Columbia Journalism Review
September/October 2005
Undoing Darwin
By Chris Mooney and Matthew C. Nisbet
On March 14, 2005, The Wa****ngton Post's Peter Slevin wrote
a front-page story on the battle that is "intensifying
across the nation" over the teaching of evolution in
public-school science cl*****. Slevin's lengthy piece took a
detailed look at the lobbying, fund-raising, and
communications tactics being deployed at the state and local
level to undermine evolution. The article placed a
particular emphasis on the burgeoning "intelligent design"
movement, centered at Seattle's Discovery Institute, whose
proponents claim that living things, in all their organized
complexity, simply could not have arisen from a mindless and
directionless process such as the one so famously described
in 1859 by Charles Darwin in his classic, The Origin of Species.
Yet Slevin's article conspicuously failed to provide any
background information on the theory of evolution, or why
it's considered a bedrock of modern scientific knowledge
among both scientists who believe in God and those who
don't. Indeed, the few defenders of evolution quoted by
Slevin were attached to advocacy groups, not research
universities; most of the article's focus, meanwhile, was on
anti-evolutionists and their strategies. Of the piece's
thirty-eight paragraphs, twenty-one were devoted to this
"strategy" framing -- an emphasis that, not surprisingly,
rankled the Post's science re****ters. "How is it that The
Wa****ngton Post can run a feature-length A1 story about the
battle over the facts of evolution and not devote a single
paragraph to what the evidence is for the scientific view of
evolution?" protested an internal memo from the paper's
science desk that was copied to Michael Getler, the Post's
ombudsman. "We do our readers a grave disservice by not
telling them. By turning this into a story of dueling
talking heads, we add credence to the idea that this is
simply a battle of beliefs." Though he called Slevin's piece
"lengthy, smart, and very revealing," Getler assigned Slevin
a grade of "incomplete" for his work.
Slevin's incomplete article probably foreshadows what we can
expect as evolution continues its climb up the news agenda,
driven by a rising number of newsworthy events. In May, for
example, came a series of public hearings staged by
evolution-theory opponents in Kansas. In Cobb County,
Georgia, a lawsuit is pending over anti-evolutionist
textbook disclaimers (the case is before the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit). And now comes the
introduction of intelligent design into the science
curriculum of the Dover, Pennsylvania, school district, a
move that has triggered a First Amendment lawsuit scheduled
to be argued in September before a federal judge in
Harrisburg. President Bush and Senator Bill Frist entered
the fray in early August, when both appeared to endorse the
teaching of intelligent design in science cl*****.
As evolution, driven by such events, ****fts out of
scientific realms and into political and legal ones, it
ceases to be covered by context-oriented science re****ters
and is instead bounced to political pages, opinion pages,
and television news. And all these venues, in their various
ways, tend to deemphasize the strong scientific case in
favor of evolution and instead lend credence to the notion
that a growing "controversy" exists over evolutionary
science. This notion may be politically convenient, but it
is false.
We reached our conclusions about press coverage after
systematically reading through seventeen months of evolution
stories in The New York Times and The Wa****ngton Post; daily
papers in the local areas embroiled in the evolution debate
(including both papers covering Dover, Pennsylvania, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Topeka, Kansas,
Capital-Journal); and relevant broadcast and cable
television news transcripts. Across this coverage, a clear
pattern emerges when evolution is an issue: from re****ting
on newly discovered fossil records of feathered dinosaurs
and three-foot humanoids to the latest ideas of theorists
such as Richard Dawkins, science writers generally
characterize evolution in terms that accurately reflect its
firm acceptance in the scientific community. Political
re****ters, generalists, and TV news re****ters and anchors,
however, rarely provide their audiences with any real
context about basic evolutionary science. Worse, they often
provide a springboard for anti-evolutionist criticism of
that science, allotting ample quotes and sound bites to
Darwin's critics in a quest to achieve "balance." The
science is only further distorted on the opinion pages of
local newspapers.
