Humanist Association of Orange County - Newsletter for March 2005
Issue #88 ( HTML format )
Editor: Benito Franqui
Associate Editor: Dave Silva
Send submissions and membership renewals to:
HAOC
2609 Fernside St.
Orange, CA 92865
benfranq@earthlink.net
Articles submitted for publication in the newsletter
must
be received no later than 10 days before the
next
HAOC meeting.
The Humanist Association of Orange County ( HAOC) is a
chapter of the American Humanist Association.
Please visit our website at http://www.ochumanists.org
HAOC Board
President: Pete Anderson
Vice President: Dave Silva
Treasurer:.Harry Becker
Secretary: Jerry Parks
Member at large: Carl Mariz
Member at large: Benito Franqui
NEXT HAOC MEETING
Sunday, March 20, 1:30 P.M.
CONSPIRACY THEORIES
By Dave Silva
The
dictionary defines conspiracy as: (2) An evil, unlawful, treacherous or
surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more people; plot.
What I'm
going to try to do is get to the heart of why so many people are eager to
believe in conspiracy theories. Unlike miracles, conspiracies do happen.
Watergate was a conspiracy that unraveled only because it was doggedly pursued.
Another example is the Mafia; organized crime really does conspire to commit
unlawful acts.
We will
talk about the different types of conspiracy theories and how the Internet has
caused an explosive growth of beliefs in bizarre ideas. I will go into some
depth about alien abductions and 911, but will attempt to present a broad
overview of this fascinating subject. For me it is more interesting why people
believe in conspiracy theories than the details of some particular theory.
The Book that Shook the World
Charles L.
Rulon, Emeritus
Life Sciences, Long Beach City College
( Much of the material for this
article can be found in
Ernst Mayr’s book One Long
Argument -1990 )
Design
requires a designer
Scientists and science
students today are often amazed at how frequently the word "God"
appears in the manuscripts of the top biologists of 150 years ago as part of
their scientific explanations. This
was mostly because biology was still tied closely to theology.
How could it be otherwise? The
incredible design of the human eye or the bird’s wing; the amazing camouflage
found in many insects -- all of this design could not have happened by accident
or chance. Where there is design,
there must be a Designer. The human
mind, in particular, seemed to be a product of such high quality and complexity
that it had to have been designed by a craftsman of infinite skill.
For naturalists who were
Orthodox Christians, this creator was, of course, the all-good and all-wise God
of the Bible who had created all of His species about 6000 years ago and who was
still personally involved in skillfully adapting His creations to ever changing
environments. Charles Darwin held
such a belief in his youth.
Philosophers, of course,
quickly pointed out the flaws in this design argument, such as all of the
cruelty and suffering, plus the existence of parasites found everywhere, plus
the mounting number of extinctions discovered, plus all of the apparent design
flaws. Especially hard hit was the belief that this so-called Intelligent
Designer had to be the Christian God.
Believer: “Look, if I found a watch
on the beach, I would obviously know that all of the parts of the watch didn’t
fly together just by accident. I
would know that there had to have been a watchmaker.
Well, the human eye is much more complex than a watch.
So is a beautifully camouflaged butterfly. All of this design obviously
proves the existence of an unbelievably intelligent and enormously powerful
designer. He had to have been
incredibly precise and creative in order to make a livable habitat for all the
creatures He designed. That means
that He has to be a personal being who cares for his creatures.
This is a creator with characteristics just like the ones described in
the Bible. This designer has to be
the Christian God!”
Skeptic: “But suppose I find a watch
that has design flaws.
Doesn’t that tell me the watchmaker is inept?
So what about all of the design flaws in humans like our appendix, our
wisdom teeth and our wind pipe right next to our esophagus so we can choke to
death on a bite of food? How about
the birth canal being too small so that women have to go through extremely
painful and dangerous deliveries? Also,
what about nipples in males? Doesn’t
all this prove that your god is inept?
“Also, to use your watch analogy, there are lots of different
watch-makers, so maybe there are also lots of different designers.
Maybe all of the parasites were made by a separate designer.
And maybe another jealous designer is causing all the extinctions we see
in nature. Besides, just because all
watches have watchmakers, why should it follow that a kangaroo has to have a
kangaroo maker? After all,
everyone’s seen a watchmaker. But
no one has ever seen a kangaroo maker. Maybe
there’s some unknown law of nature responsible for making the kangaroo and
we’re just not smart enough to figure it out.”
