At ACSH: Rather shamelessly, the Washington Post has also offered tips to stop yourself from spreading “misinformation.” And the Guardian has even recommended “10 ideas to rebuild our broken internet.” Let’s add an eleventh: take your own advice and stop running sloppy stories because they attract eyeballs.
Media
Darwinism as useless padding for news media prose
Bencze: the “evolutionary hack” is … “the task of safely raising the next generation.” That is certainly an odd way of referring to parenting but, by alluding to evolution, the tone of the review rises to a more exalted scientific level thus confirming that reviewer Emily is no mere mommy but sort of a scientist herself.
At MMN: Columbia professor wants government to regulate news media (Don’t imagine these moves won’t affect ID)
Bassett: “[J]ournalists have bizarrely transformed from their traditional role as leading free expression defenders into the most vocal censorship advocates, using their platforms to demand that tech monopolies ban and silence others,” writes award-winning journalist and former attorney Glenn Greenwald.
A centrist medium measures Wikipedia’s bias
If you rely on Wikipedia, you are consenting in advance to being misinformed by its trolls. The trolls are its biggest problem. There. We told you.
Strategies for reining in Big Tech and Big Social Media
This topic is important to us because of Big Media’s propensity for censorship. If they haven’t got round to us yet, just give them some time and more ambitious keeners.
Jonathan Wells remembers Tom Bethell (1936–2021), an early Darwin doubter in media
Bethell practiced journalism when it meant telling people what the establishment did not want them to know.
If you rely on Wikipedia, why?
Basset: In 2014, Harvard faculty members Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu published research showing that Wikipedia articles are both more politically biased than those of Encyclopaedia Britannica and more slanted to the left.
Tom Bethell (1936–2021), remembered by his editors
Readers will recall that we saluted Tom Bethell, on his passing as one of the earliest Darwin skeptics. Now some of his many editors weigh in.
At American Thinker: Science reporting is one of the saddest casualties of the schools of journalism
Okay, but many papers can’t be replicated and many journals have gone Woke too. So it may not matter as much as Arvay thinks. Maybe it doesn’t matter much that the reporting is just as bad as the studies.
At Snopes: Creationism “bears all the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory”
Curiously, Snopes admits, regarding the piece from The Conversation, “This content is shared here because the topic may interest Snopes readers; it does not, however, represent the work of Snopes fact-checkers or editors.” So… they can get away with publishing this kind of thing because they did not check it out? That is further evidence that Snopes is going downhill fast as a rumor squelching site.
Kirk Durston now has a YouTube channel
He hopes to address common science, philosophy, and faith issues.
Richard Dawkins defends Trump’s Twitter ban. Huh?
We don’t want to get into the politics of that as such. Keep reading till you get to the punch line.
Rob Sheldon responds to News’s recent Salvo article, “War on Math”
Sheldon: Talking to a retired St Louis public high school math teacher, the battle was first enjoined 30 years ago over Geometry–eliminating it from the curriculum. Why? Because it was the only course that taught logic, he said.
Pushback at StatNews against politicizing science. Rob Sheldon weighs in
Sheldon: The editors of Science and Nature compromised their scientific objectivity years ago. They promoted papers that big pharma wanted, they suppressed papers that made big pharma look bad. They were complicit in the coverup of not just tobacco and sugar lobbies, but vaccines and Darwinism and global warming… So of course this produced cognitive dissonance, since it violated some of the very basic tenets of objective science.
The Economist: Hybrids have “upturned” evolutionary theory
At The Economist: “These findings muddy Darwin’s concept of speciation as a slow and gradual process. Biologists now know that in the right circumstances, and with the help of hybridisation, new species can emerge and consolidate themselves in a mere handful of generations. That is an important amendment to evolutionary theory. “