Later this month, all of this will probably be on full
display as the dramatic evolution trial begins in
Pennsylvania over intelligent design, or ID. The case,
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, will be the first
ever to test the legality of introducing ID into
public-school science cl*****. The suit was filed by the
ACLU on behalf of concerned parents after the local school
board voted 6-3 to endorse the following change to the
biology curriculum: "Students will be made aware of
gaps/problems in Darwin's Theory and of other theories of
evolution including, but not limited to, Intelligent
Design." The trial is likely to be a media circus. And,
unfortunately, there's ample reason to expect that the
spectacle will lend an entirely undeserved p.r. boost to the
carefully honed issue-framing techniques employed by today's
anti-evolutionists.
"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of
evolution," the famed geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote
in 1973. What Dobzhansky calls "evolution," Charles Darwin
himself often called "descent with modification," but the
basic idea is the same -- that the wide variety of organisms
occupying the earth today share a common ancestry but have
diversified greatly over time. The main force driving that
process, Darwin postulated, was "natural selection." In
brief, the theory works like this: natural variations make
some organisms better equipped than others for their various
walks of life, and these variations are heritable. As a
result, some organisms will be more likely to survive than
others and will therefore pass on advantageous traits to
their offspring -- a process that, over vast stretches of
geological time, can bring about division into species and,
ultimately, the diversity of life itself.
Since Darwin's time modern science has dramatically
bolstered this theory with evidence from a wide range of
fields. For example, advances in genetics and molecular
biology have now shown how heredity actually works, as well
as explained the nature of chance mutation (the source of
the "variation" that Darwin noted). In fact, DNA now
provides perhaps the single best piece of evidence
sup****ting the theory of evolution. More closely related
organisms turn out to have more DNA in common, meaning that
the course of evolutionary change can actually be charted
through genetic analysis.
As the National Academy of Sciences has noted, further
evidence for evolutionary theory comes from such diverse
arenas as the fossil record, comparative anatomy (which
reveals structural similarities in related organisms, often
called "homology"), species distribution (showing, for
instance, that island species are often distinct from but
closely related to mainland relatives), and embryology. With
all of this interlocking evidence, the academy has declared
the theory of evolution to be "the central unifying concept
of biology."
Despite its firm foundation, however, evolution has long
been challenged by some devout religious believers who find
it incompatible with a literal interpretation of scripture
and an assault on religion itself (even though many
evolutionary scientists are themselves religious). Over
nearly a century in the United States, the creationist
movement has not only persisted but changed its form in
reaction to legal and educational precedents. In the 1960s
and 1970s, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that bans on
the teaching of evolution were unconstitutional,
creationists adopted the mantle of "creation science" or
"scientific creationism," arguing for instance that Noah's
flood caused geological phenomena like the Grand Canyon, and
calling for "equal time" for their views in public schools.
More recently, Darwin's foes have taken up intelligent
design, making the more limited -- and far more
sophisticated -- claim that evolution alone cannot explain
the stunning complexity of anatomical structures such as the
eye, or, more basically, parts of the cell. The intelligent
design movement, like the creation science movement before
it, includes at least a few Ph.D.s -- for example, Lehigh
University's Michael Behe, who argues that certain
biochemical structures are "irreducibly complex," meaning
that they could not have evolved in an unguided fa****on and
must instead have been designed by a superhuman
intelligence. Behe's arguments have not successfully swayed
the broader biological community, however.
If attacks on evolution aren't anything new in America,
neither is the tendency of U.S. journalists to lend undue
credibility to theological attacks that masquerade as being
"scientific" in nature. During the early 1980s, for example,
the mega-evolution trial McLean v. Arkansas pitted defenders
of evolutionary science against so-called "scientific
creationists." Today, few take the claims of these
scientific creationists very seriously. At the time,
however, proponents of creation science were treated quite
seriously indeed by the national media, which had parachuted
in for the trial. As media scholars have noted, re****ters
generally "balanced" the scientific-sounding claims of the
scientific creationists against the arguments of
evolutionary scientists. They also noted that religion and
public-affairs re****ters, rather than science writers, were
generally assigned to cover the trial.
