Reuters’ Reporting on Kansas: Science Fiction

Yesterday, I blogged about Reuters’ inaccurate news report earlier this week, which wrongly claimed that the new Kansas science standards would remove evolution as part of the standard core curriculum in Kansas. That was before I read the revised and expanded version of Reuters’ report. Someone has now rewritten the original story. But instead of making it better, the writer has veered off into the realm of fabrication. Reuters’ revised report claims that Kansas is actually trying to include intelligent design in its science standards, as well as asserting as fact that intelligent design is “a form of creationism”:

CNN’s Use of Trite, Tired Polls on “Creationism”

If you are CNN commentator Bill Schneider you think that intelligent design is just another name for creationism and that creationism is what schools are considering teaching. Now, ID is not creationism and, in any case, schools — with few exceptions — are only considering whether students will be exposed to the scientific evidence for and against Darwin’s theory, not whether to teach ID. But mere reality didn’t stop Schneider from warping the issue with polls that pit evolution against creationism during his Inside Politics news report on President Bush today.

“It’s quite exhilarating, actually, to be shot at and totally missed.”

The Boston Globe continues to report on the debate over evolution with nary a care for anything resembling a basic understanding of what’s being debated. Today they have an interesting interview with Discovery co-founder and senior fellow George Gilder, “The Evolution of George Gilder.” Right out of the gate the reporter mischaracterizes the issue by giving some terrible definitions to three key terms.