Still, skeptics were stuck
with the hard reality that humans, plus all the other species, actually did
exist, and actually did appear to be well-adapted and designed for the most
part. If we weren’t created by some kind of cosmic designer, then how did we
all get here? No one could come up
with any other explanation without bringing in God, or some kind of intelligence
force or universal mind. Immanuel Kant tried his best to apply the laws of
physics to explain away all this design and finally gave up. And Leibniz
philosophized that even though the world had its imperfections, since it was
made by God it still had to be the best of all possible worlds.
In any event, before 1859,
biology was still very much tied to theology.
Virtually all the naturalists in England were ordained ministers, as were
the professors at Cambridge who taught botany and geology to Charles Darwin.
So is it any wonder that in the writings of the naturalists and
philosophers of the period, God usually played a dominant role.
Is it any wonder that biologists saw nothing peculiar in explaining
puzzling phenomena as being caused by God, especially on the question of species
origins and adaptations. And then
came the year 1859.
On the Origin
of Species
In 1859 Charles Darwin's book,
On the
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, was published and the world
has never been the same since. The Origin contained considerable
argument and evidence to show a) that evolution had indeed occurred and b)
that natural selection (and sexual selection) could explain how evolution works.
Seriously challenged were several major pillars of Christian dogma and
philosophical belief, including the Genesis creation story and the belief in the
fixity of species. Man’s unique
status was also in danger. For
scientists and philosophers alike in the early 1800s, man was a creature above
and apart from other living beings. Aristotle, Descartes and Kant agreed on this
sentiment. Man
held a unique position in God's Creation. He
had a soul. He most certainly did
not evolve from an ape.
Also seriously
challenged was the powerful belief that humans were created for a purpose and that all life forms were
progressing toward some ultimate goal such as perfection. This belief in
cosmic teleology has been at the center of almost all important ideolo gies,
philosophies and religions, past and present, and has been a burning issue since
possibly the beginnings of civilization. Almost
all German philosophers from Leibniz and Kant to modern times were teleologists
to a greater or lesser extent, particularly when it came to the living world.
And now for the first time in
thousands of years, teleology was being seriously undermined by Darwin’s
theory of natural selection -- his book was
completely free of any goal-directed language.
The Origin sold out on the
first day of publication and subsequently went through six editions.
It became the book that “shook the world” and was to eventually bring
about one of the greatest paradigm shifts in scientific, philosophical and
religious thinking in the history of our planet!
The theory of common descent
Darwin documented with
considerable argument and evidence that the various creation stories, as
described in the Bible and in other cultures, were contradicted by almost every
aspect of the natural world. Instead, he
clearly demonstrated in one example
after another that every phenomenon for which special creation had been invoked
could be explained much better by his theory of common descent --
that all animals, plants and microorganisms descended from an extremely ancient
common ancestor. This included humans.
Darwin’s theory of common
descent was enthusiastically accepted by the majority of biologists within 15
years of the publication of the Origin.
In fact, if there
was one thing that united the so-called Darwinians of Darwin’s time, it was
their rejection of the biblical special creation story in favor of evolution by
common descent. Everything that had seemed to
be arbitrary or chaotic in natural history up to that point now began to make
sense.
Within a few years following
the Origin, biologists had revealed
through rigorous comparative anatomical study that humans and living apes
clearly had a common ancestry. This
assessment has never again been seriously questioned in science.
Natural
selection
Natural selection, Darwin’s
theory to explain how evolution operates, represented an extraordinary
scientific and philosophical advance. It’s
a theory that (even though all the parts of the puzzle were known) remained
unassembled for more than 2,000-years of philosophy from before Socrates, to
Descartes, to Hume, Kant and the Victorian era.
To quote noted science philosopher Daniel Dennett in reference to natural
selection: “If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has
ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone
else.”
Natural selection
is such a relentlessly naturalistic process that it's hard to imagine any kind
of supernatural involvement anywhere. All
that seems to be going on are random inheritable variations in all organisms
followed by the early death of the less fit.
End of story.
In one bold stroke natural selection completely eliminated
the need for an Intelligent Designer.
The “hand of God” to explain the existence of all living species,
plus all of the apparent design in nature was now replaced by the workings of a
blind natural process.