Now, history is repeating itself: intelligent-design
proponents, whose movement is a descendant of the creation
science movement of yore, are enjoying precisely the same
kind of favorable media coverage in the run-up to another
major evolution trial. This cyclical phenomenon carries with
it an im****tant lesson about the nature of political
re****ting when applied to scientific issues. In
strategy-driven political coverage, re****ters typically tout
the claims of competing political camps without comment or
knowledgeable analysis, leaving readers to fend for themselves.
For example, consider this perfectly balanced two-sentence
summary of competing positions that appeared repeatedly in
coverage of the Dover, Pennsylvania, evolution debate by The
York Dispatch's Heidi Bernhard-Bubb: "Intelligent design
theory attributes the origin of life to an intelligent
being. It counters the theory of evolution, which says that
people evolved from less complex beings." This type of
pairing fails in more ways than one. First, the statement
about the "less complex beings" that supposedly preceded
modern humans suggests a lackluster understanding of
evolutionary theory. (Nothing in evolutionary theory
suggests that an increase in complexity is inherent to the
process. In fact, very simple bacteria continue to thrive on
earth to this day.) Even worse, such "balance" is far from
truly objective. The pairing of competing claims plays
directly into the hands of intelligent-design proponents who
have cleverly argued that they're mounting a scientific
attack on evolution rather than a religiously driven one,
and who paint themselves as maverick outsiders warring
against a dogmatic scientific establishment.
Political re****ting in newspapers is just part of the
problem. Television news re****ting often makes the situation
even worse, even in the most sophisticated of venues.
Consider, for example, a March 28 re****t on The NewsHour
with Jim Lehrer, in which the correspondent Jeffrey Brown
characterized evolution's new opponents as follows:
"Intelligent design's proponents carefully distinguish
themselves from creation scientists. They use only the
language of science, and avoid speaking of God as the
ultimate designer." Brown appears oblivious to the
scientific-sounding arguments employed by earlier
creationists. Moreover, references to God and religion
aren't particularly difficult to find among ID defenders, if
you know where to look. The pro-ID Discovery Institute's
strategic Wedge Do***ent, exposed on the Internet years ago
and well known to those who follow the evolution issue,
baldly stated the hope that intelligent design would
"reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist
worldview, and . . . replace it with a science consonant
with Christian and theistic convictions."
In a kind of test run for the Dover trial, the national
media decamped to Kansas in May to cover public hearings
over the science curriculum staged by anti-evolutionists on
the state school board (hearings that mainstream scientists
themselves had boycotted). The event triggered repeated
analogies to the Scopes trial (even though there was no
actual trial), colorful storytelling themes that described
the "battle" between the underdog of intelligent design and
establishment science, and televised re****ting and
commentary that humored the carefully crafted framing
devices and arguments of anti-evolutionists.
Even the best TV news re****ters may be hard-pressed to cover
evolution thoroughly and accurately on a medium that relies
so heavily upon images, sound bites, drama, and conflict to
keep audiences locked in. These are serious obstacles to
conveying scientific complexity. And with its heavy emphasis
on talk and debate, cable news is even worse. The
adversarial format of most cable news talk shows inherently
favors ID's attacks on evolution by making false
journalistic "balance" nearly inescapable.
None of which is to say there aren't some journalists today
who are doing a great job with their evolution coverage, and
who can provide a helpful model. Cornelia Dean, a science
writer at The New York Times, presents a leading example of
how not only to re****t on but also how to contextualize the
intelligent-design strategy. Consider a June 21 article in
which, after featuring the arguments of an ID proponent who
called for teaching about the alleged "controversy" over
evolution in public schools, Dean wrote: "In theory, this
position -- 'teach the controversy' -- is one any scientist
should sup****t. But mainstream scientists say alternatives
to evolution have repeatedly failed the tests of science,
and the criticisms have been answered again and again. For
scientists, there is no controversy."
