Last week I went to a talk at the Centre for Inquiry by Wodek Szemberg, one of the producers of TVO's The Agenda. The topic was Why So Few Atheists in the Media?. It was a horrible talk. Wodek Szemberg spend most of his alloted time criticizing atheists and proclaiming that facts and evidence are not important on television shows. Szemberg is an atheist and he claims that most producers, writes, directors, etc. are atheists. They don't need to hear the atheist point of view on television because they are already familiar with it.
The host of The Agenda is Steve Paikin. Paikin is not an atheist. He has made this very clear on numerous shows where his bias against non-believers is patently obvious. He is one of those people who are overly respectful of believers no matter how silly their arguments.
Last year The Agenda ran a series on religion that was, to say the least, quite embarrassing. Near the end of the series the producers were pressured to bring on some atheists for balance. When I asked Wodek Szemberg about this he avoided the topic—it didn't fit into his theme that atheists have nothing to say.
Shortly after that, on May 10, 2007, the producers of the show broadcast an interview with Richard Dawkins [Richard Dawkins: Can We Live by Reason Alone?]. (The producer was Sandra Gionas, not Wodek Szemberg.) Videos of the show have just now been posted on YouTube ...
Part 1, Part 2, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5
If you listen to the opening remarks on the first episode you will hear Steve Paikin admitting that they have Richard Dawkins on the show in response to viewers who requested it. This is a direct refutation of what Wodek Szemberg was telling us last Friday night when he tried to make us believe that nobody wants to hear atheists on television.
Here's part 4 where Steve Paikin tries to argue that religion deserves much more respect and deference than Dawkins is willing to grant.
[Hat Tip: RichardDawkins.net]
7 comments :
Thanks, Larry.
It's always a pleasure to listen to Richard Dawkins.
Well, I've always gotten the impression that facts and evidence aren't important on television. So I'd have to agree with Szemberg there.
Richard Nixon (I know, not exactly a reputable quote-source) once said "Television is to news what bumper stickers are to philosophy."
Paikin is dumb, but Dawkins needs to relax.
Dawkins is not defending science, he is attacking religion. Believe it or not, attacking religion is not "doing science".
A mucch better dialogue would have been one in which dawkins confronted religious people on the account of creatonism and other fabricated conflicts with science. In that case, it is religion that is going out of it way to attck science, not the other way round, as dawkins seems to think is the "good thing". He's dumb, too.
In fact, Dawkins has't done a bit of good, hard working empirical research in a long time, if he ever did. This one went strait to the podium.
Agreed. I thought the interview went pretty well for Dawkins, actually, considering how painfully obvious it was that Paikin was trying to bait him into a straw man position.
Then he had the gall to say something along the lines of, 'He always does that', concerning Dawkins' defenses. Well yeah, critics tend to shove straw men down his throat all the time, it certainly isn't his fault!
Dawkins is not defending science, he is attacking religion.
He has books where he does science, and he has books where he does atheism. An audience should be able to separate the two.
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