Washington Post

Coverage of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial has been about as could be expected, all over the board. There’s been good, bad, and downright ugly.

Here then is a snapshot of how reporters can shape the public’s perception in the way they report a single statement. This example comes from the coverage of Michael Behe’s testimony in the courtroom yesterday.

Discovery’s resident sports fanatic Marshall Sana provided these thoughts on today’s Washgington Post column by Sally Jenkins.

Kudos to Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins for her thoughtful piece on intelligent design and athletics.

Jenkins, a well-regarded Post sportswriter, starts off her August 29th column (“Just Check the ID”) saying:

“the sports section would not seem to be a place to discuss intelligent design, the notion that nature shows signs of an intrinsic intelligence too highly organized to be solely the product of evolution.”

The Washington Post today breaks a major story about the federal probe into the persecution and harassment suffered by evolutionary biologist (twice over no less), Dr. Richard Sternberg. What, you might ask, could get scientists so riled up? Well, Sternberg is suffering the equivalent of a 21st century inquisition for having had the courage to buck the Darwinian establishment and publish a pro-intelligent design paper by CSC Director Dr. Stephen Meyer, himself a Cambridge University educated philosopher of science. The firestorm of a pro-ID paper appearing in a peer-reviewed biology journal has been reported elsewhere but I’ll try to recap the situation briefly here to put this in context.

The News Tribune (Tacoma, WA) this weekend ran three pieces about the evolution debate, one by CSC senior fellow Jonathan Witt contesting the idea that evolution is incontestable on any grounds, and two pieces of shrill polemics:

One by UW biologist Peter Ward stating that Darwinian evolution is a fact (and resorts to name calling to prove it), and an opinion piece by Peter Slevin from the Washington Post that has been masquerading in papers around the country as an objective news story for several months now (nothing like new news to keep your publication fresh and your readers up to date).

The Washington Post printed Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman’s short op-ed in today’s “Free For All” section of the Post.

I would personally like to thank Washington Post reporter Peter Slevin for highlighting the deeply held convictions of the new branch campus of the Darwin-only lobby in Fairfax Virginia. Like the cause-heads of PCU this group of freeze dried protestors “led mostly by Vietnam-era protesters” who “came together in frustration after the November elections, have little political experience, apart from hoisting Kerry-Edwards signs.”

Said Richard Lawrence, 63:

‘”We’re just a small group, maybe with a powerful idea. We don’t have a clue, but we’re not letting go.”‘

Today’s Washington Post has a handful of letters about the dust-up at the Smithsonian over the screening of The Privileged Planet later this month, both good and bad. First the good.

The Washington Post today publishes an editorial prepared by Anne Applebaum (“Dissing Darwin“) that uses the term “intelligent creator” three times to describe the concept of intelligent design. The writer knows better, but apparently believes that if she can lodge the word “creator” (as in “creationist”) in people’s minds, it will reside there forever. The key to understanding such writing: the proponents of intelligent design must never be allowed to speak for themselves or define their own ideas. Instead they must only be spoken about and accept definitions of their terms that are offered by their foes. The editorial also twice describes the film The Privileged Planet as “religious”, though the writer admits it doesn’t mention the word God. (It Read More ›

Telic Thoughts and Post-Darwinist are among the many blogs talking about The Privileged Planet premiere at the Smithsonian that has so outraged Darwinian bloggers. (For all the real juicy details see our previous blog here.)

The Washington Post has a story related to the showing of the film “The Privileged Planet” June 23 at the National Museum of Natural History. It will be interesting to see how the story is covered given the hysterical tone in evidence on certain ultra-Darwinian blogs in recent days. Once invitations got out and the New York Times ran a story over Memorial Day weekend (with its unfortunately misleading headline tying the film to the evolution debate, which is not its subject), the Museum apparently was flooded with calls and emails from angry Darwinists demanding that the event be cancelled. None of these would-be film-burners has seen the film, or read the book, of course.

RELATED DOCUMENTS:
PDF of recommended invitations provided by SI to DI
PDF of invitation sent out by DI
PDF of e-mail from SI saying The Privileged Planet had been reviewed and approved
PDF of letter received from Smithsonian by Dsicovery June 1

The Museum did not buckle, but it surely bent.

The event has not been cancelled. However a “Director’s Message” referencing supposed “consultation with the Secretary” (!) was circulated on the web Wednesday, and it purported to come from the Museum Director, Cristian Samper. The trouble is, Lucy Dorrick (director of development and special events) of the Smithsonian, who called us back when we telephoned Director Samper, knew nothing about it and seemed surprised to hear our report of it. She asked in turn if we had received a different, shorter message from her, on the museum’s behalf. We had not. She obligingly sent a copy to us and we sent her a copy of the questionable “Director’s Message.”

Addressed to Mark Ryland, Vice President of Discovery Institute and director of the institute’s Washington, DC office, the letter sent today to Discovery says,