Besides citing the overwhelming scientific consensus in
sup****t of evolution, journalists can also contextualize the
claims of ID proponents by applying clear legal precedents.
Instead of ritually likening the contem****ary
intelligent-design debate to the historic Scopes "monkey
trial" of 1925, journalists should ask the same questions
about ID that more recent court decisions (especially the
McLean v. Arkansas case) have leveled at previous challenges
to evolution: First, is ID religiously motivated and does it
feature religious content? In other words, would it violate
the separation of church and state if covered in a public
school setting? Second, does ID meet the criteria of a
scientific theory, and is there strong peer-reviewed
evidence in sup****t of it? In short, to better cover
evolution, journalists don't merely have to think more like
scientists (or science writers). As the evolution issue
inevitably ****fts into a legal context, they must think more
like skeptical jurists.
And as evolution becomes politicized in state after state
through trials and school board maneuverings, it rises to
prominence on the opinion pages as well as in news stories.
Here, competing arguments about evolution and intelligent
design tend to be paired against one another in letters to
the editor and sometimes in rival guest op-eds, providing a
challenge to editors who want to give voice to alternative
ideas yet provide an accurate sense of the state of
scientific consensus. The mission of the opinion pages and a
faithfulness to scientific accuracy can easily come into
conflict.
In fact, these forums are quite easily hijacked by
activists. Actors on both sides of the evolution debate, but
especially pro-ID strategists, often recruit citizens to
write letters and op-eds that emphasize the strategists'
talking points and arguments. "You get an awful lot of
canned comment on the creation side, which you just can't
use," observes William Parkinson, editorial page editor of
The York Dispatch, one of the two papers closely covering
the Dover evolution controversy. Yet despite his awareness
of this problem, Parkinson's paper did recently print at
least one form letter modeled on a prepared text put out by
the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, a Christian
conservative group. Precrafted talking points included the
following: "This is a science vs. science debate, not a
science vs. religion debate -- it is scientists looking at
the same data and reaching different conclusions." The York
Dispatch's rival paper, the York Daily Record, printed two
letters clearly based on the same talking points.
In our study of media coverage of recent evolution
controversies, we homed in on local opinion pages, both
because they represent a venue where it's easy to keep score
of how the issue is being defined and because we suspected
they would reflect a public that is largely misinformed
about the scientific basis for the theory of evolution yet
itching to fight about it. That's especially so since many
opinion-page editors see their role not as gatekeepers of
scientific content, but rather as enablers of debate within
pluralistic communities -- even over matters of science that
are usually adjudicated in peer-reviewed journals. Both
editorial-page editors of the York papers, for example,
emphasized that they try to run every letter they receive
that's "fit to print" (essentially meaning that it isn't too
lengthy or outright false or libelous).
We wanted to measure the whole of opinion writing in these
two papers. So for the period of January 2004 through May
2005, we recorded each letter, op-ed, opinion column, and
in-house editorial that appeared (using Lexis-Nexis and
Factiva databases). We scored the author's position both on
the teaching of intelligent design or creationism in public
schools and on the question of whether scientific evidence
sup****ts anti-evolutionist viewpoints. While this remains a
somewhat subjective process, strict scoring rules were
followed that would allow a different set of raters to
arrive at roughly similar conclusions.
