Democracy Has Prevailed.

March 13, 2014

More Anti-Science In The News (And "News")

While Scaife's braintrust does its usual fact-free science denial dance about climate change, they kinda stumble onto a rather apt description (perhaps it's merely psychological projection) of themselves:
Senate Democrats' all-night “talkathon” on so-called climate change embraced the liberal shibboleth that if a distortion is repeated often enough, it becomes truth.
Though the shibboleth isn't liberal, it's theirs.

But while that's taking place, there's more anti-science floating in the porcelain bowl that is the mainstream press.  First, let's take a look at what happened in the Bible-belt state of Oklahoma:
In what appeared to be an editing error, a Fox affiliate in Oklahoma managed to remove the only mention of evolution from Sunday night’s Cosmos science documentary by cutting only 15 seconds from the broadcast.

The much-anticipated reboot of Carl Sagan’s legendary Cosmos premiered on Sunday with an overview of the history of the Universe, from the Big Bang to the advent of humans.

It wasn’t until the last 10 minutes of the show that host Neil deGrasse Tyson hinted at human evolution.
According to Raw Story, this is what Dr. Tyson said:
“We are newcomers to the Cosmos,” he explained. “Our own story only begins on the last night of the cosmic year.”

“Three and a half million years ago, our ancestors — your and mine left these traces,” Tyson said, pointing to footprints. “We stood up and parted ways from them. Once we were standing on two feet, our eyes were no longer fixated on the ground. Now, we were free to look up and wonder.”
And this is what the Fox station in Oklahoma broadcast to its viewers:

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KOHK, the station doing the ad hoc editing, tweeted:
Sunday, during @COSMOSonTV, a local news promo was aired over a portion of COSMOS content. This was an operator error & we regret the error.
Sure it was an error.  Just as I am sure it was a complete coincidence that the only place in the USA, in Bible-belt Oklahoma btw, the only content that just happened to be edited out was the part about evolution.

1 comment:

Zeus0209 said...

Yeah, but...

My mind is still a bit in upheaval from this Cosmos redeux series.

First, simply because of which station aired it. Just what is denier nation TV up to, I find myself wondering suspiciously. I can only think that their rationalization to air begins and ends with the ratings/money. (Did I see a commercial for christianmingle.com during the airing or was my mind wandering in cynicism?)

While the Oklahoma branch may have done some choice editing, the overall program story can't be undone. The segment on the cosmic calendar has the universe beginning some 13 billion years ago and details the earth's formation at 4.6 billion years ago. Kinda gives a nice push back on earth's formation & humanity's beginnings as the "alpha" at 10,000 years old.

Lastly, my big criticism of the cosmic calendar (and only a criticism because they dropped the ball with the opportunity), is that it labels our time right now, as the last minutes of the last hour of the last day. I was disappointed that the series enforced humanity's arrogant classification of our space-time position as the "omega". While it is the beginning and end in terms of our dwelling the earth, the universe, I'd imagine, will continue on long after we’re extinct. Unless I missed it, I would've liked Tyson to address that and I hope he will in an upcoming episode. Or perhaps the editor’s just find that concept WAY too potentially mind blowing to the hard core denier community. The deniers have such a need to feel significant...