Mediawful / 9-27-10

(Preventative Strike: Here's the link to the full article in question. It is less than four hours old as of this precise moment. Here's the link to an analysis of the survey results being discussed.)

Stop The Presses. Never got a chance to say that in my newspaper days. Nowadays, of course, it'd be Stop The Upload, or Sever The Connection, but those have a decidedly less dramatic ring to them.

What are we press-stopping about? Why, beloved readers, it just so happens that American atheists and agnostics (informally known as the AAA) have outperformed Christians on a test of religious knowledge.

Boom-shakalaka!

By now, the three of you who are still reading despite my incomparable nerdiness, you guys will have skillfully predicted where I'm going with this. Coming up in fifteen seconds: violent rant on how Christians don't even know as much about their own faith as non-Christians! What a sorry spiritual state we occupy, even as we strive to be God's chosen people, blessed in every way and entrusted with the holy mission of showing the heathen the error of their ways. What a failure we are as a, nay, THE Christian nation.

That would be some serious ironic, sarcastic fun. But I'm not going there.

Instead, I'm compelled to rant about how this article sums up the sorry state of journalism in 2010.

The writer's opening paragraph (the "lede" for all you non-reporters):

"If you want to know about God, you might want to talk to an atheist. Heresy? Perhaps."

I know lame when I see it, and that's lame lame megalame lame. With a false equivalency thrown in for good measure. Come on. The survey we're getting to measured respondents' knowledge about religious facts. Not about the nature of God. There's a difference, pinhead.

And how is that heresy anyway? Maybe irony. Maybe.

And why is the "Perhaps" there? To hedge your bets? To not offend? To seem even-handed? To be extra-super lame?

Later in the same story:

"The Pew survey was not without its bright spots for the devout. Eight in 10 people surveyed knew that Mother Teresa was Catholic. Seven in 10 knew that, according to the Bible, Moses led the exodus from Egypt and that Jesus was born in Bethlehem."

It's a "bright spot" that 20 percent of believers can't remember that Mother Teresa was a Catholic nun?

Oh wait, that just what the writer was implying. That's not an actual correct interpretation of the data. That number was for the public at large, of which 82 percent correctly answered the question. And how is it good news for "the devout" that 71 percent of people know that the Bible claims Jesus was born in Bethlehem? What makes that good news? (Let's leave aside the fun fact that Jesus, according to most biblical scholars, was born in Nazareth. Had to mention that. Sorry.)

The article's stupid conclusion:

"For comparison purposes, the survey also asked some questions about general knowledge, which yielded the scariest finding: 4% of Americans believe that Stephen King, not Herman Melville, wrote "Moby Dick."

So the "scariest finding" of all is the comforting fact that 96 percent of the population correctly knows that Stephen King did not write "Moby Dick."

Oh good. Now I can sleep at night. (Must confess, for a while there, I was worried that maybe 4 percent of Americans were trying to check out Herman Melville's "It" from the public library.)

I feel more knowledgeable, yet dumber, for having read that story. Stop hurting my brain, mass media outlets!