Rather stunningly, we found that the heated political debate
in Dover, Pennsylvania, produced a massive response: 168
letters, op-eds, columns, and editorials appearing in the
York Daily Record alone over the seventeen-month period
analyzed (plus ninety-eight in The York Dispatch). A slight
plurality of opinion articles at the Dispatch (40.9 percent)
and the Daily Record (45.3 percent) implicitly or explicitly
favored teaching ID and/or "creation science" in some form
in public schools, while 39.8 percent and 36.3 percent of
opinion articles at those two papers favored teaching only
evolution. On the question of scientific evidence, more than
a third of opinion articles at the two papers contended or
suggested that ID and/or "creation science" had scientific
sup****t.
In short, an entirely lopsided debate within the scientific
community was transformed into an evenly divided one in the
popular arena, as local editorial-page editors printed every
letter they received that they deemed "fit." At the York
Dispatch this populism was partly counterbalanced by an
editorial voice that took a firm stand in favor of teaching
evolution and termed intelligent design the "same old
creationist wine in new bottles." The York Daily Record,
however, was considerably more sheepish in its editorial
stance. The paper generally sought to minimize controversy
and seemed more willing to criticize Dover school board
members who resigned over the decision to introduce
intelligent design into the curriculum (asking why they
didn't stay and fight) than to rebuke those board members
who were responsible for attacking evolution in the first
place. When the Dover school board instituted its ID policy
in October 2004, the first York Daily Record editorial to
respond to the development fretted about an "unnecessary and
divisive distraction for a district that has other, more
pressing educational issues to deal with" but didn't
strongly denounce what had happened. "I think we've been
highly critical of the personal behavior of some of the
board members, but we've tried to be, you know, fair on the
issue itself of whether ID should be taught in science
class," says the editorial-page editor, Scott Fisher, who
adds that the editorial board is "slightly divided" on the
issue.
Interestingly, however, not all local opinion pages fit the
mold of the York papers. Given the turmoil in Cobb County,
Georgia, over the introduction of anti-evolutionist textbook
disclaimers, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution also covered
the debate heavily on its opinion pages. But the paper took
a very firm stand on the issue, with the editorial-page
editor, Cynthia Tucker, declaring in one pro-evolution
column that "our science infrastructure is under attack from
religious extremists." Tucker, along with the deputy
editorial-page editor, Jay Bookman, also warned repeatedly
of the severe negative economic consequences and national
ridicule that anti-evolutionism might bring on the
community. Meanwhile, a majority of printed letters, op-eds,
and editorials in the Journal-Constitution (54.2 percent)
favored teaching only evolution and argued that ID and/or
creationism lacked scientific sup****t (53.5 percent). This
may suggest a community with different views than those in
Dover, Pennsylvania, or it may suggest a stronger editorial
role. (Tucker and Bookman did not respond to queries about
whether they print letters according to the pro****tion of
opinion that they receive or use other criteria.) Yet
despite the strong stance of the Journal-Constitution
editorial staff, the editors also actively worked to include
at least some balance in perspectives, inviting guest op-eds
that countered the strongly pro-evolution editorial position
of the paper. Roughly 30 percent of the letters and op-eds
to the paper featured pro-ID and/or creationist views.
At the other local paper we looked at, The Topeka
Capital-Journal, the issue has not received nearly as
thorough an airing, though the pro****tion of pro-evolution
to pro-ID arguments was roughly similar to those in the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Interestingly, the Topeka
paper appears to have been somewhat reluctant to go beyond
publi****ng letters on the topic, featuring only two guest
op-eds (both in sup****t of evolution) and no in-house
editorials or columns. Silence is no way for an editorial
page to respond to an evolution controversy in its backyard.
At two elite national papers, The New York Times and The
Wa****ngton Post, the opinion pages sided heavily with
evolution. But even there a false sense of scientific
controversy was arguably abetted when The New York Times
allowed Michael Behe, the prominent ID proponent, to write a
full-length op-ed explaining why his is a "scientific"
critique of evolution. And when USA Today took a strong
stand for evolution on its editorial page on August 8
('INTELLIGENT DESIGN' SMACKS OF CREATIONISM BY ANOTHER
NAME), the paper, using its point-counterpoint editorial
format, ran an anti-evolution piece with it (EVOLUTION LACKS
FOSSIL LINK), written by a state senator from Utah, D. Chris
Buttars. It was filled with stark misinformation, such as
the following sentence: "There is zero scientific fossil
evidence that demonstrates organic evolutionary linkage
between primates and man."
