Pharyngula

I don't watch TV (and don't have cable, much to my daughter's chagrin) so I don't see any of this shite myself. But from snippets I read on the liberal blogs it seems as though CNN has been trying to be Fox-lite for quite some time now. Just another example of our "liberal media" at work...

Posted by: Steve LaBonne | February 6, 2007 8:06 AM

I hardly ever watch CNN (I have a basic package from a satellite service), but usually when I watch it either Blitzer, Zahn or Cooper is on the air. Of them, it's quite common to see half-baked, half-accurate hit pieces on Democrats and liberals in general on Blitzer and Zahn's programming. I also seem to remember that Zahn gave a fawning soft-ball interview to Roy Moore during the whole courtroom 10C controversy. Cooper isn't as bad as the other two, and is usually tolerable in his reporting (especially given his recent smackdown of Sylvia Brown, which you do not see enough of in the MSM).

Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | February 6, 2007 8:18 AM

I saw parts of this when I flipped over during a commerical break on Olbermannn (MSNBC.) This segment reached the nadir of the series. I'm one of those Christian types (sort of)but this "report" had me yelling at the TV - "Where the *&^%# is the atheist on this panel?" Scared the poop out of my dog.

Posted by: MReap | February 6, 2007 8:47 AM

I knew I loved Stephen A. Smith!

Posted by: Chris | February 6, 2007 8:58 AM

Why do news networks, especially Fox, typically have people on their panels who have nothing to do with the topic at hand? I haven't had cable in roughly 5 years, but my old job had nothing but Fox and Glenn Beck on at every break. I would have gone insane but I was never the only one blasting the bias at the break table.
I think the entire media needs to be reformed, if not simply held financially accountable for bias and false information. Fox's persistant coverage of the completely made up Obama scandal is probably the best example I can give, as of late.

Posted by: xenophobic | February 6, 2007 9:03 AM

The panel comments were just excuses for the audience to rationalize their dislike of atheists. The denial of clear facts ("I don't believe atheists are the most hated", etc.) isn't meant to convince anyone, but to let people who want to be convinced feel good about their beliefs.

Posted by: Caledonian | February 6, 2007 9:08 AM

Hopefully CNN will get several thousand letters protesting their treatment of atheists. I'll send one, but the larger organizations should organize a campaign too.

Posted by: Carlie | February 6, 2007 9:20 AM

I've never seen any of those tracts, personally. What I HAVE seen is a yearly ritual at Indiana University, wherein some crazy guy from Kansas or Kentucky brings his entire family and preaches in front of one of the main classroom halls about how all college kids are going to hell. His children hold up anti-abortion signs along the pathways to class. Finally, last year, the cops drove up and told the guy he didn't have a permit or something to be standing there yelling at people, and made him leave.

Posted by: Fatmop | February 6, 2007 9:28 AM

Glad I don't have cable, so I am in no way paying for the idiots on foxnews or CNN. I'll only get cable if we could pick and choose which channels we want to pay for (and there's no local monopoly).

Posted by: DrBadger | February 6, 2007 9:42 AM

And I'd add that we have plenty of filth up North, too.

Posted by: Steve LaBonne | February 6, 2007 10:03 AM

In other news, an all-white panel agreed that racial tensions were primarily caused by "uppity n*****s", then discussed where to buy white sheets in bulk, how to get stains out of your hood, and why America is a "white nation" and it's important to maintain that heritage. Why, practically all of the Founding Fathers were white, doesn't that just settle it? (Male, too, but I think I've made my point.)

Did they really expect to have a meaningful discussion of the issue when one of the sides (the subject of the discussion!) was excluded a priori? You don't have to be a journalism major to see the problem with that approach.

Posted by: Chris | February 6, 2007 10:07 AM

Instead of ignoring them and exacerbating the network's ignorance along with the ignorance of their viewing public, why don't you try and educate? It seems that ignoring them only perpetuates the problem. I will send them a carefully worded complaint and hope that educates the network and will leave it up to other viewers to do the same. Perhaps that will bring about a change.

