Media
oracknows | February 23, 2009One thing that's become apparent to me so far in 2009 is that, while 2008 was the year of the antivaccinationist, 2009 is already shaping up to be a very bad year for antivaccinationists. A very bad year indeed, and this is a very, very good thing--if it can be sustained.
But first, let's take a look at last year. In 2008, Jenny McCarthy was the new and fresh celebrity face of the movement that believes that autism and all manner of other neurodevelopmental disorders are caused by vaccines and that the government and big pharma are suppressing The Truth. She had emerged in the fall of 2007…
pharyngula | February 21, 2009Just go and gape in awe at the obliviousness of our national media. This is a poll on US News & World Report, and it asks, "If you had a choice of four daycare centers run separately by Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi, which would you choose for your kids?" Incredible.
I believe that next week they'll have a question about Barack Obama's, Colin Powell's, Al Sharpton's, and Jesse Jackson's hypothetical fried chicken stands.
pharyngula | February 20, 2009If you open your latest issue of New Scientist (unless, of course, you threw away your subscription), you'll find a nice little letter from three luminaries — Dennett, Coyne, and Dawkins — and one other guy explaining that Darwin was actually mostly right, contrary to a certain recent cover. Here's a taste:
What on earth were you thinking when you produced a garish cover proclaiming that "Darwin was wrong" (24 January)?
First, it's false, and second, it's inflammatory. And, as you surely know, many readers will interpret the cover not as being about Darwin, the historical figure, but about…
clock | February 20, 2009Just came back from coffee with Jay Rosen:
Topic: The state of journalism, of course. Fun was had by all.
pharyngula | February 20, 2009Carl Zimmer is a little bit peeved at the ever flexible standards of the media. If you're a science writer like he is, your articles get fact-checked until they bleed. If you're George Will, conservative pedant and pundit, not so much. The Washington Post seems to basically accept whatever he says as gospel truth, even when he gets the scientific facts completely wrong.
Oh, for the day when our media wake up to the fact that they are supposed to be reality-based, not faith-based.
scientificactivist | February 18, 2009An article in today's New York Times profiles the trials and tribulations of young twenty-somethings who lack health insurance. For some it's out of hubris, but for most it's because they fall through the cracks--paid enough that they don't qualify for public health care but still lacking the means to afford health insurance of their own. It's pretty sad, and it's a stupid result of America's wacky health care system (a system around which many high hopes have been pinned to President Obama to effect some real change).
As stupid as this situation is, though, it pales in comparison to the…
edyong | February 17, 2009The mainstream media are just queuing up to fail in their reporting of the propranolol story from a couple of days ago. To reiterate:
Propranolol is commonly used to treat high blood pressure and prevent migraines in children. But Merel Kindt and colleagues from the University of Amsterdam have found that it can do much more. By giving it to people before they recalled a scary memory about a spider, they could erase the fearful response it triggered.
The critical thing about the study is that the entire memory hadn't been erased in a typical sci-fi way. Kindt had trained the volunteers…
clock | February 15, 2009Being quite busy lately, I accumulated a lot of links to stuff I wanted to comment on but never found time. Well, it does not appear I will find time any time soon, so here are the links for you to comment on anyway (just because I link to them does not mean I agree with them - in some cases quite the opposite):
In Defense of Secrecy :
Given the pervasive secrecy of the Bush-Cheney administration, and the sorry consequences of that disposition, President Barack Obama's early emphasis on openness in government seems almost inevitable. One of the first official communications issued by the new…
clock | February 14, 2009Republicans: Spare Me Your Newfound 'Fiscal Responsibility':
At his press conference on Monday, President Barack Obama had to remind Mara Liasson of Fox News and NPR that it was the Republicans who doubled the national debt over the past eight years and it's a little strange to be hearing lectures from them now about how to be fiscally responsible. That interchange was my favorite part of the press conference. A savvy inside-the-Beltway reporter of Ms. Liasson's caliber shouldn't have to be reminded that George W. Bush and the Republican Congress were among the most fiscally reckless…
clock | February 14, 2009From TechDirt:
This is wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin. Google doesn't devalue things it touches. It increases their value by making them easier to find and access. Google increases your audience as a content creator, which is the most important asset you have. It takes a special kind of cluelessness to claim that something that increases your biggest asset "devalues" your business. Thomson's mistake seems to be that he's confusing "price" and "value" which is a bit scary for the managing editor of a business publication. Yes, the widespread availability of news may…
clock | February 14, 2009Greensboro News & Record was one of the first and most innovative newspapers when it comes to the use of the Web, blogs, etc. Now Les Alexander takes a look at the experiment:
I'd love to say we made it all happen. We didn't. We did, however, learn some lessons. A lot of what we learned is specific to newspaper Web sites, but some of it could be valuable to people in other lines of work, particularly with respect to major projects that involve interacting with customers.