More recently, the Times delivered another coup for
anti-evolutionists by printing a July 7 op-ed by the Roman
Catholic Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, making the case for
the "overwhelming evidence for design in biology." Schonborn
is a religious authority, not a scientific one, and while
his opinion may have been newsworthy because it suggested a
****fting of position on evolution within the Catholic
Church, the "evidence" to which he referred is not
recognized by mainstream evolutionary science. In fact, the
Times science writer Cornelia Dean implied as much when, in
covering the publication of Schonborn's article as a piece
of news, she wrote in her seventh paragraph that "Darwinian
evolution is the foundation of modern biology. While
researchers may debate details of how the mechanism of
evolution plays out, there is no credible scientific
challenge to the underlying theory."
In early August, on the heels of Cardinal Schonborn’s
newsmaking op-ed, Americans received another confusing
signal about the scientific merits of intelligent design,
this time from President Bush. During a roundtable
discussion with re****ters from five Texas newspapers, Bush
said of the teaching of ID, "I think that part of education
is to expose people to different schools of thought . . . .
You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed
to different ideas and the answer is yes." That day an AP
article on the president's remarks re****ted his statements
without context -- no response from a scientist, no mention
of the scientific basis for evolution. The Houston
Chronicle, one of the five Texas papers at the roundtable,
reflected on Bush's statement uncritically in its story,
noting only that intelligent design and creationism "are at
odds with a Darwinian evolution theory, which holds that
humans evolved over time from other species." The Chronicle
also quoted a board member of Americans United for
Separation of Church and State, observing that Bush was
playing to his conservative Christian base. In their
re****ting, the political correspondents Elisabeth Bumiller
at The New York Times and Peter Baker and Peter Slevin at
The Wa****ngton Post did at least contextualize Bush's
remarks with responses from pro-evolution advocacy groups,
but they also referred to ID as a "theory," lending an
implicit sense of scientific legitimacy to a religiously
motivated political movement.
At the end of August, the Times weighed in with a three-part
series on the evolution "controversy," drawing from its deep
well of expertise. On Sunday, August 21, re****ter Jodi
Wilgoren provided background on the history, funding, and
tactics of the Discovery Institute. On Monday, science
writer Kenneth Chang tackled the science, giving
considerable space to an explanation of evolutionary theory.
Cornelia Dean broke new ground on Tuesday with a piece about
how scientists, including devout Christian scientists, view
religion.
The series was nuanced and comprehensive, and will likely
boost even higher the profile of evolution in the news.
Still, the unintended consequence may be that increased
media attention only helps proponents present intelligent
design as a contest between scientific theories rather than
what it actually is -- a sophisticated religious challenge
to an overwhelming scientific consensus. As the Discovery
Institute's vice president, Jay Richards, put it on Larry
King Live the day of the final Times story: "We think
teachers should be free to talk about intelligent design,
and frankly, I don't think that it can be suppressed. It's
now very much a public discussion, evidenced by the fact
that you're talking about it on your show tonight."
Without a doubt, then, political re****ting, television news,
and opinion pages are all generally fanning the flames of a
"controversy" over evolution. Not surprisingly, in light of
this coverage, we simultaneously find that the public is
deeply confused about evolution.