Posted by: pamela | February 6, 2007 10:15 AM

@Fatmop

I live in southwest Georgia and I am squarely in the "never especially vocal" camp and I have not had many problems. That is my point. My comment was to address the "I apparently have not been militant enough" comment. That would only serve to punish my kids and business prospects in my community. Punish is a strong term, but I have personally seen business deals lost and jobs not offered because 'the Lord was not being glorified' in the home. Is this punishment? It persuaded me to sit down and shut up.

A good example from down yonder:

My son's teacher announces "a moment of silent worship" before the start of class at a public school.

Now, how would you react?

Posted by: jm_II | February 6, 2007 10:22 AM

And the really funny part of it is that the wingnuts still refer to CNN as the "Communist New Network" beacuse it's not sufficiently batshit-insane for them.

Posted by: Dunc | February 6, 2007 10:42 AM

Filed under 'backlash'. About which I'd make five points:

1. It's far from as uniform as I might have imagined in my darker nightmares. Generally positive reviews of the recent popular works by Dawkins, Harris et al do come up in the press, here and there, including in several quite major organs.

2. Nothing among the various apologiae offered up by those apparently frightened or offended by these works' popularity (McGrath et al) is the least bit novel. We get the usual, predictable abuses of epistemology, empty rhetorical whines about 'arrogance'... yap yap yap from the usual lapdogs of institutionalized superstitious woo... Perhaps there are only so many ways one can embarrass oneself in this regard? Or are are the sorts of minds who tend to write such blather generally not terribly creative as a group?

3. There is something both a bit disheartening and encouraging about said backlash... it's disheartening in that it confirms most of what I'd have suspected about the entrenched nature of religious delusion: merely writing a book that points out the hollowness of the arguments that support sufficiently established nonsense is hardly going to convince someone who's invested so much of their ego in it (let alone those whose salaries depend upon it), and this is hardly news to anyone; it's hard for anyone to admit they've been had, and religious superstition, in this sense, is probably the ultimate con... but it's also encouraging in the sense that at least it looks like Dawkins' et al have touched a nerve. It's gotta be galling to see that gloriously succint title on the bestseller list... week after week...

4. The generally poor quality of the arguments mustered against the popular works means almost certainly that the backlash will have at best only a rather limited effect: it will provide those looking for an excuse to ignore the arguments given by publicly visible atheists with just that excuse... which, realistically, they probably could have come up with on their own anyway (it's not as if they need particularly good ones)... and following from this:

5. I'd rather expect a lot of 'crypto-freethinkers'... unbelievers who for the various social reasons have tended to keep their unbelief under their hat will, at least, take great encouragement from the appearance and popularity of these works, and, more generally, from the increased public visibility of unbelief... Just probably one of the nicer aspects of said increased visibility, which I'd see as something of an achievement in itself...

So: in short. Genie's outta the bottle. And all the howling the apologists have done is unlikely to reverse that.

But yeah, re:

I apparently have not been militant enough, and am going to have to work harder at aggressively promoting godlessness.

Yep. What he said.

Posted by: AJ Milne | February 6, 2007 10:49 AM

The biggest issue that atheism/promoting godlessness has going against it is that it is inherently negative. To promote atheism or godlessness, you really must convince believers that their thinking is without basis in reason - that it is, for lack of a better term, a delusion.

It's probably fair to say that most people, irrespective of religious belief, do not like being called delusional... particularly if you can enumerate the facets of their delusion and offer evidence that they are, in fact, deluded. Look at the terms in this thread: batshit insane, narrow-minded, wingnuts, etc. And even though those terms are probably quite accurate, their accuracy doesn't erase the negative overtones that they convey.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's an adequate solution to this problem. How do you convince someone that they're deluded when their delusion is so self-reinforcing?

