What is wrong with journalists?

We’ve got a couple of appalling examples of awful journalism to scowl at today. The first is this credulous piece by Gordy Slack in The Scientist. I’ve been unhappy with Slack before — he sometimes seems to want to let creationist absurdity slide — and I got yelled at by some readers for my uncharitable interpretation of his review of the Creation “Museum”. Well, I think I’ve been vindicated now.

This article tries to give credit to the Intelligent Design creationists for some discoveries or interpretations. It’s wrong from top to bottom. Here’s his list, with my brief rebuttal; Jeffrey Shallit has a more thorough dissection.

  • ID gets credit for saying there are big, open questions in science. Scientists say this. It is not news. Go ahead, ask us, and we’ll give you long lists of exciting research questions. They won’t be invented or falsified controversies, as the DI is fond of puking up.

  • The cell is more complex than Darwin imagined. Scientists say this. The complexity of the cell was not figured out by creationists of any kind — it is the outcome of hard work by cell biologists and molecular biologists. It’s also not true that Darwin had a poor understanding of cellular complexity: as I’ve said before, the mid- to late 19th century was the period when the light microscope reached its optical limits, and there was all kinds of amazing work being done into developing new staining techniques and identifying new organelles. When do you think Camillo Golgi lived?

  • IDists are correct to say love is not an illusion. Scientists say this. Frankly, this is the most dumb-ass argument in a whole slop-bucket of dumbassery; that cherished, complex phenomena like love have a material basis does not in any way imply that they are not “real”.

  • IDists are right to say that some proponents of evolution are blind followers. Scientists say this. We don’t sit around thinking, “How can I get people to obey me?” The concern about improving public understanding of science is about getting people to be skeptical and ask intelligent questions. And just how can Slack give credit for noticing dogmatism among evolution supporters when ID is all about rationalizing dogmatic beliefs in a creator?

There is nothing in this mess that Gordy Slack credits to creationists that is actually something that they have done first. And then in conclusion he asks an utterly inane rhetorical question: “Should IDers be allowed to pursue their still very eccentric and outlying theory?” Has it ever even been suggested that creationists not be allowed to do research? More often, we’re snarling at ’em to go get some reasonable evidence. Slack’s article was just plain bad, strawmen aplenty and the gullible acceptance of ID propagandists’ appropriation of basic ideas.

Here’s another example of godawful stupid journalism, this time from the New York Times. Academics in Philadelphia have done a wonderful thing: they have organized a Year of Evolution to celebrate the Darwin year; I praised this before, and it really is an excellent, positive way to celebrate and inform about science. (I should also mention that I’ve been invited to come speak in November. This is not necessarily why it is such a good event.) This is a fantastic opportunity for people in that region to learn about the amazing progress science has made in the last century and a half.

How does the NY Times article start? “In the long-running culture war between evolution and creationism, Philadelphia is firing the latest shot.”

What?

I’m wondering…when St Patrick’s Cathedral opens its doors on Sunday morning, will there be journalists there covering the latest assault in the war on reason? Would they even think to phrase it that way? When scientists gather, though, and try to present their work to the community … that’s fighting a war.

Now, since the NY Times is the greatest paper in America, and they have to excel in everything, when they screw up they don’t just make a little boo-boo and then correct their course and try to move back towards something reasonable — that would produce a mediocre article. No, they have to compound the error. They have to make it monumental. Who would be the worst person to consult to add ‘diversity’ to the article, to put it into the standard boring frame with two sides and nothing in between? Can you guess?

Of course you can. Ken “Wackaloon” Ham.

Please. This is insane. I can understand getting multiple sources for a story; I can see how if a doctor has just told you some important medical news, you might want to get a second opinion. But if that second opinion was delivered by an inebriated, unwashed schizophrenic the doctor obligingly dragged out of a dumpster for you, you might be unimpressed with the quality of his search for diverse, informed perspectives. This, however, is pretty much standard operating procedure at the Times.

Jerry Coyne asked an editor publicly about this policy.

I noticed that when the Times reported on the recent discovery of the transitional fossil between fish and amphibians (the “fishapod”), they asked a creationist for comment. As an evolutionary biologist, I was dismayed by this. Creationism is simply a discredited enterprise, and asking a creationist to comment on a new fossil is like asking a faith healer to comment on a medical advance, or an astrologer to comment on a new discovery about human behavior. I respect the newspaper’s desire to be objective and give opposing viewpoints, but don’t see the need to do that when the “opposing viewpoint” is simply a form of quackery.

Here’s her reply. It starts out well enough.

How to cover the politicization of science, intelligent design and other manifestations of what Mr. Fishkin and other readers call the war on science is a question that comes up again and again in the science department. We’re well aware that giving equal time to opposing views of an issue makes no sense when one side has no solid evidence to stand on. The old FCC idea of a fairness doctrine simply shouldn’t apply to science journalism.

