Bad journalism on Cobb County
Chris Mooney finds fault with some bad journalism. He picks on this one sentence…
Like others who adhere to a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, Rogers, a lawyer, believes that Earth is several thousand years old, while most scientists, basing their estimates on the radioactive decay of rock samples, say the planet is billions of years old.
…which is clearly screwed up. Lawyer Rogers is basing her opinion entirely on dogmatic acceptance of ancient religious texts that contradict reality, yet her opinion is presented as if it were a reasonable alternative to that of scientists who base their ideas on legitimate evidence. Mooney rewrites the bad sentence and improves it greatly, but still, the problem is deeper than one sentence—the premise of the whole article is flawed.
It's about dueling neighbors in a Georgia suburb. The differences on evolution are treated with the same seriousness as the fact that people disagree on who to vote for, whether to open the County Board of Commissioners with a prayer, or what brand of car to drive. It's all a mere difference of opinion, you know. Marjorie Rogers is presented as someone trying sincerely to find the truth, when what she's actually doing is swaddling herself in ignorance and trying to force a similarly benighted state on the kids in her school district.
Sparked by her son's interest in dinosaurs, Rogers read several books casting doubt on evolution science, including "Icons of Evolution" by Jonathan Wells and "Darwin on Trial" by Phillip E. Johnson. Once she saw the textbooks under consideration, she was appalled.
Where's the critical evaluation of these books? The reporter presents it as if she had done her homework, when what she'd actually done was dig up some bad creationist pseudo-scholarship that reinforced her biases. When you read about her objections, you don't see any counterpoint to balance her raving nonsense.
"Humans are fundamentally not exceptional because we came from the same evolutionary source as every other species," she read from one during an interview.
"That offends me," she said. "That has no business being in a science textbook. That's religion."
She points to another passage, in "Biology: Concepts & Connections," that she says is irreverent. The passage suggests that had human knees and spines been "designed" for our bipedal posture, rather than borrowed from four-legged ancestors, they probably would "be less subject to sprains, spasms and other common injuries."
Finding fault with the design of humans exasperates her.
"That's slamming God," she said.
Both of those passages are correct. There's nothing exceptional in the biology of human beings; every organism on the planet has its own unique suite of characters, and we can see how those characters are derived from its nearest relatives. We also see that many of those properties of all animals are cobbled together in a less than optimal way from ancestral states. We are good enough. We are not perfect.
Even within her own religious tradition, there are people who find nothing sacrilegious about that. Isn't everything on earth supposed to be the product of one god's hand, in her belief? Doesn't Christianity preach that every person is flawed, incomplete, and corrupted? When she goes to church and is told that we are all sinners, does she march up and bitch-slap the minister for insulting god?
If being apprised of the simple facts of reality is "slamming God", I think the problem lies with her simple-minded view of her God, not reality.
The reporter missed the real story. That people have different opinions is not newsworthy; that neighborhoods are infested with meddling kooks and journalists don't even notice…now that's an interesting story. I'd like to see a report on how 'objective journalism' has somehow been transformed into 'credulous journalism'.