I suppose that if I had a good answer to that question, I wouldn't have to write comments on blogs :)

Posted by: Evolving Squid | February 6, 2007 11:07 AM

At this point I'd settle for persuading them that it's OK not to believe-- in fact, I think that's the most important hurdle. Once you accept that atheism is a legitimate point of view, the epistemic problems of theism become overwhelming. So I think we need a two-prong approach-- First, we need to argue that atheism is legitimate-- that people have the right to be atheists and to full and equal treatment in the public sphere--in school, work and politics, as atheists. The key point to establish is that atheism doesn't imply moral corruption, dishonesty or the meaninglessness of life (pace Locke-- incidentally, there is a nice point here about the moral optimism of atheism: That people really don't need an all-seeing supervisor who practices torture on a cosmic scale to behave well....). Second, we need to keep the epistemic issues on the table: Appreciating the problem of evil and the success of science (je n'ai aucune besoin de cette hypothese) can give us a taste for an understanding of the world that actually does some work. Maybe last (and hardest of all) would be to persuade people that the finite sort of thing we are really does not need (and isn't suited to) eternal life... some of Twain's comments on conventional ideas about heaven come to mind.

Posted by: Bryson Brown | February 6, 2007 11:28 AM

FYI, I went to CNN's web page for feedback (http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form5.html?11) and sent the following negative response to the show. Sorry in advance for its length, but I though some might find it interesting or even helpful. Maybe if they get enough responses they will take some action. (ha! not likely):
-------------------
I am writing in regard to the Jan. 31 episode of Paula Zahn Now! in which CNN aired an openly discriminatory segment against an atheist family, indirectly blaming them for the discrimination they endured at the hands of militant theists. The show compounded the problem by airing a panel discussion in which caricatured, straw-man atheist views were lampooned by a group of theists who played fast and loose with historical fact.

Why did CNN not even ask the usual token atheist to join the panel discussion in order to at least illustrate, if not alleviate, the segment's theistic bias? If three white people were invited to comment on discrimination against blacks and made comments -- indirectly sanctioned by CNN's editorial and production staff by virtue of their inclusion on the show -- such as "if only black folk understood that the USA is a white country, we wouldn't have to sit here on this show and explain why it was OK for us to run them out of town for being so uppity" (see, e.g., the transcript for the comments by Schlussel beginning with "Listen, we are a Christian nation" and by Smith beginning with "We're a Christian country. There's no question about that. I love the Lord. So does Karen, so does everybody that I know.").

CNN's panel discussion was patently biased, and in that regard it inadvertently illustrated the tacit exclusion of atheists from society generally.

Indeed, Paula Zahn's show merely regurgitated the tired old theistic caricatures of atheists as somehow opposing the free speech of others. My experience is quite the opposite, that the main things which atheists actually "oppose" are (1) spending public money on indoctrinating children in religious beliefs and observances, (2) spending public money on religious paraphernalia or displays of religious belief, and (3) enacting laws favoring religion or enforcing religious dogma. Because of demographics in the USA, atheists obviously find themselves butting heads with Christians more often than other groups, but otherwise they have no special rancor against Christians.

More broadly, Christian political groups are accustomed to getting their way and by virtue of their majority status, they almost always succeed in making society mirror their own religious beliefs. On the very rare occasions they are denied by public opinion or the courts, they lash out at whatever opposes them. Take, for example, the persistent arguments by theists of many stripes that the because the US court system has generally supported free speech and the separation of church and state, it is an undemocratic institution opposed to their objectives and hence should have its jurisdiction over Constitutional questions limited by act of Congress. Theists' complaints against individual atheists often come from the same wellspring of misdirected, frustrated hostility, but of course it is easier to casually threaten or discriminate against private atheists than against the federal courts, an arm of the government. CNN's piece could have discussed this fairly, but instead it chose to take the easy path of sympathizing with the majority and diminishing the suffering of the persecuted minority.

Just how pervasive is discrimination against atheists in America? Well, if the 1/31 Paula Zahn show was any example, it continues to be extremely widespread.

