To Impose A False Notion
The Devil in Dover: An Insider’s Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-town America
by Lauri Lebo
After trial each day, I’d go back to the York Daily Record newsroom and write a story for the next day. This particular night I wrote as my lede, “One of intelligent design’s leading experts could not identify the driving force behind the concept.”
I wrote that Behe said that “intelligent design focuses exclusuvely on proposed mechanisms of how complex biological structures arose. But during cross-examination Tuesday, when plaintiffs’ attorney Eric Rothschild asked Behe to identify those mechanisms, he couldn’t. When pressed, Behe said intelligent design does not propose a step-by-step mechanism, but one can still infer intelligent cause was involved by the ‘purposeful arrangement of parts.’”
At about 11 P.M., I was gathering my things to leave the office, when Randy Parker, the managing editor, called. He wanted me to rewrite the story in order to make it appear more favorable to the pro-intelligent design side. He told me he thought my coverage had been “OK so far, but now I think we’re just piling on.”
I said that would be misrepresenting the truth. “They [the defense] must have done something you could lead with,” he said. The editors had long been concerned with my reporting on the case, fearing the newspaper would offend fundamentalist readers. They reminded me of my obligation “to be fair and balanced,” even as it became more obvious that there was nothing balanced about this debate. But until this phone call, no one had actively tried to force me to spin the story to favor a lie. Parker, who hadn’t spent one minute in the courtroom, was trying to impose a false notion of balance on my coverage. I could hear my voice, shrill, say into the phone, “No, they did nothing. Rothschild eviscerated them.”
Finally, Parker backed down. The lede stayed the same. When I left the office, I was shaking.
I thought of this notion of “fair and balanced” journalism and of how, somewhere along the line, we as journalists have gotten confused by a misguided notion of objectivity. It is our job to inform readers of the truth, not just regurgitate lies, even if it means the stories are no longer “balanced.” Every day, I watched what took place in the courtroom. And while I didn’t always get everything exactly right, this much I knew: If I went back to the newsroom and, in the interest of objectivity, pulled from my notes the best quote from the parents’ attorneys and the best quote from Dover’s attorneys and used them to present intelligent design and evolution as evenly balanced, then I’d be misleading readers.
End of excerpt.