Tuesday, April 12, 2005

OTM Interviews Scientific American Editor on Prank

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But do you think that the media have been complicit, by presenting established scientific doctrine as a he said/she said argument that requires balanced reporting on both sides?
JOHN RENNIE: There's nothing wrong with balance in principle. Balance is a very important thing to have in stories, in the same way that you want to have fairness, and - heaven forbid - accuracy. On lots of issues, it's very hard to know where the ultimate truth lies. So the best you can do is present lots of different views and leave it to the - your, your audience to try to piece together the truth for themselves. But on some scientific issues, that's really not the best you can do. Sometimes, for example, in the case of evolution versus creationism, on one side you have the entire mass of the biology community; you have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles; you have masses of experiments going back more than a century and a half at this point - all of which have fit together to paint a picture of, of how very, very true evolution is. And on the other side, you have people who present no real evidence, yet still claim that their idea is just as good as evolution, and therefore they deserve equal time.

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