The Media on Evolution

Here is some coverage of evolution by the media.

Chris Matthews:

On yesterday's edition of the MSNBC chat show Hardball, host Chris Matthews had the following surreal discussion with Richard Land, President of the Southern Baptist Convention...

The ecumenism of Land and Matthews is charming, but the fact remains the sort of Christianity to which both claim to adhere has as one of its main dogmas that non-Christians will spend eternity in Hell. I'd say someone's passing judgment on which religions are, er, kosher, and which are not.

...

Bill O'Reilly:

Matthew and Land look like Nobel Prize winners compared to Bill O'Reilly. He had Kirk Cameron on to discuss the vexing questtion of whether God exists. The video is available here. The interview opened
with O'Reilly boasting of having defeated Richard Dawkins in their recent debate. Dawkins couldn't tell him where the universe came from, you see.

To set this up, O'Reilly asked Cameron to prove, in a minute, that God
exists. Cameron answered with his stadard child's version of the argument from design. Then the following remarkable exchange occurred...

NYT:

The New York Times gives us sneak peek at the big Creation Museum opening in Kentucky this weekend:

The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures.

But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away.

And so begins one of the most vapid and credulous newspaper articles you will ever see on this subject. Given the pathetic way in which the mainstream media usually covers this subject, that's really saying something.

...

Nightline:

So I watched Nightline tonight, buoyed by the fact that the clips that appeared on the website earlier today were not too bad from the atheist standpoint (as I described here.) I should have known better. Having just watched the actual show, it is clear that they had no intention of giving any sort of accurate picture of what either side said. Instead, the goal was to play in to the standard script in which the fanatical Christians are presented as lovable, but simplistic, while the atheists are presented as dogmatic and obnoxious.

...

Nature magazine:

And speaking of bad science journalism, here's Nature's take on the Gonzalez situation:

He's a young astronomer with dozens of articles in top journals; he has made an important discovery in the field of extrasolar planets; and he is a proponent of intelligent design, the idea that an intelligent force has shaped the Universe. It's that last fact that Guillermo Gonzalez thinks has cost him his tenure at Iowa State University.

Gonzalez, who has been at Iowa State in Ames since 2001, was denied tenure on 9 March. He is now appealing the decision on the grounds that his religious belief, not the quality of his science, was the basis for turning down his application. “I'm concerned my views on intelligent design were a factor,” he says.

Advocates of intelligent design are rallying behind Gonzalez in the latest example of what they say is blatant academic discrimination. “Academia seems to be in a rage about anything that points to any purpose,” says Michael Behe, a biochemist and prominent advocate of intelligent design at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “They are penalizing an associate professor who's doing his job because he has views they disagree with.”

And after three paragraphs of puffing him up, do we now get the other side? Do we now hear about the dramatic drop-off in his publication record in the last few years, his lack of any external grant, the fact that most of this wonderful work that is being described was done prior to his arrival at Iowa State, the fact that he hasn't graduated any students, or the fact that he has aligned himself with anti-science groups like the Discovery Institute and anti-science publishers like Regnery? No....