Author: Ophelia Benson

Chris Mooney explains that journalists often get things wrong.

Why is Richard Dawkins, promoting his new evolution book, regularly being asked about his atheism, and why he is “strident,” “polarizing,” etc? Is it the media’s fault–or is it Dawkins’? I would actually say a bit of both.

Journalists can be quite irresponsible, and even when they’re not outright irresponsible, they love to be provocative and to stir up conflict. To them, Dawkins is “Mr. Big Atheist,” and thus instinctively seen as a polarizing figure. Many radio or TV hosts, and even print journalists that Dawkins encounters on his tour, will not have read his books carefully; instead, they will be going on impressions and what they’ve heard.

Ahhhhhh yes, that sounds quite likely. Many naughty journalists will be going on impressions and what they’ve heard. And what would those be? Why – partly, they would be impressions assiduously created by none other than Chris Mooney himself! It would be what they have heard from that indefatigable pursuer of Mr Big Atheists, Chris Mooney. As far as I know, Chris has done more over the last five months to create exactly that impression than any other single source of impressions – so it has the faintest whiff of crocodile tears for him to talk of irresponsible journalists going on impressions and what they’ve heard. Didn’t he want them to? Wasn’t that the idea? If not – why was he so dedicated about it? Why so many articles, in so many places? Flogging the book, of course, but he and SK could have done that by talking about Pluto, or Hollywood, instead – but it was atheists atheists atheists, and Dawkins leading the pack.

Finally, atheism is, to a trouble-making journalist, potentially a much sexier topic than evolution. It’s divisive. It’s controversial. It’s much easier to create sparks with culture war questions than it is to patiently allow Dawkins to explicate science…That Dawkins would, after The God Delusion, be framed as a scientist-atheist combo, or even the icon of atheistic science, was as inevitable as night after day. It’s the media equivalent of a law of nature.

Really? Nothing at all to do with the efforts of one Chris Mooney? Or is Chris Mooney writing about himself in the third person – yes maybe that’s it. He’s explaining that he’s part of something that is the equivalent of a law of nature so it was all inevitable and nobody should say he was being ‘divisive’ and ‘controversial’ himself while rebuking everyone in sight for being divisive and controversial. They could all do otherwise; Chris Mooney, being a journalist, was helpless in the onrush of a natural event.

Scientists tell government some pesky facts about drugs; government brushes aside pesky facts, makes decision on other grounds, ‘having taken account of “public perception” and “policing priorities”.’

The refusal to accept the expert views of a council set up to judge the relative harms of different drugs went down badly with the scientific community in general, and Professor Nutt in particular. Today, he warns of the negative consequences of what he calls, a “highly politicised” process…The government view, though, is that they should adopt a precautionary principle. “Where there is… doubt about the potential harm that will be caused, we must err on the side of caution and protect the public,” as Jacqui Smith put it last year. Professor Nutt attacks the ‘safety first’ approach arguing that “it starts to distort the value of evidence and therefore I think it could, and probably does, devalue evidence”. He recalls the scare about the MMR vaccine. “People were concerned, on the basis of false science, that the triple vaccine might cause brain damage. This led to a reduction in vaccination uptake and now children are getting lung and brain damage from measles,” he states. “The precautionary principle with MMR has been clearly shown to be wrong,” he continues. “It has harmed more people than it has helped.”

In other words the precautionary principle isn’t really precautionary, it just seems to be. It seems to be because people so often forget to take into account the risks of doing whatever the alternative is. They think (apparently): MMR, risky; no MMR, no risk. But ‘no MMR’ itself has risks, so thinking all the risk is on one side of the ledger is a mistake.

Nick Cohen takes a look at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office…

The FCO was not and is not standing up to the totalitarian ideas of the Islamist extreme Right, as it stood up to the totalitarianism of the socialist extreme Left in the second half of the 20th century. On the contrary, the establishment has appeased political Islamism abroad and interfered in the domestic affairs of its own country by mounting a covert operation to aid and abet it at home.

Well…perhaps they had some good reason?

The achievement of political Islam in Britain has been to suborn the liberal Left and cut off the most promising escape route for dissidents in the process. An abused woman, a young man fighting religious authoritarianism, an Iranian exile seeking to gain support for the campaign against the Archbishop of Canterbury’s and Lord Chief Justice’s endorsement of Sharia law or a British Bangladeshi trying to bring the Islamist criminals who massacred civilians in the war of independence to justice, would once have looked left for succour. If they do so now, they will find that progressives take their cue from the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, rather than the best of the liberal Left’s traditions, and dismiss Muslims who fight for values they profess to hold as being at best irrelevances and at worst stool-pigeons for imperialism.

Ah. Well…perhaps it’s just a small enclave of loonies?

Do not make the mistake of believing that such attitudes are confined to the FCO. Only recently, the supposedly left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research was trumpeting “non-violent” Islamism as “the best organised and most popular opposition to existing authoritarian regimes in the Middle East”.

Ah. Oh dear. Well…I’m told the climate is nice in Antarctica.