Malkin, whose guts I admire, echoes my own view of proposed media bailouts:

I launched a Newspaper Bailout Countdown Clock on my blog after The New York Times Company's bonds plunged into junk territory in October. A few weeks later, columnist Jon Fine published a tongue-in-cheek memo in BusinessWeek outlining a federal newspaper rescue proposal.

The jibes were meant to be facetious critiques of for-profit enterprises demanding massive taxpayer expenditures under the guise of preserving the "public interest." But now, in a rather unfunny turn, the newspaper bailout push has actually come to pass.

I expect we will hear many proposals like the one she documents, as various media find the new online world too much to cope with. Malkin concludes,

How "free" can a "free press" be if it is leveraged with government funding? How free would they be to criticize other corporate enterprises seeking local, state or federal help to keep them afloat in hard times? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? A press beholden to the ruling class -- a press that cannot stand on its own two feet and the strength of its product -- is a press better off dead.

Yes, I would say so. It is merely another burden to the taxpayer.

The original purpose of media was to be a permanent critic of government. That is why we are called the fourth estate. We have privileges, we can display our press cards and rush into newsworthy venues. We also have some serious duties = go to jail rather than name a source to whom we have promised anonymity. That is a classic form of civil disobedience.

The two biggest changes in my lifetime have been

1. The growth of private citizen media

and

2. The way so many big time media have morphed into government media.

In explaining this change, two factors seem key to me:

1. The materialist worldview in which legacy mainstream media grew up is collapsing of its own unpersuasiveness - for a variety of reasons.

Example: When science media are reduced to trying to explain why Texan Marilyn Mock bought a house for Tracey Orr based on selfishness, they are really reaching.

Such views are not renounced, so they can never be retired. They are part of the belief system of the journalist who has bought into materialism, and their shelf life is forever.

That is why you will hear them recycled in pop science media, again and again = ancestral cave men spread their selfish genes by behaving this way (whatever that way was!), so that is why Mock does it today. Yuh. Right. Big enlightenment, that.

2. We will not likely get anything better out of popular science media in the foreseeable future. The critical problem is, as Malkin noted above, media companies may want to force the taxpayer to fund their nonsense, thus delaying a transition to a more responsive media.

For what it is worth, I blog regularly at Future Tense, which covers these issues in detail. If you found this post helpful, you might find this one even more so.

Don't worry, we are not a cult, and you will not be asked for money. We are a group of Canadian Christian writers who are finding a way through the transitions, and we have lots of good links.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Intelligent design controversy and media: While I'm here, ...

The recent USA Today op-ed fantasy that Britain does not suffer from controversies over intelligent design (because "theistic evolution" has brought such harmony to Brit land) is an instructive example of just what’s wrong with legacy mainstream media in general. The problem for Mark I. Pinsky's "Science and Faith the British Way" was its timing: The puff piece ran just as the Michael Reiss affair was blowing through the independent blogs.

Synopsis: The Royal Society attracted attention across the globe by firing education director Michael Reiss. As of October 4, 9:00 am EST, the Google search "Michael Reiss" "Royal Society" turned up 71, 500 hits, and blogging on the subject abounds. And the people who drove Reiss from his job (the sinner in the hands of an angry god affair), have earned condemnation on both sides of the controversy over evolution and intelligent design. (Reiss, a Church of England clergyman, is a convinced Darwinist, and his sin was suggesting that terms like "creationism" and :"intelligent design" be spoken aloud in class in order to tell students that they are wrong and that Darwin is right. But the fact that he is a clergyman caused prominent scientists to question his right to hold the education director's post anyway, making their anti-traditional religion agenda pretty clear.)

Many Americans and Canadians found out about Reiss's sacking through blogs, and many lively public discussions ensued. But along come the editors and author at USA Today and make clear their assumption that North Americans know nothing about the world that’s not on prime time Boob Tube. So they publish a blog column that – in the context – would be outrageous if it were not so obviously and ridiculously false to the true situation in Britain.

Just being on the Internet does not transform legacy media into new media. The basic legacy media principle is that you have no access to information apart from what they tell you.

It is a three-stage process: 1. They talk. 2. You listen. 3. You believe.

