The Amusing Hypocrisy of the DI Blog

This you just have to find funny. Jonathan Witt has written a post on the DI blog about the Sternberg/Smithsonian situation. In the process, he has made clear the utter hypocrisy of the DI in handling criticism. The DI blog, you see, steadfastly refuses to link to the Panda's Thumb, which is the primary weblog that presents criticism of their ideas. This refusal is so obvious that even when writing a post addressing Jonathan Coddington's response to Sternberg's accusations against him, they don't link to the place where Coddington posted his response, which was in a comment at the Panda's Thumb, but to Jason Rosenhouse's post about Coddington's response on his blog. It becomes even more amusing when he says this about Rosenhouse's post:

It's curious, then, that the blogger, Jason Rosenhouse, dismisses the peer-reviewed article with this website critique (there has been no peer-reviewed critique of Stephen Meyer's article), but Rosenhouse doesn't mention this incisive defense of the Meyer's paper published here and here at our website.

I would suggest that what is "curious" is that Witt does not provide a link to "this website critique", but does provide a link to their responses to it. The website critique they refer to, but refuse to link to, is the post entitled Meyer's Hopeless Monster, written by Wes Elsberry, Nick Matzke and Alan Gishlick and published on Panda's Thumb. So while attempting to take Rosenhouse to task for not linking to a response to a critique, they won't provide a link to the critique itself even after mentioning it as "this" website critique, which in blogging convention would require that it be a link. Pots and kettles, gentlemen, pots and kettles.

Equally as important, you might also notice the strange claim in Witt's post that Coddington's response to Sternberg's accusations have something to do with criticism of Sternberg's publication of Meyer's article in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. After admitting that there are "two sides to the story", Witt says that Sternberg's side of the story is here, and he quotes from it. But what he quotes is in fact Sternberg's response to accusations from others (not from Coddington) that he violated the normal peer review procedure in publishing the Meyer article. Coddington's response to Sternberg's accusations has nothing to do with that.

There are two entirely different questions involving Sternberg. The first is whether he circumvented the normal peer review procedure at PBSW to insure that Meyer's article would be published in the last edition for which he was the editor and could do so. The second is whether Sternberg has been the victim of religious discrimination at the Smithsonian, where he is a Research Associate (which is not an employee, but merely access and workspace at the National Museum of Natural History). Sternberg has made accusations against Coddington involving the second situation, and Coddington's response on Panda's Thumb was to those accusations. Witt bizarrely seems to think that Sternberg's response to the accusations against him in situation #1 and Coddington's response to Sternberg's accusations in situation #2 comprise the "two sides" of the story. False. They are in fact entirely independent statements on entirely independent situations and they have little to do with each other. That's not bad - false implications and hypocrisy in a single post.

Also interesting to note is that of all the other Christian bloggers and media sources who jumped on the Wall Street Journal story like sharks to a bloody piece of meat to strike the martyr pose, not a single one, so far as I can tell, has even mentioned that there has been a response from the accused. After taking Klinghoffer's story on Sternberg's accusations as gospel truth and howling in outrage, none of them has published a follow-up to note that there is another side to the story and that the accusations have been emphatically denied by the Smithsonian, who have also pointed out that Sternberg has exactly the same access and privileges that he has always had. So give credit to the DI for at least mentioning that there has been a response to the accusations, which no other site has done so far. If only they had done so without wrapping it up in sheets of hypocrisy and false implications.