Author: John G. West
What Nightline Didn’t Show Viewers: The Unedited Nightline Interview with Dr. Stephen Meyer
Last night’s Nightline segment on intelligent design fulfilled the promise of its inane preview article. Rather than cover the substance of the intellectual debate over design, all Nightline could do was act as the mouthpiece for ID-bashers like Barbara Forrest. Nightline asserted that the debate over intelligent design is about politics and PR, but that is only because Nightline didn’t want to cover anything else. Nightline’s producers clearly had a predetermined agenda going into their story, and they stuck to it. We audiotaped Nightline’s interview with Dr. Stephen Meyer at Discovery Institute’s office, and we’ve prepared a verbatim transcript, available here. If you want learn what Nightline refused to show its viewers, I encourage you to read it. I think Read More ›
Reuters Makes Glaring Error of Fact in Kansas Science Standards Story
Just when I think the major media are beginning to become a little more accurate in reporting on the evolution issue, something happens to bring me back to reality. Yesterday the international newswire Reuters sent out a story making the following preposterous claim: The new science standards would… eliminate core evolution theory as required curriculum. This claim is absolutely false. The draft science standards endorsed by the Kansas Board of Education continue to include evolution as part of the standard required curriculum. Indeed, the proposed benchmark on evolution is all but identical to the one in the current Kansas Science Standards. See for yourself:
CNN Sends Fabricator of Texas Textbook Story to Kansas; Nixes Debate between Meyer and Miller
CNN Reporter Ed Lavendera, who two years ago fabricated part of his story about the Texas textbook battle, has now been sent to Kansas to report on the controversy there. Not surprisingly, Ed gets the basic facts about Kansas wrong as well. He even recycles an old clip from his previous story while creating impression that it came from Kansas!
Nightline polls Darwinists and finds (surprise!) there IS no scientific debate over Darwinism
Nightline ran a story on intellingent design last night, and if the inane preview article is any indication, the segment was the sort of lopsided hatchet-job one used to expect from the folks at “60 Minutes”—but not nearly as intelligent. Nightline’s main point appears to be that there really isn’t any scientific controversy over Darwinism and intelligent design. How do they know this? They checked with several Darwinists, who told them so! That’s right. According to Nightline, because Darwinists happen to believe there is no scientific controversy over evolution, there really must be no controversy. Hmm. Nightline could apply this logic to a lot of other issues besides intelligent design:
ID Makes the Cover of Time!
Intelligent Design (ID) has made it to the cover of Time magazine this week, and I’m delighted to say that the cover story is for the most part respecftul and fair. It’s certainly a far-cry from Time’s inaccurate and conspiracy-mongering tirade a few months ago. The cover story even gives a mostly correct definition of ID (adapted from the definition on Discovery Institute’s website). Time says that intelligent design is “the proposition that some aspects of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause or agent, as opposed to natural selection.” A number of ID scientists were interviewed for the article, and Time assigned at least a dozen reporters to work on the story. Still, there are some misleading Read More ›