Only one problem: It does snot work any more. This is not the early 19th century. North Americans do not wait six weeks to find out what is happening in London; we know as soon as Brits do. And we now have lots of independent sources of information. So legacy media - online or not - are spinning tales for a shrinking population, as their plummeting circulations show.

Those circulations are never coming back. And this little vignette is a window into one reason why.

The following stories address some recent developments in the intelligent design controversy in Britain:

How angry is the Brit God of Science? Pretty angry, it seems ...

So they actually need to explain this? Britain's Royal Society is considering casting out God ...

Intelligent design and popular culture: The BBC spin on British creationism

Will Brit “faith and science” heavyweights speak up after education director’s firing?

Failed Brit Darwinist Michael Reiss: "A Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God": Synopsis of a Play in Three Acts

Intelligent design and high culture: Philosopher says teaching students about intelligent design should be okay - with qualifications (Here in evil, backward North America, this atheist philosopher was not driven from the campus for his views.)

Darwinism and popular culture: The Anglican Church's non-apology to Darwin

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

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.

News media and the ID controversy: Links to better news coverage?

When I blogged recently on the media coverage of the intelligent design controversy, I remarked, "Then the big challenge is to find a publication that actually wants the real story. That means readers who want the real story. Only those readers can help you."

An Australian commenter wrote to ask,

Do you have any ideas on where we will find such readers? Should we be concentrating on informing believers? Will this be resisted by interested parties? Will we then divide our house? Should we concentrate on convincing religious and political power brokers?
ID is often accused of being a media beat up rather than a scientific controversy. Will we reinforce that view if we concentrate on media?

These are challenging questions, so let me take them in turn:

- Do you have any ideas on where we will find such readers? Anywhere there are Internet-linked terminals. There is no shortage of people who question the worldview of the ''Darwinoids", as a journalist friend calls them. The difficulty is that we are in a transitional phase between reliance on print/broadcast media and reliance on the Internet. The latter operates fundamentally differently from the former because it does not empower the big over the small. Don't believe me? Look what the Swift Vets did to John Kerry, or the pajamaheddin did to Dan Rather. The swifts and the pajamas were nobodies - apart from the fact that both groups knew something that the public would be very interested to discover.* In the legacy media, both groups would be promptly stifled because they did not fit the story template that had already been hammered out. (Everyone who mattered knew that Kerry was a good officer, you see, and Bush was a bad airman.)

Only on the Internet could these nobodies have succeeded because anyone who can use a search engine could find out what they had to say. Currently, some want to reduce the Internet to the state of the current print/broadcast media, controlled by a few key opinion-shapers. That is more orderly, you understand. The government of China apparently does it now.

The whole point of the Internet is to circumvent that very thing! The world does not need another medium, it needs a different kind of medium - one that allows both user control and user input.

So use the Internet to find the people who doubt materialism/Darwinism and forget the legacy media.

* For the record, I will not enter into any controversy on anyone's military record. I am concerned only with whether viewpoints that contradict a pre-existing template can easily reach a broad public while they still make a difference.

(Note: A word to people whose comments I have not published or have deleted. Why depend on me? Start your own blog. In the West, the Internet is still the last free country in the world. Stake out a virtual land claim while you can.)

- Should we be concentrating on informing believers? Believers in what, exactly? If you mean evangelical Christians, no. Most of them are educated way, way beyond their obedience now. And you do not want to get dragged into useless disputes about the age of the Earth. Reach people who do not want to hear a long jaw about God and religion but realize, for example, that the materialist dogma that the mind is merely an illusion or a chance buzz in the brain is simply not true. The materialist must believe it, of course. But his belief does not make it true, even if he is a professor somewhere. Start from there and work back to just how and why our pundits came to know that people are nothing but animals with a big brain. You'll find plenty of people interested in hearing alternatives.

- Will this be resisted by interested parties? No, they will shower us all with tickertape and pink champagne! Okay, no, they won't like it a bit. But so? That's the beauty of the Internet. You don't depend on them.

- Will we then divide our house? Hmmm. Are you asking whether people who believe that the universe shows evidence of purpose and design will split up over the age of the Earth? Not if they have any sense, they won't. And if they don't, let the gods punish them. I certainly don't have the time or the inclination, nor should you.

