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Deliberate mendacity

Deliberate mendacity

Last updated on: February 9, 2006 at 5:46 pm by Fred Clark

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Deliberate mendacity 2006-02-09T17:46:56-05:00 Fred Clark

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Andrew C. Revkin of The New York Times wrote last weekend about political pressure and threats directed against NASA scientists by political appointees.

"NASA Chief Backs Agency Openness," Revkin reported, noting that NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin had been forced to take sides, writing in an e-mail to everyone in the agency, "It is not the job of public-affairs officers to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA's technical staff."

The article singled out one public-affairs officer, George Deutsch, for his particularly aggressive attempts to "alter, filter and adjust" the materials produced by NASA.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."

It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA."

Deutsch seems like the archetypal patronage hack. The 24-year-old, just out of college, seemed to have no qualifications for the job other than his fierce, loyal partisanship, his willingness to be simultaneously a sanctimonious moralizer and a lying fraud.

Based on Deutsch's own resume, Revkin reported that Deutsch was "a 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M." That proved to be the young hack's downfall. In addition to an avalanche of Aggie jokes from TBogg, it also caught the attention of officials at Texas A&M, who noted that Deutsch attended the school, but never actually graduated.

So on Tuesday, the hack was forced to resign in disgrace.

Hmm, proponents of "intelligent design" getting slapped down for being liars … where have I heard that before? Ah, that's right, in U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III's ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover (.pdf here)

Buckingham, Bonsell, and other defense witnesses denied the reports in the news media and contradicted the great weight of the evidence about what transpired at the June 2004 Board meetings, the record reflects that these witnesses either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions, and are accordingly not credible on these points. …

Bonsell and Buckingham lied at their January 3, 2005 depositions about their knowledge of the source of the donation for Pandas, which likely contributed to Plaintiffs’ election not to seek a temporary restraining order at that time based upon a conflicting and incomplete factual record. This mendacity was a clear and deliberate attempt to hide the source of the donations by the Board President and the Chair of the Curriculum Committee to further ensure that Dover students received a creationist alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution. We are accordingly presented with further compelling evidence that Bonsell and Buckingham sought to conceal the blatantly religious purpose behind the ID Policy. …

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

After the jump: How the AP Stylebook fits into the NASA affair.

In its public materials, NASA seems to follow AP style. Good for them. The vast majority of printed material read by Americans follows this style, which makes it more familiar and accessible to members of the general public than, say, whatever style is preferred in the professional journals of astronomers and astrophysicists.

But NASA should also feel free to adapt this style for its own use, and not to act beholden to it as though they were a bunch of wire stringers and not the agency that put men on the moon. And they shouldn't, as they did in this instance, try to use style concerns as cover for politicizing NASA materials. From Revkin:

The memo also noted that The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual specified the phrasing "Big Bang theory." Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch's boss, said in an interview yesterday that for that reason, it should be used in all NASA documents.

Two things about this, the substantive point first, then the editorial one.

1. Deutsch clearly intended to append the word "theory" after every mention of the Big Bang to place this "theory" on equal footing with what he saw as its only, and superior, alternative: creationism. That distorts the reasoning and the substance of the AP Stylebook's entry, which reads:

big-bang theory The theory that the universe began with the explosion of a superdense primeval atom and has been expanding ever since. The oscillating theory, another hypothesis, maintains that expansion eventually will stop, followed by contraction to a superdense atom, followed by another big bang. The steady-state theory, an alternative hypothesis, maintains that the universe always has existed and that matter constantly is being created to replace matter that is constantly being destroyed.

2. New York Times style differs from AP style on many points, including this one. Thus for the Times: "Big Bang theory." And thus for the AP (following, as always unless otherwise noted, Webster's New World): "big-bang theory."

The Times copy desk, perversely, took a sentence intended to cite, in quotation marks, the precise specifications of AP style and adapted all of that sentence to conform to NYT style. This is nonsensical. It's like taking the sentence "'Gracias' is Spanish for 'thank you'" and then, out of regard for your English-speaking readers, translating all of it into English to read "'Thank you' is Spanish for 'thank you.'"

(Incidentally, I've been a paid enforcer of AP style for many years, and I generally follow it here. But it's my blog and, unlike at work, I get to deviate from the AP bible when I think they've got it wrong. This is one of those cases. Both AP and Webster's insist on lowercase "big bang." It seems to me this is a proper noun and, therefore, requires capitalization: Big Bang.)

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