Media
pharyngula | November 5, 2010This is billed as a special news report: do angels exist?. I remember using "special" in exactly that way in grade school, too. Do Fox News reporters also ride the short bus to work?
I suppose I should be grateful that they brought in one skeptic to moderate it a bit, but otherwise…it's an excuse to quote the Bible a bunch of times and drag in some truly stupid people to testify. Joey Hipp ought to be in jail: after being told, he says, that his wife's spine was so mangled she might not be able to walk, he strolls up to her hospital bed, takes her hand, and makes her stand up…what kind of…
sastyk | October 9, 2010The first day of the ASPO conference involved a lot of smaller sessions, most of which I missed because I was speaking or at the press conference and congressional briefing. The congressional briefing was a wild success - absolutely packed. The press conference was smaller (we were competing with the IMF and several other events) but the press follow up has been pretty good. Since what I care most about is ASPO's ability to extend the message out to the overwhelming majority of people who have no idea that their life is going to change, this was useful and interesting.
Day two (Friday)…
sastyk | October 7, 2010Can a movement with the truth on its side abandon dry numbers for truthiness?
by guest blogger Molly Davis
**Hi guys! Sorry, this isn't much of an intro, but I hope you like the blog!**
Today's ASPO-USA conference in Washington, DC, is by far populated with people who support the idea that oil and gas supplies (or at least our ability to access them without serious environmental impacts) are peaking and that the results will prove both economically and socially disruptive.
But among this group, almost all of the messaging experts say the movement's narrative has failed to influence…
pharyngula | September 1, 2010Disney has always been aggressive about extending their copyright to the various Disney characters — they keep going to congress and getting more years tacked on. It's clearly past due that we should revoke all that (come on, Ol' Walt died when I was in 4th grade, and I don't care if his cryogenically frozen head is occasionally revived to dispense marching orders and consume baby brain smoothies). As evidence, I present to you the latest atrocity from the Disney channel, "Disney Blam!" What they do is take classic old Disney cartoons from the 40s, 50s, and 60s and 'update' them by adding…
pharyngula | August 25, 2010Jebus, but I despise that fluffy, superficial, Newagey site run by the flibbertigibbet Ariana. I will not be linking to it, but if you must, you can just search for this recent article: "Darwin May Have Been WRONG, New Study Argues". I don't recommend it. It sucks. Read the title, and you've already got the false sensationalism of the whole story down cold.
It's actually an old and familiar story that doesn't upset any applecarts at all. There is a well-known concept in evolutionary theory of an adaptive radiation: a lineage acquires a new trait (birds evolve flight, for instance), or an…
drorzel | August 19, 2010Everybody's favorite science-and-politics blogger has posted a video clip showing part of what's wrong in science communication. It's a clip from the BBC from last December, featuring one of those head-to-head quasi-debates about "Climategate" between Prof. Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia and political consultant Marc Morano, who has made himself a nice little media niche as the go-to guy for climate change denial:
I don't think this is quite as damning as Chris says, but it's pretty bad. What you see here is a competition between a scientist and somebody who knows how the…
pharyngula | August 14, 2010What a nice idea: bad journalism warning labels that you can stick on newspapers and magazines.
It only gets an "almost" modifier because these labels get slapped on after publication. Full-on brilliant would involve hacking into printing houses and digitally inserting the labels so they get printed on every copy.
pharyngula | July 30, 2010That would be tough. She's written a diatribe in the NY Times on the Pepsico debacle, and it isn't just that she doesn't like many of the scienceblogs (including yours truly), but that she gets the facts wrong.
This was just bizarre.
