Look, you all saw the latest Noah's Ark story, right? Many excellent posts, going through all the rational responses to this story. We all know that both the story and the discovery are nonsense, and we all know the reasons why. So I thought instead of just going through it all again and have my dear readers saying 'boring, boring', I would look at the story in a different way.
The biggest question in my mind when I saw the HuffPo headline, was 'Why is HuffPo running this story'? And then, why was it being reported in the MSM, and why in this way? The answers I think tell us a lot about the modern mainstream media.
Just look at the story through the eyes of the 'Good Morning America' executive producer. It has come in as a press release from the 'Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration (B.A.S.E) Institute' of Texas. Does this alone not ring alarm bells? And if it does not, is there not a humble researcher at ABC who could do a Google search on the organisation and its 'archaeologists' and find out in seconds that these people have as much credibility as a three dollar bill? And beyond that, why does Chris Cuomo, who brought America this piece of breathtaking news on morning television, not cast his mind back to those dim distant years before last week and recall that this story keeps cropping up every year or so. The story does indeed comment that another person found a different ark in a different place as recently as March, but clearly no one at ABC thought that this alone might be good reason to dump this press release in the shredder. If he had thought back even further, he might have had some sense of the once popular, and lucrative demand for fake religious relics - a demand that is still there, as witness the phony claims a year or so ago about the labelled coffin of 'James brother of Jesus'. And they might have known from their junior casual part-time researcher that these guys at BASE have a habit of searching for similar non-existent relics (the anchor of Paul's ship!).
No, they reported it straight, as if these were real archaeologists from a real research institute researching a real archaeological question, the media concerned having devoted not even a few seconds to providing context for themselves or their viewers. That context, among other things would have enabled them to say 'I knew archaeologists, Mr Bonnema, you are no archaeologist'.
There are two reasons I think. First, the MSM, certainly the television part, does no research for any story now. This is just a very obvious example, but there are no stories which are researched, it is news bulletin by press release. The videos supplied by government and government agencies are just the most sophisticated version of this. But if they will run this story they will run any story.
But, before you crank up your keyboards, the Noah nonsense has another lesson. Yes it is news by press release these days, but only press releases coming from certain sources. A press release from an atheist group denouncing 'B.A.S.E.' would probably be trashed. Press releases from Green groups, anti-war groups, socialists, real archaeologists, humanists, scientists, or even, shudder, Democrats, would all be either ignored or treated to scurrilous attack, put up against disparaging comment by Karl Rove, or energy company spokespeople, or given to a right wing ranter to rave about.
This particular case has even less chance of being subject to any kind of journalistic analysis, or being simply ignored, because it comes from a self-described Christian group. It is therefore, these days, apparently, beyond any kind of examination. If the release had been shredded or used in the toilets, denunciation of the liberal media would not be far away, and the two thirds of people who believe Noah's Ark is a real object from an historical event, and the half who thought that the Texans had found it, would be running outraged to their congressman or radio shock jock.
But because the MSM is running stories like this without analysis or context, those two thirds of people remain ignorant, and each new claim is just further evidence that the bible is an historical record. Problem is, they are also running the rest of the news like that too, and those two thirds can be put together for many other whacky claims.
So, just one more question. Why on earth did HuffPo run the story? You want the MSM to start behaving like real journalists and throwing out this rubbish? Then don't encourage them by linking to this garbage.