Over at Men’s News Daily, editor Mike LaSalle has a post entitled, “Darwin Ist Tot: Intelligent Design is Not Creationism” that observes, “Science is practiced by scientists, not by priests. But recently science and religion appear to have become indistinguishable, as for example in their respective institutional intolerance of competing ideas.” Since leading scientists oppose ID by misrepresenting it as a silly appeal to “magic,” LaSalle observes that “[m]y daily crop of the term ‘Intelligent Design’ on Google News usually brings a plurality of articles that have in common a missionary intent to define Intelligent Design as a hands-down flavor of biblical creationism.” LaSalle offers his witty suspicions about what goes on in the backrooms of the newsmedia:

It’s almost as though everyone in the Science-as-Public-Opinion business got a YouTube saying something to the effect, “Attention all Science Opinion contributors in the Main Stream Media: The following is an instruction from the Supreme Politburo at Central Command. You are hereby advised that whenever you are forced to use the two words ‘Intelligent’ and ‘Design’ together in the same sentence, you must ALWAYS include ‘Creationism’ as a qualifier. If you have questions about this, please submit them in writing to your supervisor. That is all.”

Sadly, Mr. LaSalle has many examples to justify his observations about the newsmedia’s confusion on this issue. Let us hope that perhaps some members of the media are watching so they can avoid this confusion in the future.