Well, just as Media Orchard had predicted, the mainstream media’s coverage of the intelligent design “debate” has been less than edifying.

Of course, the reality is there is little to debate: evolution theory is a cornerstone of modern science. Intelligent design is not a theory, and even though its advocates have found a few people in lab coats to put on TV, it’s not science.

CBS News Sunday Morning , however, covered the controversy as a typical “he said, she said” in its Oct. 23 report. Rita Braver started off on exactly the wrong foot by framing her topic in this way:

There are questions we cannot stop asking: Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? There have never been any easy answers, or universal agreement.

Well, that’s true — and completely irrelevant.

The Columbia Journalism Review published a cover story in its most recent issue discussing reporters’ coverage of intelligent design. The writer, Chris Mooney, summed up the situation well:

As evolution, driven by such events, shifts out of scientific realms and into political and legal ones, it ceases to be covered by context-oriented science reporters and is instead bounced to political pages, opinion pages, and television news.

And all these venues, in their various ways, tend to deemphasize the strong scientific case in favor of evolution and instead lend credence to the notion that a growing “controversy” exists over evolutionary science. This notion may be politically convenient, but it is false…

Not surprisingly, in light of this coverage, we simultaneously find that the public is deeply confused about evolution … Perhaps journalists should consider that unlike other social controversies — over abortion or gay marriage, for instance — the evolution debate is not solely a matter of subjective morality or political opinion. Rather, a definitive standard has been set by the scientific community on the science of evolution, and can easily be used to evaluate competing claims.

Scientific societies, including the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, have taken strong stances affirming that evolution is the bedrock of modern biology. In such a situation, journalistic coverage that helps fan the flames of a nonexistent scientific controversy (and misrepresents what’s actually known) simply isn’t appropriate.

Let’s hope people in newsrooms are reading Mooney’s piece — although I’ve seen no evidence of it to this point.

Technorati tags: Journalism, PR, Intelligent Design, Science