John McCain and the Discovery Institute

Has anyone mentioned that the article linked to in the OP is mistitled and has a rather glaring error?

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But last year, he said the intelligent design theory should not be taught in the science classroom:

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This is supposed to be a contradiction, but it's a misunderstanding on the part of the writer. He goes on to quote John McCain:

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I respect those who think the world was created in seven days. Should it be taught as a science class? Probably not.“

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Intelligent Design should not be confused with 7-day creationism. It is true that ID can and should be called creationism, but suggesting Intelligent Design be taught in schools while agreeing that a 7-day creation ought not to be is not a contradiction. Those are two quite different thoughts. Most IDers believe in an old earth and some sort of evolution.

ramoss, they may both be religious concepts and both be completely useless as science, but that doesn't change my point.Of course, I don't know how important my point is. An article falsely accused McCain of a contradiction. That doesn't seem very significant, but it's hard for me to leave a glaring error like that alone.

Not just anybody, Crash. I didn't know that. My wife is also over 30, and I'd say it's unlikely she has ever heard of kerning text.This is totally off topic, but I found this fact very interesting. Typewriters could kern text in the 60's? I'm impressed. It seems obvious with thought that electric typewriters must have existed then and much earlier, but I never saw one till I was in high school (70's). My family didn't even get a color TV until 1980.

I have a question. I'm a little frightened about being jumped all over, because I rarely read a newspaper or see a TV, and I won't be able to defend myself. I'm just asking a question. I listen to the radio about 30 min./day, NPR on the way to work, O'Reilly or NPR on the way home, depending on whether O'Reilly is tolerable that day. (I don't have a large selection here in rural TN, unless I want to be bombarded with country music.) So I have zippo personal experience on liberal bias in the media.The right wingers I listened to in the past (and O'Reilly) all say that polls say journalists vote 85% or 90% democrat. One, do you believe that's true, and two, wouldn't that suggest that some sort of liberal bias would be unavoidable?

Thanks for the link. I thought I'd never find something like that. I always wondered where those stats came from. I'm a firm believer that at least 80% of all statistics are made up on the spot, so if the source isn't named I don't believe the stats.

I've been backtracking through this thread looking at Crash & Subbie's conversation. I ran across your post 33, and I read the article. Some notes on the source you mention there.1. When I read it, their opinion came glaring through. 58% to 42% is a "dramatic advantage" when it's conservative to liberal, but 53% to 45% is a "small advantage" when it's liberal. Yes, there's a difference, but that leaves a pretty small distance between "dramatic" and "small." And an increase from 53-45 to 61-39 is "nearly three times as large." Well, okay, 22 is nearly 3 times 8, but that's hardly an accurate portrayal of an increase from 53% to 61%.2. So I looked up the source. They are "A non-profit progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation."3. This really makes me question even their data. You spent a lot of time on the issue of bias in our other thread, and this is an openly biased research group with a clearly stated goal that has nothing to do with accurately producing data.

I have heard a lot of assertions about liberal bias in the media, and I don't think even one of the people making those assertions were talking about movies being full of immorality. I've never even heard anything like this.The issues I've heard addressed are coverage of the president, gun control, abortion, and I'm sure there's others, but those are the main ones.

Isn't this a place where Percy & nator would tell you "the plural of anecdote is not data"?Nator produced a couple of links to people that tried to tabulate total percentages. That kind of data would be useful. "42% of the stories on major news networks during the six months during the election were favorable to Republicans, 32% favorable to Democrats, and 26% covered both sides" would be useful type information. I made those figures up, of course, but that would be data.It'd be nice if the data didn't come from a non-profit organization with the goal of correcting conservative misinformation in the media, but from some reasonably unbiased source.The fact is, if 10% of all news stories were favorable to conservatives, and 85% were favorable to liberals, you'd still have enough examples to regale us from now till Von Danikens aliens come back (Dec. 24, 2011, I believe).

In my limited experience, McCain does get sweetheart treament from the media. He gets portrayed as more middle of the road than most, and he's well-liked.However, he's probably a bad example, because the right wingers don't like him and consider him to be pretty liberal. I don't hear much of the right wing talk shows any more. I can only listen to them while I travel, but they vilify him. He's a bad guy that they don't want elected.

Well, doubtless this is true, but since I didn't do that and no one has suggested doing that, it's irrelevant. I gave reasons for the source I rejected as biased, and the bias was obvious. It didn't take keen insight to find it. It's not fundamentally false. If it's true that the journalists' bosses lean right, then that would speak against such a bias. However, without such mitigating factors, if most journalists lean one direction, and especially if they lean hard to that direction, it's reasonable to expect bias, consciously or unconsciously. I don't know. Maybe we can't. In which case, we're stuck with just everyone's opinions about what they see or feel when they watch or read the media, and that's not worth much. We really can't even determine who does the most things wrong, because our knowledge of that is at least somewhat dependent on the media as well.

answer tomorrow, going home, have guests, won't be back on till tomorrow.

The source was Media Matters for America.My comments on why they are biased are in message 71.