Posted by: Jim Gitzlaff | February 6, 2007 12:02 PM

"The biggest issue that atheism/promoting godlessness has going against it is that it is inherently negative."

What if we framed it as, "Yes, there is no god! Hooray!" Would that work?

Posted by: Will E. | February 6, 2007 12:49 PM

I have to agree with the comment at #18. I work in the south with what I had always assumed to be educated people. However I came within a hair of losing my job over a chance comment concerning evolution. If my lack of religious beliefs was widely known I would be in the street immediatly.

Posted by: giscindy | February 6, 2007 1:17 PM

I'm not sure there is a positive spin that can be put on saying to something like 4 billion people "you're deluded". But that's what we're all saying and it has to be expected that they'll act negatively.

It is, in my opinion, unreasonable to presume that someone who thinks you are, at best, an unfaithful sinner who hasn't found the calling of the almighty or at worst, an evil tool of some arch-fiend who is doomed to eternal punishment, upon the hearing of your logical and well-reasoned argument that believing in god(s) is essentially a self-reinforcing delusion, will have an epiphany and accept your argument. No, it will be viewed as an attack and they will defend themselves.

And in a sense, they are correct - it IS an attack. It is an attack from people who have as much courage from their convictions as the religious do. From a theistic point of view it makes very little difference whether the attack is from some godless heathen or from some other religion... it's all the same.

In the case of the CNN thing, if that family were Muslims, or Shintoists, do you think it would have changed the situation at all? I don't.

As a member of the minority view, atheists have an uphill battle. It will be a long time before the sort of discrimination we see today will be eliminated.

What if we framed it as, "Yes, there is no god! Hooray!" Would that work?

I know you were being facetious, but in truth, it might help. Remember, you're dealing with people who have been indoctrinated into believing that unless they go through a life of specific religious douchebaggery, they will be punished eternally. They're indoctrinated to believe that there is an otherworldly cuddle-bunny to help them through the hard times. They're thoroughly convinced that their path is the path of righteousness and that they're just that much better than everyone else.

So atheist activism should concentrate more on the positive than the negative. You won't be punished forever. There is no cuddle-bunny to help you but you can help yourself and be proud of your successes... that sort of thing.

I don't know how the "we're better than you" thing can be addressed. That's the toughest bit.

Posted by: Evolving Squid | February 6, 2007 1:33 PM

I saw the piece in question and I coudn't believe my ears. This so-called panel spent most of the time provided (perhaps 90 seconds) shouting over each other. None of them knew anything about the story in question. And yes, they did actually say that they (atheists) should just shut up.
Paula Zahn was clueless. She spends more time in front of a makeup mirror than she does doing background work on the stories she broadcasts.

Posted by: Jim51 | February 6, 2007 1:56 PM

Evolving Squid,

Concerning the positive portrayals of atheism, as in the losing of spiritual shackles is a liberating process, I fully agree. My parents have recently started going back to church, and I think it's a combination of encroaching mortality (the Old Man turned 60 this year and both have shakey health) and a sense of community (the church they go to is the same one Momma went to as a little girl, very rural community, sort of thing). Momma and I have had a lot of religious discussions - particularly on how modern mainstream American Christians woefully misread and misunderstand the Bible - and she's amazed that one can still find a sense of hope and joy in a world without God.

I'm also reminded of a convorsation I had with a co-worker. She's the daughter of my bossman's rabbi, but more of a spiritual-New Agey type than hardcore Jewish type. She said a cosmos without some sort of divine guidence scared her, and I told her the idea of total freedom - without fear of punishment over arcane, incomprehensible "laws" or promise of reward if I toe the line unquestioningly - was liberating. I'm in control and, thus, responsible for my actions and thoughts, and my future - indeed, my existence - is solely what I make it and not at the whim of a caprecious, unpredictable, unquestionable diety.

A life without God isn't one without happiness or joy or wonder, just as a life with God doesn't mean you have all those things. She said she'd never thought of it that way and it gave her a lot to think about.