- Should we concentrate on convincing religious and political power brokers? I wouldn't recommend that. See, power brokers usually come with a fixed set of opinions, the ones that brought them to power. In some cases, they can help you. In others, they must oppose you. But conviction rarely plays as strong a role as you'd like. People who don't seek power can afford convictions. Take advantage of whatever comes your way, but don't rely on power brokers. Build your own networks.

- ID is often accused of being a media beat up rather than a scientific controversy. Will we reinforce that view if we concentrate on media? No, what I am trying to say is that on the Internet, you are the media. When you open a site or blog, it is like starting a newspaper or magazine. If you have something to say that is worth hearing and know how to reach your public, your detractors are only helping you by broadcasting far and wide, "— is a dangerous liar who is planning to take over the planet and impose public prayer in US inner city schools, where once drug lords and security guards prowled."

Hope this helps., cheers, Denyse

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.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

My U of Toronto talk on why there is an intelligent design controversy, or my talk on media coverage of the controversy att he University of Minnesota.

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being granted tenure at Baylor after a long struggle - even after helping in a small way to destroy the Baylor Bears' ancient glory - in the opinion of a hyper sportswriter.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

Blog policy note:Comments are permitted on this blog, but they are moderated. Fully anonymous posts and URLs posted without comment are rarely accepted. To Mr. Anonymous: I'm not psychic, so if you won't tell me who you are, I can't guess and don't care. To Mr. Nude World (URL): If you can't be bothered telling site visitors why they should go on to your fave site next, why should I post your comment? They're all busy people, like you. To Mr. Rudeby International and Mr. Pottymouth: I also have a tendency to delete comments that are merely offensive. Go be offensive to someone who can smack you a good one upside the head. That may provide you with a needed incentive to stop and think about what you are trying to accomplish. To Mr. Righteous but Wrong: I don't publish comments that contain known or probable factual errors. There's already enough widely repeated misinformation out there, and if you don't have the time to do your homework, I don't either. To those who write to announce that at death I will either 1) disintegrate into nothingness or 2) go to Hell by a fast post, please pester someone else. I am a Catholic in communion with the Church and haven't the time for either village atheism or aimless Jesus-hollering.

How not to cover the ID controversy - and why we do it that way anyway

Here's what I told a friend who was complaining about how his national media cover the ID controversy.

Media go through at least four stages in getting comfortable with covering any new issue, including ID:

(There are more than four stages, but no national media that I know of are there yet, collectively, with ID.)

1. First, both print and broadcast media gallop in all directions at once to find traditional sources of support for their existing approaches. Prof. Bumph and Dr. Justzo are leading candidates, as is the entire Society for Circular Solidarity AND the Society for Solid Circularity. Whatever huffing, yelping or caterwauling the esteemed above can provide will certainly be reported. If media can drag foolish politicians in, they will jump at the chance. We KNOW how to cover politicians.

That should settle everything, right?

2. At stage two the story continues to develop. But it would cost a lot of time and trouble and money to find out what is really going on. So the first strategy continues, while people make stuff up to explain why the story doesn't just die. A search for weird stuff ensues. Weird stuff is more comfortable. Perhaps an enterprising Polish reporter will dig up a hermit in the Catskills who has an opinion. Perhaps he has been writing a newsletter on catfish tails for years ...

3. At stage three, most media people dig in on the #1 story approach. It conforms with what they believe. And they have put a lot of work into it already, so they must get their time and money back. And the people they don't like are pond scum. Therefore, the media people's beliefs must be true. You see, it's all so completely logical, it could be MATH, right?

No? Not quite math? Well, okay, a few desperate hacks sense that the traditional sources of explanation are not providing real answers. So they start sniffing the wind.

Friend, you must make contact with media people sniffing the wind, sensing that a new story is developing. Be polite to the others, of course.

4. The story persists, despite multiple predictions that it would fade. By now, the media people who are sniffing the wind are acquiring some expertise.

Try to understand one thing. It takes a LONG time to learn a new story, a new beat. Especially if one just happens to stumble over the story, as I did.

Then the big challenge is to find a publication that actually wants the real story. That means readers who want the real story. Only those readers can help you.