Instead, natural
selection is a process without any detectable intelligent guiding or foresight.
With natural selection, there's no plan, no purpose, no guiding hand,
just mindless ignorance. All of the so-called design we see in nature is not purposeful design but instead came about over
very long periods of time through a blind automatic sifting process.
But it gets even worse.
With natural selection there inevitably would be immense suffering, pain,
apparent cruelty and flawed designs, plus disease organisms and parasites
evolving everywhere.
There would be a prodigious waste of life and great loses often
associated with the most trivial of gains. Extinction would be the rule.
Ethics and natural selection
Darwin’s
theory of natural selection didn’t just pound another major nail in the
“Earthly gods are dead”, coffins of numerous theistic dogmas, it also provided a scientific foundation and direction for future
research in the study of ethics.
Darwin wrote: “Our descent… is the origin of our evil passions!—The
Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!”
So Darwin was already aware that it will be through the study of
evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, not through philosophy or
religion, that we will discover new valuable truths and insights into our moral
and immoral natures.
Reactions to the Origin
From
the moment of its publication, Charles Darwin’s fundamental ideas inspired
intense reactions ranging from ferocious condemnation to ecstatic allegiance.
Most of Darwin’s Victorian contemporaries bitterly opposed and ridiculed the
idea that man might have descended from an ape.
There was no possible transition from animal to man.
Harvard University’s famous zoologist, Louis Agassiz, even wrote that
Darwin’s theory was a scientific mistake, that his facts were untrue and that
he was unscientific in his methods and mischievous in his intent.
In
addition, notions of progress and perfectibility, so entrenched in Victorian
England, were being seriously challenged by Darwin’s demonstration that
natural selection isn’t about progress, at least in the way humans think, and
also could never lead to perfection.
Darwin also had
problems with the physicists and philosophers who were strict determinists.
Because of the discoveries of Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier and
Laplace, in the 1600s and 1700s, the active God of the heavens had retreated
from active involvement in the heavens to become the "Great Watch Maker".
This Watch Maker had created the universe in the beginning, defined all the natural
laws and then left things to take care of themselves.
These divine natural laws of God provided rigid
predictions and determinism, not randomness.
Philosophers from Bacon and Descartes to Locke and Kant entirely agreed
with the physicists and astronomers that good science made exact predictions and established
theories grounded in God’s mathematics and based on these universal laws.
But Darwin’s theories weren’t based on mathematical proofs or
on physical laws and exact predictions.
They weren’t deterministic.
Instead, he inferred past historical events to support his theories, something totally absent in the physical
sciences at that time. He also introduced the concepts of probability and
contingencies, plus chance and uniqueness into scientific discussions. Thus,
Darwin was accused of being unscientific by the physicists and like-minded
philosophers.
But
there were also many who supported Darwin.
One was Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin and one of the
founders of meteorology.
On reading the Origin, Galton wrote him the following letter:
“My Dear Darwin,
I always think of
you in the same way as converts from barbarism think of the teacher who first
relieved them from the intolerable burden of superstition.
I used to be wretched under the weight of the old-fashioned arguments
from design, [which I felt were worthless, but unable to prove it].
Consequently, the appearance of your book drove away the constraint of my old
superstition as if it had been a nightmare and [gave] me freedom of thought.”
Francis Galton (1822-1911)
Biology becomes separated from theology
Eliminating
God from being actively involved in biological phenomena made room for strictly
scientific explanations of natural phenomena; it produced a powerful
intellectual revolution, the effects of which have lasted to this day.
Remember, there could never be any truly
objective science of biology until it had been divorced from the religious
beliefs of the day.
Darwin was more responsible for this divorce than anyone else.
As a result, Darwin has become the most celebrated (or infamous) figure
in the history of biology.
In fact, most historians of intellectual thought believe that the
Darwinian revolution was the most fundamental of all intellectual revolutions in
the history of the human species.
So
here we are today, almost 150 years after the publication of Darwin’s famous
book.
Today, the mega-theme of biological evolution by means of
natural selection is securely tied by literally hundreds of thousands of threads
of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other area of human knowledge.
The evidence for evolution continues to pour in from geology,
paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and molecular biology.
As Daniel Dennett put it bluntly: “Anyone today who doubts that the
variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is
inexcusably ignorant.”
