Until this election madness is over. I’ve got to say though that the latest round of attacks the GOP has been leveling on the democratic ticket is a level of hypocrisy that must make the religions of the world jealous. Sarah Palin rails against Barak’s Obama’s promotion of “socialist” progressive taxation (progressive taxation which was also promoted by Adam Smith, the founder of American capitalism, but that’s a whole other rant), while her state dolls out thousand+ dollar checks for the share of Alaska’s Oil Revenues. McCain’s Campaign bullies the L.A. Times to release a video of Barak Obama attending the going away party of fellow University of Chicago professor Rashid Khalidi, while McCain has shoveled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the same professor’s Palestinian Research Center.
But being the junkie that I am I’m starting to really get angry at journalists, not as individuals but as a profession. The method of journalism has always seemed to be to find “both sides” of every story. It seems that with the 24-hour news cycle that the cable news networks have to fill, they’ve got the time to do this for every single story. This often gives voice to radical fringe elements under the guise of “equal time”. A couple weeks ago I went to the CFI kickoff event here in Portland, OR. There Professor Krauss told us why he does not waste time debating creationists. It’s not because, as I’ve heard some say, the mere act of debating gives the appearance of weight to the creationist argument, but because the nature of a debate is, in itself, not an accurate representation of the “controversy”. To truly have a representative debate on creationism/intelligent design vs. evolution you would need to have three creationists on one side of the table and 997 scientists on the other. But again, the fact is that science isn’t decided in a debate or in a court-room, but by the evidence, and until the “opposition” can produce some to support their own claims then they’ve got no debate.
I feel that journalists need to also take this kind of measure when deciding on how much to weigh the sides of a story. Of course, they’ll never do this. News networks need controversy, they need people arguing, they need political contests to be close, because givens are boring, because, as I’ve said, facts themselves are boring. And here’s where I even out this article, that the public puts up with this is due in most part, to wishy-washy, touchy-feely liberals. Those folks who believe that all opinions are equally vaild, that everyone has a right to believe what they want and not have those beliefs questioned. Well I’m here to say that not all sides of an argument are equal, and sometimes people’s beliefs are just wrong.
In further election related news, further fall out from Governer Palin’s critisizm of “Fruit Fly Research”, the earmark in question was related to research around a species of fruitfly which menaces olive trees, the eramark was authored by a Californa represntative, a state which has a very large annual olive crop. The full details are here at ScienceNOW. This level of ignorance is dangerous, research earmarks made up 4.5 billion of federal spending for ’08. A large amountof this money goes to our Universtiy system, these research grants drive the advancement of science and keep schools like MIT and Harvard the envy of the academic world. Earmarks may be a problem, but not all earmarks are equal.