As for the Southern thing, yes, if you stir up shit concerning your disbelief (or even questioning of mainstream, accepted Christian doctrine), you will catch hell. Even before I became an atheist - at the time, I was a wishy-washy "well, there's gotta be something" agnostic type - I caught all kinds of hell in high school from some of my peers for sneering at the whole Ham-means-black-people-deserved-slavery thing. Still, it's not so much attacks of Christianity that bother Southerners, it's attacks of tradition that gets up their noses. Anything that ruffles the status quo in a small Southern town is cause for frothing rednecks, frankly. I got long hair, down to my rearend, and it drives the homefolks up the wall, man.

Posted by: Matt T. | February 6, 2007 3:02 PM

I work in the south with what I had always assumed to be educated people. However I came within a hair of losing my job over a chance comment concerning evolution. If my lack of religious beliefs was widely known I would be in the street immediatly

Interesting and sad. I teach biology and evolution without any problems in Texas.

Also this comment illustrates what I have long said, the number of atheists, agnostics, skeptics whatever is MUCH higher than any poll shows. It's simply a matter of making it safe to say so. I am sure quite a few people you work with have the same feeling.

Posted by: Uber | February 6, 2007 3:11 PM

I don't have cable, I don't watch t.v. People who watch that crap are wasting their lives. People who watch and swallow it are fools.

T.V. is a wasteland through and through. That includes the news. This is just more of the same.

Complaining to CNN would amount to complaining about one pussed-filled zit on a zit-covered monster.

Posted by: George | February 6, 2007 3:37 PM

PZ Myers wrote:

I'm adding CNN to my list of news agencies to ignore, along with Fox.

The problem with ignoring them is, when the pro-authoritarians finally get around to replacing "The Star-Spangled Banner" with "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" on national television, you will not know what key to sing along in....and that would be embarrassing... =-)

CNN and Fox are now only useful as indexes of the the amount of hysteria and fear we are expected to have...

Posted by: Dark Matter | February 6, 2007 4:37 PM

I found this article useful thanks

Posted by: Psychic Readings | February 6, 2007 4:59 PM

Is there anything we can do to show this on more and more websites. It's disgusting and needs to be talked about. This is the first time, 7 days after it aired, that I've seen it and I am constantly following the news. It's just sad that america still hasn't changed. This nation is still filled with millions of people who think like this. All the same people who hate homosexuals. The same people who fostered those two kids who killed Matthew Shephard a while back. Nothing has changed. I feel like PBS or the NYT should have a response to this horrible, one-sided, slanderous piece of shit. What can be done? Anyone?

Posted by: Matt | February 6, 2007 5:10 PM

Oh, stogoe posted while I was typing.

Posted by: Tom Foss | February 6, 2007 5:19 PM

Can someone on Youtube make a video exactly like this panel one using the transcript and just substituting Christianity for Atheism. "Are we now going to have to have prayer in schools?" "Are we going to have to look at their huge megachurches, crosses, and nativity scenes all the time?" "I think they just need to shut up!" "Don't impose upon my right to actually have a life and not listen to all your bible-pushing, one-sided, Fox news loving, gun touting, every-other-living-thing-on-earth bashing shit. Don't infringe upon that right." etc. etc. etc. That would make my life if someone did that.

Posted by: Matt | February 6, 2007 5:29 PM

THANK YOU for writing about this! I saw this on CNN last week and was SO upset by their misconceptions of Athiests. I wrote them a letter of complaint which, of course, was never replied to. In the letter I:

- Asked why they didn't include an actual Atheist in the panel discussion
- Pointed out that their statistics that 3% of the population of the US is Atheist must be wrong because those statistics are given to them by churches and Athiests rarely call the church they grew up in that they are Atheist.
- Told them they should get in touch with some of the Atheists interviewed in Wired a couple of months ago to clear up some misconceptions.

I'm appalled that they make good people like me look like a criminal.