The real story, of course, is that there is no particularly good evidence for materialism unless you already believe it on faith, and that diminishes the value of Darwin's creation story of materialism. Thus, evidence against it starts to matter.

ID in the UK: Media and Darwinists still ID's best friends

The American National Center for Science Education seems to have franchised* the British Centre for Science Education (notice how they thoughtfully used the British spelling of "Centre"), staffed largely by militant atheists, to sell Darwinism in Britain.

This follows on the heels of a group called Truth in Science sending copies of Unlocking the Mystery of Life to all secondary school science departments in Britain.

And of course, a group of liberal Christians and humanists has banded together to oppose Truth in Science. (That the British Humanist Association is shouting "lies, lies, lies" is no surprise, but I would have thought that plummeting liberal church attendance would be more of a concern to the liberals, but hey .... ) And the legacy media of Britain are, true to form, blundering after the Internet, retelling the only story they ever really knew - the need to defend the creation story of atheism (Darwinism), never mind why.

As I have noted elsewhere, contrary to usual practice, journalists never wonder whether current science boffins may be acting from partiality to atheism's grand creation story. Indeed, most would be embarrassed to even consider the possibility that there may be evidence against that particular story. Such evidence does not make other stories true, of course, but it does raise the question of why questioning the evidence for the creation story of atheism should be so controversial.

In some cases, I suspectt hat the reason for not going down that path is simply that it takes only a modest amount of research to discover how self-referential the story is. But that would be a dangerous discovery indeed, too dangerous for most journalists today. When a person starts with the mindset that Darwin's creation story must be correct, it makes so much more sense for them to speculate on the hidden motives of anyone who knows of reasons to doubt it.

(That is one reason why the controversy can only grow. People who would prefer to avoid controversy find that they cannot, because they cannot trust legacy media sources in this area.)

I also find it curious that the militant atheists of BCSE have not considered the possibility that their efforts could backfire. Thanks in large part to groups such as NCSE, belief in Darwin's theory is lower in the United States than it is in Europe. (That, of course, is mainly because some doctrines are never doubted until someone tries too hard to defend them. Enter NCSE ... )

Presumably, BCSE wishes to duplicate the feat in Britain, but wouldn't it be fairer and more honorable of them to let the Truth in Science guys do their own work?

Some legacy media stories are here and here, oh and here too - this last one a classic Brit toff "just doesn't get it" special. But there have been some intelligent letters anyway.

* in BSCE's words, NCSE is providing "active support and advice".

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.

Are American media the intelligent design guys' biggest asset?

Courtesy of the McLaurin Institute, I gave a talk Thursday night at the Murphy Building of the University of Minnesota's journalism school. I answered five questions (that the organizers wanted to know the answer to), as per the next five posts:

Part 1: First, how and why did intelligent design get started and why did it grow so quickly?
Part 2: How do US media interpret the controversy over ID?
Part 3: Why are ID ideas such as specified complexity assumed to be religion rather than science?
Part 4: What assumptions to journalists make about public education?
Part 5: What predictions would I make about how the controversy will develop over the next few years

Intelligent design controversy: Legacy mainstream media vs. new media

While we are on the subject of media/new media, here's an interesting account of legacy mainstream media (LMSM) spin on an issue unrelated to the ID controversy - US immigration policy.*

The chosen example merely shows that LMSM can slant any controversy as long as everyone who has a say on the news desk is absolutely convinced about who the winners will ultimately be.

In LMSM, such stories usually get framed as a black and white morality play. On the ID issue, for example, doubts about Darwinism - of whatever kind - are treated like this: Bad or irrelevant "religion" attempts takeover of good and useful "science."

Okay, so go be a profane, beer-swilling unbeliever somewhere if you like. But if you dare to wonder whether school kids should be told some of the textbook stretchers and fudgies, you are one disloyal bunny. It's bad enough that you even know that the books are full of stretchers and fudgies , where Darwinism is concerned.

Next thing we hear, you will be handling diamondback sidewinders for Jesus in some East Carolina swamp** .... Hey, you read your fate here first.