EASTER HAVOC
by Jerry Parks
There is probably no better example of the havoc caused by the influence of
religion, politics and ideology on society than Easter Island. Easter was once a
very idyllic island, well forested with the world¹s largest palm trees, and
home to many species of birds and valuable plants. Originally colonized by
Polynesians from western islands, around 900 CE; who set up a unique society
that eventually peaked at around 15,000 people, divided into about eleven
territories, each with its own chief, who all claimed a relationship with the
Gods and promised prosperity and bountiful harvests if they were properly
honored. And according to their religion, that was to be done by building the
largest stone statues in their honor, to outdo their rival chiefs. Naturally,
that ended up as a never ending rivalry, with any practical considerations of
the consequences being completely ignored.
Around 1680 CE, with most of the trees felled to use in transporting the
statues, and making the ropes necessary for the hauling of the statues, as well
as used to make ocean-going canoes for deep-water fishing, and to burn for heat
during the winter and other uses by the unsustainably large population (that was
encouraged by the chiefs in order to have enough people to haul the ever-larger
statues to their intended locations) everything came to a breaking point and
their society collapsed in an epidemic of civil war. The islanders were faced
with the fact that their chiefs, their priests and their belief in their Gods
were responsible for the destruction of their environment and their ability to
survive.
With no more trees to use, they could no longer make the canoes necessary to get
to good fishing grounds and ended up as cannibals to survive. Many people turned
to living in caves for safety. Captain Cook, when he arrived in 1774, described
the barely over 1000 natives remaining, as small, lean, timid and miserable.
When the consequences would have been so obvious, why were the Easter Islanders
so foolish? What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree think
about when he was doing it? But, if you have faith in your God, and you think
that you know what that God wants of you, as the Easter Islanders clearly did,
then you can ignore what common sense tells you. Is Easter Island representative
of what we are doing to the Earth?
For details regarding Easter Island see The Enigma of Easter Island by John Flenley and Paul Bahn, Among Stone Giants by Jo Anne Van Tilburg, and Easter Island: Scientific Exploration into the World¹s Environmental Problems in Microcosm, edited by John Loret and
John Tancredi. Jared Diamond¹s recent book Collapse has a chapter on Easter Island, as well as on many other civilizations and
societies around the world that have encountered and created serious
environmental problems. Many have completely collapsed or stand in danger of
collapsing. In practically all of these cases, overpopulation has played a major
role in such collapses, with
religious beliefs coming in a close second. Diamond proves
that Easter Island is not just a strange anomaly that has no significance for
the larger world.
Humankind has
a long history of ignoring environmental problems, with disastrous results.
God Owes Us an Apology
From The Progressive ( http://www.progressive.org/
) March 2005
By Barbara Ehrenreich
The tsunami of
sea water was followed instantly by a tsunami of spittle as the religious
sputtered to rationalize God's latest felony. Here we'd been placidly killing
each other a few dozen at a time in Iraq, Darfur, Congo, Israel, and Palestine,
when along comes the deity and whacks a quarter million in a couple of hours
between breakfast and lunch. On CNN, NPR, Fox News, and in newspaper articles
too numerous for Nexis to count, men and women of the cloth weighed in solemnly
on His existence, His motives, and even His competence to continue as Ruler of
Everything.
Theodicy,
in other words--the attempt to reconcile God's perfect goodness with the
manifest evils of His world--has arisen from the waves. On the retro,
fundamentalist, side, various men of the cloth announced that the tsunami was
the rational act of a deity enraged by (take your pick): the suppression of
Christianity in South Asia, pornography and child-trafficking in that same
locale, or, in the view of some Muslim commentators, the bikini-clad tourists at
Phuket.
On the
more liberal end of the theological spectrum, God's spokespeople hastened to
stuff their fingers in the dike even as the floodwaters of doubt washed over it.
Of course, God exists, seems to be the general consensus. And, of course, He is
perfectly good. It's just that his jurisdiction doesn't extend to tectonic
plates. Or maybe it does and He tosses us an occasional grenade like this just
to see how quickly we can mobilize to clean up the damage. Besides, as the
Catholic priests like to remind us, "He's a 'mystery' "--though that's
never stopped them from pronouncing His views on abortion with absolute
certainty.