Posted by: Casey McKinnon | February 6, 2007 5:45 PM

Suuuuure he's not. All straight men get high on Meth and get "back rubs" from male prostitutes. The self loathing is sad.

Posted by: Steve_C | February 6, 2007 5:48 PM

"The biggest issue that atheism/promoting godlessness has going against it is that it is inherently negative."

I found that "losing my religion" freed me, made me more accountable for myself and my actions, and made me happier as a person. Besides not many atheists gather once a week to sit around proclaiming that there is no God; we just fill the time we spent on religion with something we consider more meaningful.

In fact I have yet to meet another person like myself who rejects all of the lessons we learned from our previous religion's beliefs, we just discard the more negative and fallacious aspects (which to an atheist includes the concept of God).

Once we notice that our lives are better, sure we get offended when people tell us it's somehow worse. It's no more negative than a theist getting offended when an atheist tells them their life would be better without theism.

I've personally found that the difference is that most atheists don't hiss and spit when their beliefs are challenged, and far fewer seem bent on harming or killing over it (maybe there are just fewer atheists, I don't know).

Posted by: BTreeHugger | February 6, 2007 5:59 PM

A bit touchy, aren't you? My worldview is portrayed in worse terms on a regular basis. Wah.

Posted by: the forester | February 6, 2007 6:09 PM

I'm an Atheist I have been all my life. By it's very definition it's a lack of belief. I don't have any beliefs. I'm not offended by others beliefs, and don't want to push mine on others, I have none.

Reading your reactions to this article, you all just sound like another religion. Atheism is not an opposing point of view to religion, it the complete abscence of one.

The best thing about being an Athiest is that you can choose to become one, your not left open minded from birth, you manage to stay open minded despite religions constant indoctrination.

Don't get me wrong, I see religions destroying the world and being polluted by individual agendas. The truth is that could be any group, even Atheiests. If you get enough people together we do bad things.

Posted by: S. Coopmoore | February 6, 2007 6:33 PM

Fuck you, CNN.

Posted by: mike | February 6, 2007 6:38 PM

There are so many things wrong with the panel portion of the broadcast that I have to pick just one or I'd be writing for days. How could anyone make a blanket statement like "Atheists believe in nothing" and hope to be taken seriously. As an atheists I would like to say that I believe in many things. I believe in the strength and dignity of mankind. I believe we should treat others the way we would like to be treated. I also believe that the ancient Romans, Greeks and Egyptians had just as much faith in Zeus, Apollo and Ra as modern day believers do in Jesus, Allah and Yahweh. Since there have been thousands of supernatural and magical gods worshiped by mankind over the centuries, every monotheist is an "atheist" in regards to every god but the one they were either taught to believe as a child or were converted to by either good marketing or peer pressure.

At the risk of over simplifying, I also believe that there are two kinds of people in the world: People that believe in a magical supernatural realm and those who do not. If you do not believe in any kind of magic, you are an atheist. The group of people that do believe in magic can then be divided into subgroups such as people who believe in Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, Ra, Apollo, Isis, Aphrodite, ghosts, pixies, unicorns, Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, trolls, fairies and all other things that cannot be proven. To me it seems a bit backwards that the people who believe in magic have chosen to speak in such a condescending way about people who have chosen to live a life based on reason and logic instead of magic and superstition.

And finally, I believe that most people do not want to consider that their parents and peers might be wrong about religion. Because of this and the overwhelming desire to fit in with society, most Christians do not take the time to read their own bible with a skeptical eye. How can anyone truly believe that if there is an all powerful, loving and compassionate god in the universe that this is the book he would write and endorse? It condones misogyny, rape, murder, racism and is full of some of the silliest stories ever written. (i.e. Jonah lived inside a fish, two of every animal fit on a boat etc..) Wouldn't a perfect god write the best book in the world? Why not dictate to Shakespeare or Hemingway?

Anyway, I just wanted to demonstrate that even though I'm an atheist, I do not believe in nothing.

Posted by: Luke Adams | February 6, 2007 6:49 PM