In a November 2004 Gallup poll, respondents were asked:
"Just your opinion, do you think that Charles Darwin's
theory of evolution is: a scientific theory that has been
well sup****ted by evidence, or just one of many theories and
one that has not been well-sup****ted by evidence, or don't
you know enough to say?" Only 35 percent of Americans
answered a scientific theory sup****ted by evidence, whereas
another 35 percent indicated that evolution was just one
among many theories, and 29 percent answered that they
didn't know. Meanwhile a national survey this spring
(conducted by Matthew Nisbet, one of the authors of this
article, in collaboration with the Survey Research Institute
at Cornell University), found similar public confusion about
the scientific basis for intelligent design. A bare majority
of adult Americans (56.3 percent) agreed that evolution is
sup****ted by an overwhelming body of scientific evidence; a
sizeable pro****tion (44.2 percent) thought precisely the
same thing of intelligent design.
At the very least, the flaws in the journalistic
presentation of evolution by political re****ters, TV news,
and op-ed pages aren't clarifying the issues. Perhaps
journalists should consider that unlike other social
controversies -- over abortion or gay marriage, for instance
-- the evolution debate is not solely a matter of subjective
morality or political opinion. Rather, a definitive standard
has been set by the scientific community on the science of
evolution, and can easily be used to evaluate competing
claims. Scientific societies, including the National Academy
of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, have taken strong stances affirming that
evolution is the bedrock of modern biology. In such a
situation, journalistic coverage that helps fan the flames
of a nonexistent scientific controversy (and misrepresents
what's actually known) simply isn't appropriate.
So what is a good editor to do about the very real collision
between a scientific consensus and a pseudo-scientific
movement that opposes the basis of that consensus? At the
very least, newspaper editors should think twice about
assigning re****ters who are fresh to the evolution issue and
allowing them to default to the typical strategy frame,
carefully balancing "both sides" of the issue in order to
file a story on time and get around sorting through the
legitimacy of the competing claims. As journalism programs
across the country systematically review their curriculums
and training methods, the evolution "controversy" provides
strong evidence in sup****t of the contention that
specialization in journalism education can benefit not only
public understanding, but also the integrity of the media.
For example, at Ohio State, beyond basic skill training in
re****ting and editing, students focusing on public-affairs
journalism are required to take an introductory course in
scientific reasoning. Students can then specialize further
by taking advanced courses covering the relation****ps
between science, the media, and society. They are also
encouraged to minor in a science-related field.
With training in covering science-related policy disputes on
issues ranging from intelligent design to stem-cell research
to climate change, journalists are better equipped to make
solid independent judgments about credibility, and then pass
these interpretations on to readers. The intelligent-design
debate is one among a growing number of controversies in
which technical complexity, with disputes over "facts,"
data, and expertise, has altered the political battleground.
The traditional generalist correspondent will be
hard-pressed to cover these topics in any other format than
the strategy frame, balancing arguments while narrowly
focusing on the implications for who's ahead and who's
behind in the contest to decide policy. If news editors fail
to recognize the growing demand for journalists with
specialized expertise and backgrounds who can get beyond
this form of writing, the news media risk losing their
ability to serve as im****tant watchdogs over society's
institutions.
When it comes to opinion pages, meanwhile, there's certainly
more room for dissent because of the nature of the forum --
but that doesn't mean editorial-page editors can't act as
responsible gatekeepers. Unlike the timidity of the York
Daily Record and The Topeka Capital-Journal, The York
Dispatch and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution serve as
examples of how papers can inform their readers about
authoritative scientific opinion without stifling the voices
of anti-evolutionists.
One thing, above all, is clear: a full-fledged national
debate has been reawakened over an issue that once seemed
settled. This new fight may not simmer down again until the
U.S. Supreme Court is forced (for the third time) to weigh
in. In these cir***stances, the media have a profound
responsibility -- to the public, and to knowledge itself.
Chris Mooney is Wa****ngton correspondent for Seed Magazine
and author of The Republican War on Science
(http://www.waronscience.com
), due out this month from
Basic Books. Matthew C. Nisbet, Ph.D., is an assistant
professor in the School of Communication at Ohio State
University, where his research focuses on the intersections
between science, the media, and politics.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1587154838/thedanclorenecro/
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
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