The
clerics who are struggling to make sense of the tsunami must not have noticed
that this is hardly the first display of God's penchant for wanton, homicidal
mischief. Leaving out man-made genocide, war, and even those "natural"
disasters, like drought and famine, to which "man" invariably
contributes through his inept social arrangements, God has a lot to account for
in the way of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and plagues. Nor has He ever
shown much discrimination in his choice of victims. A tsunami hit Lisbon in
1755, on All Saints Day, when the good Christians were all in church. The
faithful perished, while the denizens of the red light district, which was built
on strong stone, simply carried on sinning. Similarly, last fall's hurricanes
flattened the God-fearing, Republican parts of Florida while sparing sin-soaked
Key West and South Beach.
The
Christian-style "God of love" should be particularly vulnerable to
post-tsunami doubts. What kind of "love" inspired Him to wrest babies
from their parents' arms, the better to drown them in a hurry? If He so loves us
that He gave his only son etc., why couldn't he have held those tectonic plates
in place at least until the kids were off the beach? So much, too, for the
current pop-Christian God, who can be found, at least on the Internet,
micro-managing people's careers, resolving marital spats, and taking excess
pounds off the faithful--this last being Pat Robertson's latest fixation.
If we are
responsible for our actions, as most religions insist, then God should be, too,
and I would propose, post-tsunami, an immediate withdrawal of prayer and other
forms of flattery directed at a supposedly moral deity--at least until an
apology is issued, such as, for example: "I was so busy with
Cindy-in-Omaha's weight-loss program that I wasn't paying attention to the
Earth's crust."
It's not
just Christianity. Any religion centered on a God who is both all-powerful and
all-good, including Islam and the more monotheistically inclined versions of
Hinduism, should be subject to a thorough post-tsunami evaluation. As many have
noted before me: If God cares about our puny species, then disasters prove that
he is not all-powerful; and if he is
all-powerful, then clearly he doesn't give a damn.
In fact,
the best way for the religious to fend off the atheist threat might be to revive
the old bad--or at least amoral and indifferent--gods. The tortured notion of a
God who is both good and powerful is fairly recent, dating to roughly 1200 BC,
after which Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam emerged. Before that, you
had the feckless Greco-Roman pantheon, whose members interfered in human events
only when their considerable egos were at stake. Or you had monstrous,
human-sacrifice-consuming, psycho-gods like Ba'al and his Central American
counterparts. Even earlier, as I pointed out in my book Blood Rites, there were prehistoric god(desses) modeled on
man-eating animals like lions, and requiring a steady diet of human or animal
sacrificial flesh.
The
faithful will protest that they don't want to worship a bad--or amoral or
indifferent--God, but obviously they already do. Why not acknowledge what our
prehistoric ancestors knew? If the Big Guy or Gal operates in any kind of moral
framework, it has nothing to do with the rules we've come up with over the eons
as primates attempting to live in groups-- rules like, for example, "no
hitting."
Yes,
12/26 was a warning, though not about the hazards of wearing bikinis. What it
comes down to is that we're up shit creek here on the planet Earth. We're wide
open to asteroid hits, with the latest near-miss coming in October, when a
city-sized one passed within a mere million miles of Earth, which is just four
times the distance between the Earth and the moon. Then, too, it's only a matter
of time before the constant shuffling of viral DNA results in a global pandemic.
And 12/26 was a reminder that the planet itself is a jerry-rigged affair, likely
to keep belching and lurching. Even leaving out global warming and the
possibility of nuclear war, this is not a good situation, in case you hadn't
noticed so far.
If there
is a God, and He, She, or It had a message for us on 12/26, that message is: Get
your act together, folks--your seismic detection systems, your first responders
and global mobilization capacity--because no one, and I do mean no One, is
coming to medi-vac us out of here.
Barbara Ehrenreich is
a columnist for The Progressive. She is the author of "Nickel and Dimed: On
(Not) Getting By in America" and "Blood Rites: Origins and History of
the Passions of War."
Inside The
'Gannon' Case:
How Blogs
Broke It Wide Open
( From http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000818447
):
For the first time last month, I was able
to follow a "blog probe" from the start, and it was amazing to see the
resources and skills the larger sites can bring to bear on a single issue or
controversy.
By Greg Mitchell
(March 01, 2005) -- The Jeff
Gannon affair has not yet morphed into a full-fledged political scandal, or
retreated to the realm of embarrassing footnote, so this may be a good time to
pause and reflect. At the center of the controversy: A man with no journalistic
(but plenty of sex-site) experience who managed to cover the White House at
close range for two years for an obscure online site called Talon News — under
an alias — with the avowed aim of simply presenting the administration's case,
unfiltered.