This situation is not new. Doubts about Freudianism were routinely framed, years ago, as evidence of psychological problems, and doubts about Marxist economics were not tolerated from people who ate macaroni and cheese in order to pay off a mortgage. There is no middle ground or alternative viewpoint in a morality play.

What's new is the challenge created by the new media, which empower alternative viewpoints like no other has ever done. To see why, consider what, precisely, is changing.

The blogosphere, the Web, and e-mail have undermined the newsgathering function of major media as such. They are not needed the way they used to be. [break here]
Today, an honest, meticulous, and creative person can, with affordable equipment, do a reasonable job of newsgathering.

How was it different in the past? Formerly, professional equipment was not easy to come by and information storage was itself a challenge. And if pros made a mess of things, they had to live with the results themselves.

For example, a pro needs to be able to trust her own notebook, story files, and morgue. That created some control over how unrepresentative news stories could become in democratic societies. She would need one heck of a memory to know the difference between the facts of the case and ten years of her own misrepresentation.

But today, stories can be slanted in order to affect an electorate, in the full knowledge that the correct information is archived somewhere on the Internet - and anyone who really wants to know can get hold of it easily!

Not everyone realized the significance of that fact until fairly recently. Hence pajamagate. The egregious thing about pajamagate was not that Rather was suckered by bogus dox (hey, stuff happens), but that his network took so long to just admit that fact, long after it was utterly self-evident.

I notice that Reuters has been much quicker disowning its recent fauxtos. People can learn.

The media have always been slanted in a liberal way. But that is principally because young persons inclined to traditional views do not go into media. They are urged to enter the clergy instead.

When people who espouse traditional views have gone into media, they have often been quite effective. One thinks of the conservative blogosphere, talk radio, and Fox News, for example, and a number of good conservative thinkmags.

But meanwhile, the burden of public recordkeeping and analysis is shifting toward the blogosphere, for better or worse.

I first realize that shift clearly when a New York Times reporter sneered at me last year as a (mere) "blogger. But my coverage of the incident in question had been more accurate than her paper's, and unlike the reporter for her paper, I had actually seen the controversial film.

(*I am not an American, not to trying to become one, and don't currently know anyone who is. Thus I have no cat in the fight over US immigration policy, and thought this a safe example.)

(**Please do not write to inform me that there is no East Carolina. That is the Americans' problem, not mine. It is a forgivable lapse on their part, and I have forgiven them, somewhat reluctantly.)

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?.

Thinkquote of the day: The difference the new media make

Young readers do not want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what is important, and they certainly do not want news presented as gospel. The media world can no longer lecture; it must become a place for conversation.

- press lord Rupert Murdoch, Chairman, News Corporation, quoted as part of the advertising for a conference on the growth and importance of the blogosphere (January 29–31, 2007).

Now, say what you want about Murdoch, he made money in media. Darwinists profess ongoing amazement that the public does not just gasp and obey when Darwin lobbies huff that there are no reasonable, science-based objections to Darwinism. They clearly do not grasp what Murdoch is saying. Pronouncements from on high that there are no reasonable objections are not so much contested as merely ignored.

That, by the way, is another indicator that Darwinism is on the way out. Systems that are declining in importance are usually passively ignored for a long time before anyone proposes to actually retire them.

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.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being denied tenure at Baylor.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

Blog policy note:Comments are permitted on this blog, but they are moderated. Fully anonymous posts and URLs posted without comment are rarely accepted. To Mr. Anonymous: I'm not psychic, so if you won't tell me who you are, I can't guess and don't care. To Mr. Nude World (URL): If you can't be bothered telling site visitors why they should go on to your fave site next, why should I post your comment? They're all busy people, like you. To Mr. Rudeby International and Mr. Pottymouth: I also have a tendency to delete comments that are merely offensive. Go be offensive to someone who can smack you a good one upside the head. That may provide you with a needed incentive to stop and think about what you are trying to accomplish. To Mr. Righteous but Wrong: I don't publish comments that contain known or probable factual errors. There's already enough widely repeated misinformation out there, and if you don't have the time to do your homework, I don't either. To those who write to announce that at death I will either 1) disintegrate into nothingness or 2) go to Hell by a fast post, please pester someone else. I am a Catholic in communion with the Church and haven't the time for either village atheism or aimless Jesus-hollering.