CSICOP News/CMI
SkeptInq@aol.com
Thu, 3 Apr 1997 14:55:09 -0500
Council for Media Integrity Blasts Networks for Distorted Treatments of
Science
The opening salvos in the new Council for Media Integrity’s campaign to
improve the treatment of science in television entertainment programming were
fired in Los Angeles—the heart of the TV and movie entertainment industry.
The Council, established last June by the Committee for the Scientific
Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), held its first meeting
and first news conference January 9 at the Los Angeles Airport Hilton Hotel.
The Council was formed to closely monitor and quickly respond to distorted
treatments of science and uncritical presentations of paranormal and
fringe-science claims in the media.
The Council attacked the major television networks for running two or three
pseudoscientific specials almost every month. “Recently there have been
programs on prophecies, astrology, psychic powers, creationism, Noah’s Ark,
angels, and alien abductions,” said the Council. All of them posed, in some
way, as being based on scientific fact.
The Council also criticized the many talk shows devoted to the paranormal
in which claims in favor of the paranormal are given a platform but the
scientific viewpoint is rarely allowed.
The Council’s two co-chairs, entertainer and author Steve Allen and Nobel
laureate nuclear chemist Glenn T. Seaborg, called for the television industry
to exercise greater responsibility toward science and truth.
Allen emphasized that the Council’s concerns are not with entertainment
programs that honestly present themselves as fictional dramas. “We are
talking about shows that are presented as if they are true, as reality,” said
Allen, creator and host of the original Tonight Show, producer of the
award-winning Meeting of Minds television series, and author of nearly fifty
books, including “Dumbth”: And 81 Ways to Make Americans Smarter (Prometheus
1991). Allen has been a long-time advocate of critical thinking.
He and other speakers emphasized that series like Star Trek and The
Twilight Zone never crossed that line and are not of concern. But a recent
disturbing trend is “reality-based” TV programming in which fictional dramas
or pseudodocumentaries claim or at least imply that they are based on truth
and scientific fact.
“I call them damn lies,” said Allen. “How,” he said, referring to their
producers, “do you approve of irresponsibility and lies?”
Seaborg, discover or co-discoverer of eleven elements including plutonium,
former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and current associate
director at large of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, pointed to
the discouraging state of scientific literacy in American society.
“I have been interested in the general problem of scientific literacy since
just before Sputnik,” said Seaborg. “So I have been an advocate of scientific
literacy for nearly forty years.” He was a leader behind the famous study “A
Nation at Risk” that identified a need for renovation of pre-college science
education to advance scientific literacy.
“We have a problem with regard to the amount of pseudoscience facing us,”
Seaborg said. “One solution is increasing the scientific literacy of the
general public.” Unfortunately, he said, too much television programming has
the opposite effect.
CSICOP founder and chairman Paul Kurtz said the media have now virtually
replaced the schools, colleges, and universities as the main source of
information for the general public.
“The irresponsibility of some of the media in the area of science and the
paranormal is a worldwide problem. But it especially applies to the United
States, where the media have been distorting science, and in particular
presenting pseudoscience as genuine science. Indeed, we are appalled by the
number of ‘documentaries’ that are really entertainment programs presenting
fringe science as real science.
“We believe that the media have presented a distorted view of science,”
Kurtz said, and that they have a responsibility to provide a more balanced
view of what is real science and what is pseudoscience.
“We are asking only for some balance. We are asking TV not to dramatize
pseudoscience as real science.
“We are not, of course, asking that TV producers not run these shows or
make a profit,” Kurtz added. “We surely do not wish to censor the media. We
only ask that they provide some balance and some appreciation of the
scientific approach. The Council will monitor such programs and attempt to
persuade producers, directors, writers, and the general public to leave room
for the appreciation of scientific methods of inquiry.”
Kurtz, recovering at the time from surgery, spoke to the news conference
via videotape. Barry Karr, CSICOP’s executive director, hosted.
Council member Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science
Education in Berkeley, California, said the concern is that science be
presented honestly. “We offer to provide our help, our expertise to help you
do a better job,” she said. “We would like to encourage you to consider that
science, in and of itself, is exciting, creative, and wonderful.
“You don’t have to present the crackpot stuff to be interesting.”
CSICOP staff member Tom Flynn lamented the increasing blurring of
entertainment and fact-based programming. He showed excerpts from NBC’s
notorious 1996 pseudoscientific, documentary-style “Mysterious Origins of
Man,” which presented, as Flynn put it, “the utterly baseless idea that
dinosaurs and man lived at the same time.”
“This program did probably more than any other to reinforce the idea that
dinosaurs and man co-existed.”
Scott, a physical anthropologist, agreed that much of what goes on in
school is absolutely swamped by television. The day after the NBC program
aired, she said, science teachers throughout the United States were deluged
with questions from their students about dinosaur-human coexistence. She said
this single program set back science education on this topic by decades.
—Kendrick Frazier, Editor, Skeptical Inquirer