Archives for: August 2009, 21

08/21/09

Permalinkby 01:19:26 pm, Categories: Commentary - OpEd, 376 words   English (CA)

If and when The New York Times finally tanks ... what will it mean for intelligent design?

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here's my MercatorNet column about the decline of traditional media (known to bloggers as "legacy mainstream media"). Anyone interested in the intelligent design controversy should think carefully about how the media are changing.

I don't accept the thesis that the old media declined because they were partisan. Rather they became more ridiculously partisan as they were declining.

Single-minded partisanship is - in a free society - usually an outcome of consumer choice. People can get their news from lots of sources. So if they choose your source, you can develop the story as you like.

But - by contrast - how many air traffic controllers are permitted to bug pilots with their opinions about politics and religion? How many weather forecasters would last long if they likewise bugged farmers seeking data on the tornado watch?

So the tsunami of consumer choices in media fuels partisanship - but also opportunity.

The decline of big legacy media means the decline of the Big Controlling Story. You know - four legs good, two legs bad - as George Orwell put it, immortally, in Animal Farm. The story that writes itself for the 12:00 pm deadline, and no one gives a moment's thought to possibilities like:

1. It's not as simple as that.
2. Things may have changed.
3. The old guys might be wrong.
4. We may need to add to our panel of reliable experts (and maybe drop some).

The decline of the tired old Darwin lobby sources in favour of broader ones can certainly help the intelligent design theorists get a fairer hearing.

For more, go here.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist:

The overthrow of Darwinism - in real life, forget the pop science media

How can you lose playing tic tac toe with a pigeon? Don't watch the board. (You can be sure he will.)

Okay, I did it again ... Blew my stack ...

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

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    Don Cicchetti blogs on: Culture, Music, Faith, Intelligent Design, Guitar, Audio

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    Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones maintains one of the best origins "quote" databases around. He is meticulous about accuracy and working from original sources.

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    Most guys going through midlife crisis buy a convertible. Austrialian Stephen E. Jones went back to college to get a biology degree and is now a proponent of ID and common ancestry.

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    Complete zipped downloadable pdf copy of David Stove's devastating, and yet hard-to-find, critique of neo-Darwinism entitled "Darwinian Fairytales"

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    Intelligent Design The Future is a multiple contributor weblog whose participants include the nation's leading design scientists and theorists: biochemist Michael Behe, mathematician William Dembski, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, philosophers of science Stephen Meyer, and Jay Richards, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, and science writer Jonathan Witt. Posts will focus primarily on the intellectual issues at stake in the debate over intelligent design, rather than its implications for education or public policy.

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