Re: Why Christians Are Viewed Poorly

On 5/21/06, gordon brown <gbrown@euclid.colorado.edu> wrote:
> One factor shaping the general impression that people have of conservative
> Christians is that many of them may get their input from the various news
> media. What sort of events are likely to make the headlines? Agreeing with
> science is much less likely to be deemed newsworthy than disputing it.

Fortunately, this is not always the case. Strangely enough, some of
the best reporting on the cooperation between evangelicals and science
and generally positive reporting on evangelicals is *gasp* the New
York Times and the Washington Post. Someone more perceptive than me
may explain why this is the case given an overall anti-conservative
bias. It may be as simple those as the individuals assigned to those
beats may simply be quality reporters, though.

Exceptions to this is when the New York Times science reporters report
on evangelicals. The usual straw men come out to play then. When they
report on science it is good but when they report on evangelicals they
are clearly out of their depth. To see what I mean compare this story
by Laurie Goodstein with many extended quotes from both sides of the
global warming controversy within the evangelical community
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/national/08warm.html and Kenneth
Chang's hack piece with lot's of short quotes and lots of "says that"
with no direct quotation
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/science/sciencespecial2/21peti.html
Received on Sun May 21 20:49:08 2006