Posted on 01/05/2005 12:16:14 AM PST by JohnHuang2
Wednesday, January 5, 2005
MEDIA MATTERS
PBS station cancels
intelligent-design film
TV outlet charged with practicing 'politically correct censorship'
By Ron Strom
The PBS station in Albuquerque, N.M., has canceled a scheduled showing of a documentary on the theory of intelligent design, eliciting charges of "politically correct censorship."
New Mexico teacher Phil Robinson says he worked with staff at KNME-TV
to arrange for the documentary, "Unlocking the Mystery of Life," to air on Friday night. Robinson discovered Monday that the show had been pulled and newspaper advertising for it had been canceled.
The station says the scheduling of the program was a mistake caused by a miscommunication related to the transition to a new program manager and that there was concern about the fact that those who funded the film have religious ties.
Seattle-based Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture hammered KNME for the cancellation.
"It is simply astounding that a public television station would engage in this sort of politically correct censorship," said Rob Crowther, director of communications for the organization, in a statement. "Public television usually prides itself in exploring new ideas, not suppressing them. Doesn't anyone at KNME believe in free speech?"
Joan Rebecchi is the marketing manager for KNME.
"It wasn't suppose to be scheduled in the first place," she told WND. "It was a scheduling mistake.
"We're in transition between two program managers, and they were repeating NOVA in that timeslot. … There was confusion over the show title, and so that show was scheduled in [NOVA's] place. It was figured out last weekend that we had that scheduled and we weren't suppose to schedule it."
Rebecchi said Robinson contacted her about advertising for the show and that she helped him write a good ad for it, not realizing at the time the show was not suppose to have been scheduled.
"When I found out the show in fact wasn't going to air, I pulled the ads from the Albuquerque Journal because I didn't want him to lose any money," Rebecchi said. "We were able to pull them before he lost any money."
Rebecchi confirmed that a lot of Albuquerque residents are "very, very upset" that the station is not running it.
She said station personnel had concerns about the fact that those who funded the program "had some connection to a religious point of view."
Continued Rebecchi: "Our underwriting guidelines don't allow us to air programs that have a specific religious point of view," adding that PBS has to be "kind of biased" against programming with any religious connections.
"That's the reason they didn't want to schedule it in the first place," she told WND.
Crowther points out, however, that the film in question is currently for sale on PBS' national website
and has aired in almost every top-20 media market in the country, including PBS stations in California, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington state and Washington, D.C.
"The real losers here are New Mexico viewers who will be denied the chance to see a fascinating documentary that public television viewers in other states have already had the opportunity to see," Crowther added. "I guess if New Mexico viewers want to learn more about intelligent design, they will have to go the national PBS website."
"Unlocking the Mystery of Life" is a 58-minute program exploring what DNA reveals about the origin of life and documents how some scientists are skeptical about naturalistic explanations for the origin of genetic information and are looking to theories of design instead. According to the Discovery Institute, the documentary follows the development of intelligent design theory through interviews with key design scientists.
CANCEL PUBLIC FUNDING OF PBS, and let them EARN their own right to appeal to their PC viewers...
Am I to understand, then, that we can look forward to seeing no more pro-Muslim films on PBS from here on?
Oh...silly me. The prohibition on religion only extends to Christians.
Well, that certainly doesn't describe intelligent design theories.. As an idle aside, I've always wondered a tiny bit why it's called "intelligent" design and not something more accurate like 'intentional design' or whatever. I mean, if some entity is actually designing all this it's hard to imagine a more incompetent, inefficient method and outcome design. I could come up with far better in one afternoon, given absolute design freedom....
so true....
maybe NPR's own Terry Gross (!) will fill the void with Christian-specific programming that doesn't cut the muster of PBS's board...
nahhhhh....
Well yes. Now, with examples of what not to do.
But what would your first draft look like, if it hadn't been done before?
...unless the point of view is agnostic, atheistic or pagan, as in Joseph Campbell's long-running series. As long as you don't happen to be a Bible-based Christian, your religion is welcome on PBS.
Very good point.
Bingo.
Given absolute design freedom I would know all the could or would be done and have every option at my disposal. The result would certainly be something different than this mess..
Now how could they be expected to show a religious show on the public airwaves. Have you not heard of seperation of Church and state?
Don't flame me - sarcasim tag is on.
You are right, I consider atheism, humanism and the rest to be a religious tie in every way.
I checked out PBS recently in Los Angeles because I have this projector that shoots a bright 15' wide High Definition picture and HD programming is still a bit thin.
Well, I like their animal shows and travel shows, but I think you can become practically spiritually possessed watching all their other shows.
If the PBS stations were any more politically left, they would be acceptable on Al Jazeera.
If you or I were president, we would do just that. Along with funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and many other such funding nonsense. But, we are not president so this garbage continues.
Spoken like a true engineer...
Atheism and humanism are big time religions. They believe MAN is god.
Those views along with other paganisms are always broadcast on PBS it seems without sensor.
God is banned, but god is OK on PBS.
Question is, will their PC viewers put their big money where their big mouths are? Oh, silly me, I forgot. We are supposed to like being taxed to death and beyond the grave. Everyone repeat after Oliver Wendell Holmes, "I like paying taxes, they purchase civilization..." My guess is that these PC viewers don't have the guts to risk going it alone, donating to their beloved PBS/NPR without imposing that burden on the majority of us who do not agree with the PBS/NPR agenda, and maybe even to go so far as to say that we do not find their programming to be intellectually and humanly interesting.
(Yawn)
Right. Whatever.
"Intelligent" comes from the Latin meaning "to choose between"; meaning, of course, that the specified complexity that is manifest in all examples of intelligently designed objects -- including biological objects -- chose between a number of possible alternatives and came up with the one that happens to exist. It was not (nor could it have been) produced either deterministically or randomly.
"Intentional Design" would not be a bad description, except that it's redundant; anything designed is done so by intention.
You probably mean something like "Designed by Conscious Intention." ID has no position on that. The designing agency might be a conscious Creator; it might be more akin to the ancient Greek idea of "nous" -- universal Mind.
Ultimately, Darwinism is not a new idea either. The notion of explaining everything (including life) naturalistically was done by Lucretius and Epicurus.
As it turns out, some of the things that have traditionally been misunderstood by Darwinists to be examples of "poor" design are now being understood to be examples of profoundly subtle and clever design. For example, the supposedly "inside-out" construction of the mammalian eye (in which the photosensitive cells face away from the light, and the neural "plug-ins" face toward the light) is now understood to be an efficient way of preventing heat damage to the photosensitive cells without compromising visual acuity too much. Creatures that are "lucky" enough to have their photosensitive cells face outward -- the way a video engineer would probably have designed it -- usually live under the sea where the light intensity would normally never be enough to cause heat damage.
But in order to have come across this explanation (let alone appreciate it), one would have to have given up being a knee-jerk neo-Darwinist.
"It is simply astounding that a public television station would engage in this sort of politically correct censorship," said Rob Crowther, director of communications for the organization, in a statement. "Public television usually prides itself in exploring new ideas, not suppressing them. Doesn't anyone at KNME believe in free speech?"
Where did this guy drop from, anyway? Free speech has been reserved for evolution, democrats, commies, hollywood, the pinkos and other rats for years. Have the rules changed?
The opposite of intention is chance. ;)
The most efficient way to prevent heat damage to photosensitive eyes is to design them so that they are not damaged by heat..
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