By Ezra
It's interesting that in a discussion where everyone agrees on much, the one thing no one disputes is that the press is blind, deaf, and dumb. In the ID debate, and particularly the paragraph Melissa excerpted below, the problem isn't bias, it's ignorance. The reporter is clearly trying to call ID a "mere" theory and then show that scientists reject it as "scientific" theory, but he's got the definitions all wrong, he's conflating the colloquial and the academic, and ending with incoherence.
Policy reporting, in the contemporary press corps, is worse than bad. On an intellectual level, it's criminally negligent. During the 1994 Health Care Battle, polls showed that the American people knew less about Clinton's plan as time went on. So from the start, and through the press's blanket coverage, news consumers actually lost information. That's a staggering statistic if you think about it. When the fight was ending, polls were done on what sort of health care system Americans actually wanted. The answer? Clinton's, they just didn't know that that was what Clinton was proposing. A year prior, they did.
So what we're ending with here is a catalogue of failures. As it stands, I count eight:
