You know how I'm always carping about when lazy reporters start a sentence with "Critics say..." for the sole purpose of rehashing anti-testing myths? "Critics say the tests are biased." "Critics say the tests are not fair to minorities." And so on.
Well, Orson Scott Card (yep, the sci-fi author), writing for the Opinion Journal, is peeved about the very same phenomenon, which he catches in a credulous article about the eco-scare movie, "The Day After Tomorrow":
The whole point of this article is to make sure that the people who read it take "The Day After Tomorrow" far more seriously than the film deserves. Why? Because global warming has become one of the weapons used in the political war to bring down Western civilization, and without necessarily realizing it, the left-biased news media are completely buying into that political agenda...
But the reporters covering science in America today are so wretchedly miseducated that they don't even know what questions to ask when interviewing biased sources. And they are perfectly willing to make ridiculous statements--which would include any sentence beginning with "scientists believe."
This is the postreligious equivalent of a fundamentalist preacher starting a sentence with "The Bible says." It invokes authority without context, without understanding, and without admitting the possibility of error. (Most self-respecting fundamentalist preachers would at least tell you which book in the Bible they were quoting.)
Emphases mine. It's so nice to see that I'm not the only one driven mad by reporters who use intentionally undefined sources to make wild, sweeping statements about complicated issues. And I'm not surprised that a successful sci-fi author was able to describe the issue in much more complete, descriptive, and colorful a fashion than I ever could.
Posted by kswygert at July 12, 2004 03:34 PM