Right. Philadelphia is planning a major event around the discoveries and evidence and ideas of evolutionary biology, and that certainly is newsworthy. Ken Ham has no solid evidence to stand on, so it makes no sense to call him up and asks for his opinion…but they did. As she said, this makes no sense.

So why do they bring in anti-intellectual reprobates and promote their ignorance to a kind of equivalence to scientific ideas?

Yet viewpoints that may strike scientifically literate people as absurd, dangerous or even evil have a way of making news that insists on being dealt with. In recent years creationism’s hip cousin, intelligent design, has grown to be a divisive issue at every level of society, from school boards to the White House. So it seems to me that a serious paper is obliged to investigate the phenomenon, beginning with the question ‘What is going on here?’

Wait — so now she’s claiming that bringing aboard an irrational wackaloon is the mark of a “serious paper”? Wow. I guess that makes World Net Daily one of the pinnacles of serious journalism. The NY Times must be trying to catch up with them.

If the newspaper was writing an article on the serious sociological and political issues of creationism, evolution, and education, then sure — bring in many sides, explore them, and weigh them, and try to come to a conclusion. Unfortunately, there are two observations that invalidate the editor’s defense.

One is that even in those instances where the topic warrants the inclusion of these multiple perspectives, journalists tend to just let them lie there, limp and unresolved. We have scientists and we have creationists, they disagree with one another, we can’t resolve this issue, we can’t suggest that maybe one side is the province of insanity and ignorance, we’re just reporters for the NY freaking Times. There is no investigation, only the bland, blinkered recitation of each side’s position.

The other problem is that in both the cases of the Philadelphia Darwin celebration and the discovery of Tiktaalik, the creationist side had nothing of substance to contribute, other than sullen, unfounded disagreement. Denial is not an argument. The newspaper does a disservice to work that has heft to it, that has a solid foundation of serious evidence behind it, when they take any event on the side of reason and reflexively pair it with some cretin who has nothing but a dogmatic denial of science and reason as his credentials.

It seems to me that that is not what a serious paper would do.

One month of stonewalling

In early February, a number of bloggers brought to your attention a peculiar paper on mitochondrial proteomics, a paper which was obviously odd on even casual inspection, containing grandiose claims of a theoretical revolution that were entirely unsupported and ludicrous assertions of evidence for God in the genome. Deeper examination revealed that much of the paper had also been plagiarized from various sources. To the credit of the journal, the paper was quickly retracted one month ago today; however, the retraction was entirely based on the plagiarism, and none of the other failings of the paper were addressed, nor were any of the patent errors in the review process at the journal Proteomics discussed. This is strange, especially in light of the fact that the Warda/Han paper was the most accessed article in the journal. This is not an issue that should be swept under the rug!

Today, several of us — Steven Salzberg, Lars Juhl Jensen, and Attila Csordas — are repeating our call for an explanation of the events that led to the leakage of such an egregiously ridiculous paper into print. Bad papers are a dime-a-dozen, and we aren’t so much concerned with the detailed discussion of the flaws in this one paper as we are with seeing the integrity of the peer-review process maintained, or better, improved. The Warda/Han paper had obvious red flags that marked it as potentially problematic in the title, the abstract, and scattered throughout the body, and it’s hard to imagine how any reviewer or editor could have let them simply slip by without comment, yet that is exactly what seems to have happened.

We want to know how this paper slipped through the cracks, because we want to know how large the cracks in the peer review process at Proteomics are. It’s a journal with a good reputation, and we are not presuming that there was any wrong-doing or systematic failure of peer review there, but we do think that a lack of transparency is of concern: there is no assumption of a crime, but the ongoing cover-up is grounds for suspicion. Let’s see some self-criticism from the journal editor, and an open discussion of steps being taken to prevent such errors from occurring again.

Alternatively, if the journal wants to outsource its quality control to a mob of bloggers, that works, too … but we tend to be less formal and much more brutally and publicly critical than an in-house process might be, and we’re also going to be less well-informed than the actual principals in the review process. Better explanations are in order. Let’s see representatives of the journal provide them.

Why do newspapers continue to publish Discovery Institute press releases?

A reader brought to my attention this outrageously dishonest mangling of a quote by that creationist, Casey Luskin. He writes:

In January, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences weighed in on this debate, declaring that “[t]here is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution,”1 because neo-Darwinism is “so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter“2 it. As an undergraduate and graduate student taking multiple courses covering evolutionary biology at the University of California San Diego, that is what I was told as well. My science courses rarely, if ever, allowed students to seriously entertain the possibility that Darwin’s theory might be fundamentally flawed.

