The Perils of So-Called Objective Journalism

From yesterday's tres bizarre Times review of the new Creation Museum in Kentucky:

Highlights are mine:

"For the skeptic the wonder is at a strange universe shaped by elaborate arguments, strong convictions and intermittent invocations of scientific principle. For the believer, it seems, this museum provides a kind of relief: Finally the world is being shown as it really is, without the distortions of secularism and natural selection."'

It's this obsession with an "one the one hand, on the other hand" kind of mentality that leads the NEW YORK FUCKING TIMES to include the phrase "the distortions of secularism and natural selection" in a piece of criticism (not even a bloody news story). And the "it seems" is just an incredibly weak attempt to distance the writer from the journalistic atrocity he's about to commit.

Oh, and this crap about "the believer." Okay, I may come from the East Coast liberal secular elite, but I've spent my fair share of time travelling and interacting with people not of my creed. I've met tons of people who consider themselves believers, but not one of them, not ONE of them, doesn't fucking believe in natural selection.

"A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these pre-fossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years?"

"Usually thought," or SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN?

An article like this must make bona fide scientists want to deface that shiny new Times Corp. building with a vat of homemade laboratory acid.

Objective journalism does not mean presenting both sides of a story as equally plausible. It means presenting different perspectives and then gleaning out the cold, hard, facts.