[Fwd: CSICOP News/CMI]

[planetario@...>]

Os transmito este texto, que creo es de interes. Se trata de un
comunicado del "Council for Media Integrity" del CSICOP.
j.a.


SkeptInq en aol.com wrote:
> 
>  Council for Media Integrity Blasts Networks for Distorted Treatments of
> Science
> 
>  The opening salvos in the new Council for Media Integrity’s campaign to
> improve the treatment of science in television entertainment programming were
> fired in Los Angeles—the heart of the TV and movie entertainment industry.
>         The Council, established last June by the Committee for the Scientific
> Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), held its first meeting
> and first news conference January 9 at the Los Angeles Airport Hilton Hotel.
> The Council was formed to closely monitor and quickly respond to distorted
> treatments of science and uncritical presentations of paranormal and
> fringe-science claims in the media.
>         The Council attacked the major television networks for running two or three
> pseudoscientific specials almost every month. “Recently there have been
> programs on prophecies, astrology, psychic powers, creationism, Noah’s Ark,
> angels, and alien abductions,” said the Council. All of them posed, in some
> way, as being based on scientific fact.
>         The Council also criticized the many talk shows devoted to the paranormal
> in which claims in favor of the paranormal are given a platform but the
> scientific viewpoint is rarely allowed.
>         The Council’s two co-chairs, entertainer and author Steve Allen and Nobel
> laureate nuclear chemist Glenn T. Seaborg, called for the television industry
> to exercise greater responsibility toward science and truth.
>         Allen emphasized that the Council’s concerns are not with entertainment
> programs that honestly present themselves as fictional dramas. “We are
> talking about shows that are presented as if they are true, as reality,” said
> Allen, creator and host of the original Tonight Show, producer of the
> award-winning Meeting of Minds television series, and author of nearly fifty
> books, including “Dumbth”: And 81 Ways to Make Americans Smarter (Prometheus
> 1991). Allen has been a long-time advocate of critical thinking.
>         He and other speakers emphasized that series like Star Trek and The
> Twilight Zone never crossed that line and are not of concern. But a recent
> disturbing trend is “reality-based” TV programming in which fictional dramas
> or pseudodocumentaries claim or at least imply that they are based on truth
> and scientific fact.
>         “I call them damn lies,” said Allen. “How,” he said, referring to their
> producers, “do you approve of irresponsibility and lies?”
>         Seaborg, discover or co-discoverer of eleven elements including plutonium,
> former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and current associate
> director at large of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, pointed to
> the discouraging state of scientific literacy in American society.
>         “I have been interested in the general problem of scientific literacy since
> just before Sputnik,” said Seaborg. “So I have been an advocate of scientific
> literacy for nearly forty years.” He was a leader behind the famous study “A
> Nation at Risk” that identified a need for renovation of pre-college science
> education to advance scientific literacy.
>         “We have a problem with regard to the amount of pseudoscience facing us,”
> Seaborg said. “One solution is increasing the scientific literacy of the
> general public.” Unfortunately, he said, too much television programming has
> the opposite effect.
>         CSICOP founder and chairman Paul Kurtz said the media have now virtually
> replaced the schools, colleges, and universities as the main source of
> information for the general public.
>         “The irresponsibility of some of the media in the area of science and the
> paranormal is a worldwide problem. But it especially applies to the United
> States, where the media have been distorting science, and in particular
> presenting pseudoscience as genuine science. Indeed, we are appalled by the
> number of ‘documentaries’ that are really entertainment programs presenting
> fringe science as real science.
>         “We believe that the media have presented a distorted view of science,”
> Kurtz said, and that they have a responsibility to provide a more balanced
> view of what is real science and what is pseudoscience.
>         “We are asking only for some balance. We are asking TV not to dramatize
> pseudoscience as real science.
>         “We are not, of course, asking that TV producers not run these shows or
> make a profit,” Kurtz added. “We surely do not wish to censor the media. We
> only ask that they provide some balance and some appreciation of the
> scientific approach. The Council will monitor such programs and attempt to
> persuade producers, directors, writers, and the general public to leave room
> for the appreciation of scientific methods of inquiry.”
>         Kurtz, recovering at the time from surgery, spoke to the news conference
> via videotape. Barry Karr, CSICOP’s executive director, hosted.
>         Council member Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science
> Education in Berkeley, California, said the concern is that science be
> presented honestly. “We offer to provide our help, our expertise to help you
> do a better job,” she said. “We would like to encourage you to consider that
> science, in and of itself, is exciting, creative, and wonderful.
>         “You don’t have to present the crackpot stuff to be interesting.”
>         CSICOP staff member Tom Flynn lamented the increasing blurring of
> entertainment and fact-based programming. He showed excerpts from NBC’s
> notorious 1996 pseudoscientific, documentary-style “Mysterious Origins of
> Man,” which presented, as Flynn put it, “the utterly baseless idea that
> dinosaurs and man lived at the same time.”
>         “This program did probably more than any other to reinforce the idea that
> dinosaurs and man co-existed.”
>         Scott, a physical anthropologist, agreed that much of what goes on in
> school is absolutely swamped by television. The day after the NBC program
> aired, she said, science teachers throughout the United States were deluged
> with questions from their students about dinosaur-human coexistence. She said
> this single program set back science education on this topic by decades.
> 
>                                                 —Kendrick Frazier, Editor, Skeptical Inquirer

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