Darwinian PZ Myers has been doing some thinking about what the new atheism didn’t accomplish and now we have Darwinian Jerry Coyne seems to be doing some thinking too, in the wake of the Covington meltdown, which revealed the nullity of traditional media:
Quoting Andrew Sullivan on the abyss of hate vs. hate, he says,
This is about the Covington Mess and how both social and mainstream media, by going with their confirmation bias, is ruining America. And I agree. I’ll give a couple of good quotes:
Yes, the boys did chant some school riffs; I’m sure some of those joining in the Native American drumming and chanting were doing it partly in mockery, but others may have just been rolling with it. Yes, they should not have been wearing MAGA hats to a pro-life march. They aren’t angels; they’re teenage boys. But they were also subjected for quite a while to a racist, anti-Catholic, homophobic tirade on a loudspeaker, which would be more than most of us urbanites could bear — and they’re adolescents literally off the bus from Kentucky. I heard no slurs back. They stayed there because they were waiting for a bus, not to intimidate anyone.
. . . To put it bluntly: They were 16-year-olds subjected to verbal racist assault by grown men; and then the kids were accused of being bigots. It just beggars belief that the same liberals who fret about “micro-aggressions” for 20-somethings were able to see 16-year-olds absorbing the worst racist garbage from religious bigots … and then express the desire to punch the kids in the face.
Jerry Coyne, “Weekend Reading” at Why Evolution Is True
Musing from his own reading experience, Coyne also directs us to Britain’s Guardian, one of whose writers seems determined to present the story as he wishes it had been:
When Wilson writes something like this, did he ever care about the truth? I don’t think so; he just wanted to maintain that the Covington students were still pariahs while dissing the conservative media that painted them as heroes. Nobody was a hero in that narrative, but neither were the boys nor the Native Americans pariahs.
Jerry Coyne, “Weekend Reading” at Why Evolution Is True
He then turns to other current events topics and seems to have found some good reading.
But now, speaking as a news writer of about five decades standing, I (O’Leary for News), find that the biggest single change from decades past is the relative lack of interest among major media figures in getting things correct.
I first became interested in the topic with Rathergate in 2004, when CBS news icon Dan Rather promoted to the public a dossier on George W. Bush that, by any media standard had to be suspect.
As Canadian newsman Rex Murphy asked at the time, “What were they thinking?” Okay so they didn’t want Bush to be president again. Then didn’t they think their own reputations for accurate Watergate-style reporting mattered?
Unlike Watergate, Rathergate slammed back on the news team, not the president. That can happen when media go with clearly suspect documents.
And just before the Covington uproar, where both conservative and liberal media rained down condemnation on the heads of a group of teens waiting for the bus without getting all the relevant facts, another story grabbed attention that, as veteran newsman Phelim McAleer says, should never have run. There were too many legitimate questions about the accuracy of one of the journalists preferring it. No surprise, it collapsed in ruins but that was eclipsed by the social media meltdown and libel law threats around the Covington boys waiting for their bus.
These are deeply sick media. They no longer care about getting stuff right. I read about a thousand journalists losing their jobs and I wonder, how much worse is that than a thousand bartenders losing their jobs? Will society really be worse off?
It will be interesting to see how or if the major media decline affects public discussion of the riddles of design in nature.
* Mind you, this was the guy who — abandoning the usual prostration of Big Science before the Raging Woke, started calling out the mob’s anti-Semitism* So let’s see what happens next.
Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is the author of a book, also called Why Evolution Is True. He’d started to call out the anti-Semites among the Marching Woke recently. Couldn’t happen soon enough.
and
About the facts of life, Darwinian Jerry Coyne is still being stubborn … Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne continues to refuse to follow Nature down the primrose path of political correctness and is doubling down on what people used to be allowed to accept as biological fact (Coyne was president of an evolution society which has started to wobble on whether sexes are real divisions.)
and
Is Darwinist Jerry Coyne starting to get it about SJW “science”? Ah, not a moment too soon.; Here is a perfect specimen of sp. SJW, Trollus inyerfaceus. We have certainly dealt with them. Coyne may find some in his own backyard.
See also: New atheism is over, says Darwinian PZ Myers To judge from PZ’s post, it looks as though the new atheists are turning on each other instead of on the rest of us. Doesn’t a proverb somewhere cover that?
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