clock | February 14, 2009I was listening to NPR in the car yesterday when David Brooks came on and started blathering in his usual vein, revealing with every word his love for the establishment in Washington and his disdain for the proles, and pushing Broderism with all his might. So I was very pleased to see Glenn Greenwald dissect him in great detail in his latest post - David Brooks reveals the mentality of the Beltway journalist:
Here we see the full expression of one of the most predominant attributes of the contemporary Beltway journalist: because they are integral members of the Washington establishment,…
clock | February 14, 2009Well deserved:
The Carrboro Citizen won six awards including two first-place awards in the 2008 North Carolina Press Association's News, Editorial and Photojournalism contest. The awards were presented Thursday evening at the press association's banquet in Cary.
Also check their blog. And, they are also now on Twitter.
pharyngula | February 13, 2009I was more than a little disappointed when Forbes magazine published the screeds of those ignorant doofii, Ham, Wells, Flannery, West, and Egnor. Now, though, they've also published a broadside from Jerry Coyne that demolishes the five creationists. His primary focus is on Egnor (but just as much could be said against any of them), and he doesn't hold back.
Why does he so readily dismiss a theory that has been universally accepted by scientists for over a century?
Apparently because a rather old book, Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, first published in 1985, convinced him…
pharyngula | February 11, 2009Coyne and I seem to have achieved consensus in our opinion of the Safina column, without talking to each other about it. It's true, once you reach a certain level of Darwin Consciousness, you gain the ability to read minds. And also levitate.
scientificactivist | February 10, 2009Evolution is an established scientific idea, the unifying theme of biology, and an important field of study. "Darwinism", on the other hand, is a term used misleadingly by creationists to attack ideas they can't counter on fact alone and misguidedly by journalists unwittingly assisting this process. With that in mind, the recent essay by Carl Safina in The New York Times entitled "Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live" seems a bit irrelevant:
By propounding "Darwinism," even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one "…
pharyngula | February 9, 2009The other problem with media coverage is that certifiable idiots get to open their mouths and their noise goes unquestioned in print. Here's a regrettable example of an ignorant opinion piece, one so egregiously stupid that even Ian Musgrave is reduced to indignant spluttering.
The problem I face is weariness with science-based dialogue partners like Richard Dawkins. It surprises me he is not chided for his innate scientific conservatism and metaphysical complacency. He won't take his depiction of Darwinism to logical conclusions. A dedicated Darwinian would welcome imperialism, genocide,…
pharyngula | February 9, 2009I must recommend an excellent editorial in the Guardian. Somebody there gets it; all the "he said she said" journalism that we get is a failure of the media to get to the basic truth of a story.
There can be no such equivocation in the week of a survey which showed that only around half of all Britons accept that Darwin's theory of evolution is either true or probably true. In a democracy, citizens should respect each other's beliefs; and citizens have a right to express their beliefs. But in a democracy, a newspaper has an obligation to what is right. The truth is that Darwin's reasoning has…
pharyngula | February 8, 2009How strange: The Economist is running this graph, of people's acceptance of evolutionary theory by country.
Look familiar? It should. It seems to be some of the same data used in this well known figure (not from New Scientist, by the way, but Science):
Miller JD, Scott EC, Okamoto S (2006) Public acceptance of evolution. Science 313:765-766.
So, The Economist has taken a chart, stripped out half the data, put it into new colors that make my eyes hurt, and put it on a background with chimpanzees having a snack — said chimpanzees occupying almost half the space allotted.
Shock horror! I am…
clock | February 7, 2009Science coverage in New York Times is good because they can afford a whole stable of people, each expert in one field only. If Carl Zimmer was forced to cover, on a daily basis and without time to research, everything from astronomy and physics to archaeology and materials science, he would do a bad job, too. But he is given time to pick his own area - evolution - to study it for years, and to write whatever the heck he wants on any given week. So Carl is an expert on what he is writing.
A small paper with one science beat reporter will have to cover everything and that reporter will thus…