Tag Archives: State-Run Media

Washington Post blogger is an advisor for the Obama administration

Story from Big Journalism. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Ron Brynaert has a story over at his The Raw Story blog that reveals yet another denizen of the Old Media trying to be both a “journalist” and an operative of Barack Obama’s administration. She is Patricia McGinnis, an unpaid advisor at the White House and also one of the contributors to the Post’s “On Leadership” blog.

Once again we see the Old Media working hand-in-hand with the Obama administration and putting the lie to the idea of the “independent journalist” in traditional media outlets, this time with the Washington Post. Even worse than this collusion, though, is the fact that the Post somehow forgot to inform its readers of this little detail.

[…]While the position is unpaid, her work for Obama certainly would seem to be a pertinent fact that readers might want to know in order to assess the veracity of her work in the pages of the newspaper. Mysteriously, though, her work with Obama is not mentioned in her official bio on the Washington Post’s website.

[…]Just last month the Post’s supposed conservative blogger, Dave Weigel, had to quit when it was revealed his personal politics were extremely leftist, although he had presented himself as a conservative to both the readers and the editorial board of the paper.

That’s why newspapers are dying – they can’t be relied on to be objective. It’s just propaganda. If you don’t have two people on opposite sides talking, then it’s not objective.

How PBS uses your tax dollars to distort the evidence for evolution

Evolutionists believe that the embryos of different mammals look similar in the earliest stages of development because the mammals share a common ancestor. And they believe that as the embryos develop, they begin to look less similar. This theory was invented by Ernst Haeckel, who believed that”ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”.

With that mind, consider this post by embryologist Jonathan Wells at Evolution News, in which he describes PBS’s latest effort to use taxpayer dollars to push evolution on children, without any presentation of opposing views.

Excerpt:

On the website for its December 29 special, PBS offers an interactive “Guess the Embryo” exercise featuring four different vertebrate embryos: an 8 day-old mouse, a 5 day-old quail, a 17 day-old turtle, and a 40 day-old bat. The purpose of the exercise is to convince viewers that “embryos of different species can appear startlingly similar to one another.” A discerning viewer, however, will notice that the turtle embryo already has a rudimentary shell on its back—thus distinguishing it clearly from the others. A discerning viewer might also notice that the bat embryo bears little resemblance to the mouse embryo, even though both are mammals. What viewers may not know—and PBS does not tell them—is that the interactive exercise shows embryos midway through development. The earliest stages are systematically omitted. Perhaps this is because in their earliest stages vertebrate embryos are striking different from each other. They follow a pattern that embryologists call the “developmental hourglass”—wide at the top, narrow in the middle, and wide at the bottom. In other words, vertebrate embryos start out very different from each other, become superficially similar midway through development, then diverge again as they mature. Like Darwin’s German disciple Ernst Haeckel, PBS distorts vertebrate development to make it seem to provide evidence for Darwin’s theory.

As Wells notes, the embryological evidence actually shows that mammal embryos are different in the earliest stages, and similar in the middle stages of development. So embryological development Darwinian fundamentalist Ernst Haeckel’s embryo drawings were discredited as a fraud in the 19th century. The drawings also showed intermediate stages of embryo development – not the earliest stages.

Wells’ Ph.D in Biology is from the University of California at Berkeley. His area of specialization is embryology, in which he has conducted post-doctoral research.