News media and the ID controversy: Links to better news coverage?
When I blogged recently on the media coverage of the intelligent design controversy, I remarked, “Then the big challenge is to find a publication that actually wants the real story. That means readers who want the real story. Only those readers can help you.”
A commenter wrote to ask,
Do you have any ideas on where we will find such readers? Should we be concentrating on informing believers? Will this be resisted by interested parties? Will we then divide our house? Should we concentrate on convincing religious and political power brokers?
ID is often accused of being a media beat up rather than a scientific controversy. Will we reinforce that view if we concentrate on media?
These are challenging questions, so let me take them in turn:
– Do you have any ideas on where we will find such readers? Anywhere there are Internet-linked terminals. There is no shortage of people who question the worldview of the ”Darwinoids”, as a journalist friend calls them. The difficulty is that we are in a transitional phase between reliance on print/broadcast media and reliance on the Internet. The latter operates fundamentally differently from the former because it does not empower the big over the small. Don’t believe me? Look what the Swift Vets did to John Kerry, or the pajamaheddin did to Dan Rather. The swifts and the pajamas were nobodies – apart from the fact that both groups knew something that the public would be very interested to discover.* In the legacy media, both groups would be promptly stifled because they did not fit the story template that had already been hammered out. (Everyone who mattered knew that Kerry was a good officer, you see, and Bush was a bad airman.)
Only on the Internet could these nobodies have succeeded because anyone who can use a search engine could find out what they had to say. Read More ›