This item at Evolution News & Views is worth pondering:
A journalist working for a national newspaper chain has fabricated a claim about the Texas science standards, and now he and his editor are refusing to correct the record.
In late September, three Texas newspapers owned by Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc. (CNHI) published an article by reporter John Austin claiming that a science standard adopted by Texas in 2009 authorizes the teaching of “non-scientific explanations.” That claim is false.
Austin asserted that conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education in 2009 “inserted language into the high school biology curriculum allowing teachers to introduce non-scientific explanations for such questions as why some creatures suddenly appeared in the fossil record about 500 million years ago, instead of more gradually.” (Emphasis added.) See the article at the Weatherford Democrat, The Huntsville Item, and Jacksonville Progress.
In fact, the statement in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Science standards Austin refers to says exactly the opposite: More.
One of the biggest stories of the last twenty-five years is how the internet has wasted legacy mainstream media. While it would be nice to get CNHI to correct the record, it is becoming less important all the time. No one who actually wishes to be well-informed can depend on such sources, and fortunately, it is no longer necessary. The recent US election predictions have made that clear. In any event, everywhere I go, I see people using handhelds to go all over the world for news…
Put another way, if Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc. (CNHI) is not a good source and ID feels important to people, so much the worse for Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc. (CNHI).
Nothing like that reader freedom prevailed in 1975, let me tell you.
Meanwhile, just to clear up some misconceptions: Mainstream media today are only somewhat more corrupt than in the past. Their biggest problem now is that they are mostly not necessary. Blatant attempts at misrepresentation stem largely from that fact. They survive by becoming mere PR for progressive governments. They have every reason to wish to suppress independent media offering alternative information, correct or otherwise, a clear departure from their historic independent role.
Are new media more reliable? No; what’s more reliable is the opportunity we all have now to keep looking for correct answers.
Note: I, for one, do not take the explosion of “fake news” seriously. I just learned yesterday from a checkout counter tabloid that Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton are all going to prison. Last week, I was informed by a competitive tabloid source that Hillary Clinton is dying.
Neither I nor anyone else capable of forming part of a checkout counter lineup believed any of it particularly. Yet many of these publications have been around for decades.
I recommend considerable caution when we are faced with proposals to eliminate fake news for the public good. Most such claims appear grounded in an assumption that the public is more naive than my local checkout lineup, and I cannot think of areason why that should be true. True information is just as likely to be suppressed as false information. – O’Leary for News
See also: Why the mainstream media was bound to call the U.S. election wrong Fake, but accurate, is a sign of weakness, not strength.
Scientists stunned by Trump win. (Which says what about the prediction methods they were relying on?)
In traditional media, fact doesn’t matter any more, only social virtue Legacy media is now largely popular fiction
Traditional media doesn’t get new media It is called the internet, not the innernet for a reason.
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