Whatever the merits of the uproar over this episode, it has proved extremely
instructive for me, making possible my first immersion in the new world of blog-generated
controversy.
Of course, I closely watched previous blog brouhahas, such as "Rathergate,"
but at some distance. This time I followed it from day one. The blogs helped
drive E&P's online coverage (which drew national attention), and our
coverage, in turn, fed the blogs. So this is an interesting case study in the
tenuous new blog/mainstream relationship that has lately drawn much name-calling
on either side.
The Gannon affair began in late January after the faux news reporter, who had
drawn little notice, suddenly asked a too-puffy-to-ignore question at one of
President Bush's rare press conferences. The fact that this strange fellow was
not only in the room, but got called on, set tongues wagging. The Media Matters
Web site raised questions about Gannon and his long history of softball
questions. Our own Joe Strupp got Gannon's phone number, and was first to
interview him. He learned that "Gannon" was an alias, though the
reporter would not reveal his true name.
By this time, the liberal blogs were probing Talon News, finding that it was
closely affiliated with another site called GOP USA.com. Hundreds, maybe
thousands, of the pajamadeen went to work on the alias angle. A few days later,
the popular blogger Atrios suggested that Gannon's real name was James D.
Guckert.
This is when I really started following the pursuit. It was amazing to see how
many participants, at how many sites, took part, and the skills at their
command, mainly Web-based. The material the detectives at DailyKos and other
blogs drew out of obscure or abandoned Web sites — and caches — regarding
Talon, Gannon, and a dozen other threads was astounding, although I couldn't
quite tell if any of the searches and grabs required talents well beyond the
reach of even the most advanced computer wonks.
Within 24 hours, the gumshoes had confirmed that Gannon was Guckert. Meanwhile,
someone linked Guckert to setting up half a dozen sex-oriented Web sites with
names like militaryescort.com. Hours later someone else posted a screen capture
of a "JDG" in his underwear from an abandoned AOL hometown page, and
he sure looked like Gannon/Guckert. Certainly that was just coincidence?
Then Gannon/Guckert told Strupp that he had indeed set up sex sites "for a
client," but claimed they had never been activated.
Well, I was growing impressed with blog research. Cutting away the over-the-top
rhetoric, snarkiness, and conspiracy theories, most of their far-fetched facts
were standing up. So when Americablog uncovered what appeared to be nude photos
of Gannon/Guckert advertising his wares as an escort, along with something of a
paper trail linking him to those sites, I was no longer skeptical. Soon The
Washington Post was citing this evidence.
I won't go into the rest of that week, except to note that Strupp managed to get
exclusive interviews with current White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan
and his predecessor, Ari Fleisher, who each made admissions that drew wide
attention — and gave the blogs even more leads. The mainstream media slowly
came to the story, with the explosion occurring on Feb. 17, two weeks after the
first Media Matters mention, although too many outlets have pooh-poohed the
story.
Sure, there is plenty of junk-research out there on the blogs, and unproven or
offensive comments still abound in the postings. But what surprised me the most
were the resources the major blogs (as opposed to the Mom-and-Pop operations)
can call upon for this type of story, enlisting experts around the country —
non-journalists, but people with similar, or even more highly developed, Web
skills.
And here's the nut of it: In the blogosphere, it's often asked, on
both the left and right, "Why can't the mainstream media get to the bottom
of these scandals like the blogs sometimes do?" Of course, one of the
reasons is--they are simply too timid. But I understand another part of the
answer now: No single news outlet has anywhere near the army of workers who
toil, unpaid, at odd hours, for the larger blogs. To compete in this regard,
Gannett would have to shut down some of its local papers and put their news
staffs to work for USA Today. Then USA Today could throw a battalion of
reporters at a hot issue — like some blogs now can, and do.
Greg
Mitchell is the editor of E&P and the author of several books on politics
and history.
ON THE LIGHT SIDE
NOTICE :
The Irvine Ranch Water District neither supports nor endorses the
causes and activities or organizations which use the District’s meeting rooms, which are made available
as a public service.
HAOC
2609 Fernside St.
Orange, CA 92865
Your membership expiration date is shown in your
address label.