Another credibility triumph! In May, when I wrote about the Times' so-called Credibility Group report—in its most significant statement, a flat capitulation to the Bozell/Horowitz language police—I said, attempting to achieve some kind of snark maximum, "About the only thing missing here is the Times admitting that its Science section has persecuted Christians by being insufficiently skeptical about evolution."

As they say, beware what you pretend to wish for. Yesterday, in the second installment of the paper's promised (threatened?) series on the Intelligent Design "debate," Kenneth Chang came pretty close to making the snark come true ("In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash"). Arthur Silber and PZ Myers both read the thing, and Arthur concludes that he was right, reacting to Jodi Wilgoren's first installment in the series, to call the Times (a dire but apt, not to mention catchy, phrase) "a know-nothing paper for a know-nothing nation." (Arthur, if they put that slogan in place of "All the news that's fit to print" I hope they give you some kind of royalty on it.)

Silber and Myers both see yesterday's article as another debased example of, as PZ puts it, the "old tired he-said-she-said journalism": a lazy, credulous reporter unable to recognize "that he was selling him the Brooklyn bridge, and she was representing the judicious opinion of thousands of competent scientists who were all saying he is a con artist." Ah, if it were only a simple matter of standard bad, heedless practice. But—with the Credibility Group report, and Bill Keller's wholehearted endorsement of same in the background—I'm incapable of believing that Kenneth Chang is simply getting conned because he only knows the Beltway political-tennis style of journalism, because he hasn't bothered (or hasn't had time) to educate himself enough on the science. I suspect that Mr. Chang has, in fact, learned all the lessons that matter, the ones his bosses really want him to have learned.

The excerpt below spans the entire introduction to the piece, the portion of it that comes before the jump—the only portion of the article, that is, that a majority of readers will actually read.

At the heart of the debate over intelligent design is this question: Can a scientific explanation of the history of life include the actions of an unseen higher being?

The proponents of intelligent design, a school of thought that some have argued should be taught alongside evolution in the nation's schools, say that the complexity and diversity of life go beyond what evolution can explain.

Biological marvels like the optical precision of an eye, the little spinning motors that propel bacteria and the cascade of proteins that cause blood to clot, they say, point to the hand of a higher being at work in the world. ...

It is an argument that appeals to many Americans of faith.

But mainstream scientists say that the claims of intelligent design run counter to a century of research supporting the explanatory and predictive power of Darwinian evolution, and that the design approach suffers from fundamental problems that place it outside the realm of science. For one thing, these scientists say, invoking a higher being as an explanation is unscientific.

"One of the rules of science is, no miracles allowed," said Douglas H. Erwin, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution. "That's a fundamental presumption of what we do."

That does not mean that scientists do not believe in God. Many do. But they see science as an effort to find out how the material world works, with nothing to say about why we are here or how we should live.

Let's let go the fact that the article, as this frames it, gives the impetus to the ID "critics," with the scientific community thus forced to play defense (after a full five paragraphs, snipped above, devoted to retailing the IDers favorite anti-evolution "gotchas"): that much is straight out of Beltway Journalism 101, Let the Attackers (as long as they're attacking from the right) Write Your Lead. The key to this thing is in that highlighted single-sentence graf: "[ID] is an argument that appeals to many Americans of faith."

This, folks, is straight out of the "credibility" playbook. Look at Keller's June memo, and its Horowitzian employment of the right-Stalinist code-word "diversity":

In a lengthy memo published the newspaper's Web site, Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, announced several new policies in response to a recent report by the paper's Credibility Committee. Among them is a fresh attempt to diversify the Times' staff and viewpoints, and not in the usual racial or gender ways, but in political, religious and cultural areas as well. ...

The point, Keller wrote, "is not that we should begin recruiting reporters and editors for their political outlook; it is part of our professional code that we keep our political views out of the paper. The point is that we want a range of experience. ... First and foremost we hire the best reporters, editors, photographers and artists in the business. But we will make an extra effort to focus on diversity of religious upbringing and military experience, of region and class."

Kenneth Chang, obedient to the Times' new version of PC, is so far from wanting to offend the sensibilities of faith-based Americans that he's basically willing to give the game away to them entirely, at least in that part of the article he expects them to read. Having been charged to write about the science of the ID controversy, what, in Chang's mind, is the most urgent "scientific" question his article needs to address? Whether science can properly "include the actions of an unseen higher being."

With respect to Arthur Silber, this is no kind of merely passive know-nothingism. In the reporter's own voice, in the lead graf, he states the ID position as if it were legitimately a question for science, as opposed to what it is in fact, a hoary theologically-based argument against scientific materialism. And rounds off his introduction by offering the weakest possible answer to that argument, the vapidly tautological statement that science doesn't consider "higher beings" because doing so would be "unscientific"—very nearly as if "no miracles allowed" were a statement of arbitrary intellectual preference, rather than the founding instrumentality of scientific practice. Hell, at the end of the excerpt Chang (again in his own voice) actually feels the need to apologize to his audience on behalf of the scientific community: they're not all disbelievers, he avers, they just have this ideology that doesn't let them think about the really big questions, an ideology "with nothing to say about why we are here or how we should live."

In its crucial gestures, that is to say, the article betrays the assumption that its audience is crucially composed of "Americans of faith"—and that the writer's proper pose is to situate himself intellectually among them, if only for purposes of mollifying them about whatever more informed discussion of the actual science might follow. You know, it's a laughably small thing to ask, that a great national newspaper published from one of the country's most liberal and best-educated cities, and this far into the history of the modern scientific project, exhibit an unshakeable commitment to empirical rationality. There shouldn't even be a question about it. And it would be bad enough if laziness and thoughtlessness in the work of such a newspaper were in effect to connive at giving some anti-empirical irrationalism (like ID) a hearing it didn't deserve. But the Chang article goes well beyond even that level of bad.

And, as I keep saying when the subject comes up, don't expect it to get any better. Just a couple months in to Bill Keller's PC credibility campaign, and the Times is already showing symptoms of the most advanced intellectual and political rot. Can front-page reprints of Tech Central Station pieces be very far behind?

posted by michael  1:25:14 PM  
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