First rule of reading creationist literature: never trust an ellipsis. They always leave something significant out to change the meaning. Second rule of reading creationist literature: if they don’t use an ellipsis, they’re still going to distort a quote. Basically, you can’t trust anything these guys say. Luskin is claiming to be quoting something from the National Academy of Sciences booklet, Science, Evolution, and Creationism. How honest is his scholarship?

The first part of the quote is from page 52, near the end of the book. Here it is in context:

1There is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution. In this sense the intelligent design movement’s call to “teach the controversy” is unwarranted. Of course, there remain many interesting questions about evolution, such as the evolutionary origin of sex or different mechanisms of speciation, and discussion of these questions is fully warranted in science classes.

Where do you think we’ll find the second half of his quote? Page 53, maybe? Page 54? No. You’ll have to thumb backwards through the book, to a place near the beginning: page 16.

2Many scientific theories are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them substantially. For example, no new evidence will demonstrate that the Earth does not orbit around the Sun (heliocentric theory), or that living things are not made of cells (cell theory), that matter is not composed of atoms, or that the surface of the Earth is not divided into solid plates that have moved over geological timescales (the theory of plate tectonics).

So what Casey Luskin has done is to flip through the book and manufacture quotes by splicing together clauses from scattered sentences. Students who tried to pull this kind of unethical crap in a term paper would get an automatic “F” from me…yet Luskin reportedly has a law degree.

Aren’t journalists supposed to have some kind of ethical standards about this sort of thing? Do they simply suspend any regard for reasonable journalistic values when some right-wing think-tank like the Discovery Institute mails in some PR pablum?

The story that will not die

Good morning, anti-censorship intellectuals! Remember that story from January about Abunga Books, the online bookstore whose sole unique feature is that it claims to “empower decency” by enabling prudes to vote to censor their offerings? Now it has made ABC News. It’s amazing how much press this thing has received — I’m beginning to suspect there is some marketing genius behind the store who knows how to whip up a media frenzy.

They’ve got a couple of quotes from me and from the founder of Abunga, Lee Martin.

“Anything that irritates the right, they want off,” Myers told ABCNEWS.com “They can have a limited selection of books and select whatever political perspective they want. But [Abunga] is cloaking itself in democracy, and instead of being open-minded, they are being narrow-minded. It’s hypocrisy.”

Boy, I got that one exactly right. You should read how Martin defends himself against that charge.

In response, Myers’ readers mass e-mailed the company and logged on to Abunga.com to ban a number of religious books themselves, including the Bible.

“What they didn’t realize is that we control inventory from our members, and it’s pretty easy to see the difference of customers who are blocking ‘The Golden Compass’ and the Bible,” Martin said.

Martin insists his company has no agenda. “If you look at the books, we have a complete rainbow range of books, and we give to non-Christian ministries.”

(By the way, you’ll have a hard time finding a non-Christian ministry in their list of charities. They’ve got a few good secular groups in there, like regional hospitals and the March of Dimes, but it’s mostly a collection of openly evangelical organizations. I guess if you do stuff that actually works, like giving medicine, that counts as “non-Christian” to these guys.)

So they don’t have an agenda, and they’re just letting their customers control the inventory, but they can tell the difference between the ‘good’ customers who want to block The Golden Compass, and the wicked, nasty bad customers who want to block the Bible. We are all equal, except some of us are more equal than others.

Like I said, Abunga can have whatever bias they want, and they clearly want to be a right wing Christian bookstore. I don’t mind that at all, although they certainly wouldn’t be getting my business. My objection is that they want to pretend that they’re taking the high road and calling their bias “democracy,” when it clearly is not, and it is definitely not a noble enterprise — these are guys with yet another scheme to pander to right-wing ignorance and make money from it.

Of course, that’s my disagreement with their practices. The ABC News article takes a different approach that might be more effective in alienating their prospective clientele, by listing a selection of naughty books that are still easily available at Abunga. They’ve got a censorship filter, but it’s a mighty leaky one.

Throw away your TVs

The Great Wasteland is done. It’s hit bottom. I suspect everyone has heard about
Sherri Shepherd, a new co-host on a talk show for stupid women, who doesn’t accept the theory of evolution and, by the way, isn’t so sure about the shape of the earth, either.

Way to go. Way to reinforce the idea that women are incurious airheads. Way to inform and educate and encourage thinking — hire an idiot to help anchor your program in idiocy.

Time for another blogger ethics review panel

This is appalling. How dare a mere blogger do the research, write up a detailed account, and break an important health story before the NY Times writes it up without recognition of the source? Some will demand that the NY Times retroactively acknowledge the work and expertise of the blogger, but nay — that is not the one true way. Bloggers should proactively acknowledge the possibility that the NY Times might someday use their research and rewrite their stories for them.

— grateful acknowledgment —
The NY Times hasn’t published anything about this article yet, but if they do, this post was the product of borrowing their future hard work and good name. With my magic time machine.