I was nonplussed by the high dudgeon of the so-called SciBlings. The bloggers evidently write often enough for ad-free academic journals that they still fume about adjacencies, advertorial and infomercials. Most writers for "legacy" media like newspapers, magazines and TV see brush fires over business-editorial crossings as an occupational hazard. They don't…
pharyngula | July 29, 2010Helen Thomas vacated her front row seat in the White Press (under ignominious circumstances, unfortunately), and now it's up for grabs. The White House Correspondence Association is going to decide whether to give it to NPR, Bloomberg, or, appallingly, Fox News. Sign the petition. Slap down the right-wing propaganda organ and insist that a legitimate news organization like NPR get the seat.
pharyngula | July 26, 2010It's amazing: WikiLeaks has just dumped over 91,000 classified documents from the Afghanistan war on the web. Just like that, we get an actual look at what's been going on over there, unfiltered by the traditional media, and definitely not given a rosy patina by Fox News. Fox New is, of course, treating this as a serious blow to their worldview — which isn't surprising, since reality does great damage to Fox. US Government sources also condemn the release, since it exposes the failures of militarism, and militarism is what the government and its profitable contractors have committed…
pharyngula | July 22, 2010So there I was on strike, and this appalling news story flew by and I had to choke on my tongue. I'm late, but I have to say something.
The story, as you probably all know, is that Shirley Sherrod gave a talk on her work assisting poor farmers hang on to their land, in which she confessed to being less enthusiastic about helping poor white farmers early on. Andrew Breitbart, professional pseudojournalist and teabaggin' hack, ran just that excerpt of her talk and made it sound as if she and her audience at the NAACP were flaming racist hatemongers who were chuckling over making Whitey pay.
He…
sastyk | July 20, 2010The first two pieces of this series were largely comic pieces. This one is more serious. I have said this before, but I'll repeat it - I came to science blogs for one reason, and one only - because there was no one else talking about facing up to our material limits on this kind of site, with this kind of audience. I didn't come for the money (you may or may not believe me on this one, but as I keep saying, it isn't that I probably don't have a price, it is just that it isn't a few hundred bucks a month) - I've donated everything I've ever earned here (well less than 1K, given that they…
clock | July 19, 2010It is with great regret that I am writing this. Scienceblogs.com has been a big part of my life for four years now and it is hard to say good bye.
Everything that follows is my own personal thinking and may not apply to other people, including other bloggers on this platform. The new contact information is at the end of the post, but please come back up here and read the whole thing - why I feel like I must leave now.
Sb beginnings
Scienceblogs.com started back in January 2006. On that day, several of my favourite science bloggers moved to this new site, posting the URL on their farewell…
clock | July 10, 2010I will not be saying anything about PepsiCo thing myself yet. I do have opinions (and decisions that come from them), but I am not revealing anything until I am ready (and it may end up being one of those horribly long posts, who knows).
But in the meantime I can put together this linkfest, so you can have a one-spot-shopping place for all the key posts about the event. I don't think this is a complete collection, and I could not order them in a chronological order (too much work, so the order is random) but close enough - the key posts/articles are here, and the comment sections are very…
pharyngula | July 9, 2010Last night, Stewart interviewed Marilynne Robinson. I do not expect attack dog tactics from Stewart, ever, but I also didn't expect him to so totally buy into her premises. It was very disappointing.
The low point came as Stewart tried to justify Robinson's nebulous argument that science and religion need each other, and he offered stock apologetics.
The more you delve into science, the more it relies on faith.
No, it doesn't. The less you delve into science, and the more superficial your understanding of the evidence, the more likely you are to ascribe its more difficult concepts to faith.…
pharyngula | July 7, 2010We've known for a long time that the Huffington Post is a stronghold of anti-scientific, anti-medicine woo. They've also recently added Discovery Institute propagandists to their roster. I've given up on them as a lost cause, but Eric Michael Johnson of the Primate Diaries has been trying to swim up the sewer, posting articles on HuffPo that are pro-science and reason. It's been a noble but futile effort.
The latest revelation is that being a columnist on HuffPo does not mean you have any independence to write as you please: they have editors who censor content. Write something critical of…
hrynyshyn | July 1, 2010My first reaction to the papier du jour among climate communications activists was "meh." It's not that Chris Mooney's latest ruminations on the gap between what the public thinks about scientific issues and what scientists have to say isn't worth reading. It's just that we've been down this road so many times now, the standards of what passes for new and remarkable are getting rather high.
That didn't stop Andy Revkin, Joe Romm, and Evil Monkey from posting lengthy and hard-hitting responses, though. So I gave it a second look, and I've now concluded that "Do Scientists Understand the Public…