Here Klinghoffer muses,
I will never forget my personal experience with a journalist who often writes for The New Republic. In an email exchange he chastised me for thinking the universe was created a mere 6,000 years ago. He assumed that was the main issue for intelligent design advocates. I explained to him that wasn’t the case and that I’m not a YEC, that intelligent design assumes a universe more than 13 billion years old and a history of life going back more than 3 billion.
Not long after, he criticized me again on the very same point, for believing in a 6,000-year-old world. I don’t think he believed that I was lying in my previous email to him. He just could not surrender a plank in the platform of his own ignorance: The belief that this is all fight about whether in riding around on dinosaurs, cavemen went bareback or opted for more of a western saddle. He had that audio loop playing over and over in his head. He couldn’t hear a thing I said.
No, David, and he won’t, and his publication will go under before he does.
Here’s what 40 years in the field have taught me: The journalist doesn’t want to know things, he wants to know better than you.
Let’s say, for example, you can’t understand why the school taxes are so high and rising, when standardized testing shows that math and science performance numbers (best indicators of later jobs) are in the toilet – internationally. Slovakia is better’n you.
The journalist doesn’t care about that. What he cares about is that the head of admin is shacked up with the mayor, and enjoying a $300,000 salary for helping others rip off.
His paper won’t let him write about that because they are supporting the mayor for re-election, and generally support the head of admin’s no-tests, no homework policy. They can always find scantily clad high school girls to pose in favour of no effort at school, and an earnest social worker to back them up.
You take the journalist out and buy him a few, and he will admit all this. But then nothing follows.
So the only useful information he could provide you is, generally, stuff you could have figured out for yourself – if it mattered. For example, if the mayor and the head of school board admin aren’t shacked up, they may as well be for all the difference it makes that your district performs worse than Peru, while spending twenty times as much and now planning to spend more.
Okay, how does it relate to ID? David, what on earth would cause a fellow like that to actually think that facts mattered? (Other than who’s sleeping with whom, the only fact he knows that you probably didn’t.) A lightning bolt? A heart attack? Armageddon? I’m out of ideas here, and have to go back to my day job real soon.
We are the new media. He isn’t.
Note: Christian journalists are no better, but that is a horrible story for another day: The betrayal of civil rights in English-speaking democracies.