Tri-City Herald Publishes Creationist’s Tall Tale As News

At least the comments don’t make me hurt.  Unfortunately, I can just see an editor go “oh, that got readers!  Let’s do more of the same!”

”
I know newspapers are desperate to sell copies, but finding the craziest person in town and claiming his nutball theory is valid isn’t the way to do it.”

I wish that were true.

The article does say:

The formation itself is classified as Jurassic Navajo Sandstone, and according to conventional “old Earth” geology, was formed 200 million years ago when seasonal winds laid down the layers to create the dramatic land forms.

but that’s the extent of it.

Oregon and Washington have some really nice towns for intelligent people. Sadly towns on the east side of the Cascade mountain range tend to fall very short. The small towns tend to be hot-beds for Mennonite and Mormon groups. Tri-cities has a very large Mormon presence. Suspicious coincidence?

Nah, I was just confirming your observation.  No reason we should all have to get a headache.  I was just trying to take one for the team 🙂

I’m a Washington resident, but I’m from Western Washington, not Eastern Washington (a distinction that likely means nothing to non-Washington residents, who are likely unaware of the the Western/Eastern Washington tensions).

Anyway, I read this with a mounting sense of shame for Washington state, but I kept reminding myself that this is the Tri-Cities, so, y’know. Eastern Washington is pretty darn conservative. Basically, the state is split in a red/ blue divide, but Western Washington has denser population counts so the state as a whole swings blue in government policy, which irritates the (larger) but more sparsely populated red counties. I understand there’s even been discussion in the past of splitting the state, North Carolina/ South Carolina style, but nothing ever comes of it.

Then I went to the link and read the comments. Has anyone else ever noticed that the minority population in an area seems to be the most opinionated/ verbose? I’m not complaining in this case, because the minority population in the area appears to be intelligent scientists who are calling out the article for the bunk it is.

If you go read the comments on the KOMO news website for news stories based in Seattle, etc., you come away with this sense that everyone in Seattle is a homophobic pro-life, pro-death penalty gun-nut who wants to run down bicyclists and throw plastic bags in the Puget Sound just because it’s neat.

Reading those comments in the Tri-City Herald makes me wanna move there. Then I remember that my sister lives in Pasco, and every time I visit with her, I find myself frantic to be back in Olympia after a week or so. There’s a very subtle but pervasive difference in the atmosphere and how people interact. 

I am a newspaper reporter – have been for many years – and I’ve just got to try once again to correct a common misconception that’s spilled all over this post.

People constantly assume that “sellin’ more papers” is the motivation for every news story they don’t like. This is simply not true. I have never seen that motivation come up in a newsroom, not even once, and I’ve been in a lot of newsrooms.

Sure, newspapers want to remain profitable, and journalists want to keep their jobs. But the factors controlling that are so far removed from daily news operations as to be irrelevant.

Since papers only print so many copies each day, single-copy sales can’t actually increase by much due to any one story. Anyway, it’s ad revenue that constitutes the bulk of newspaper income – and that’s based on long-term average circulation, not a one-day spike.

The reality? This was probably a reporter with only the haziest background in science, sent to cover something about which he had no prior knowledge; and it went through editors who were similarly ignorant, were themselves creationists, or were simply too busy to read it closely: “Everything’s spelled right? OK, slap it on the page and send it.”

Le sigh.

I grew up in the Tri-Cities (both parents being Hanford employees… we all have a healthy glow about us!) and am still in eastern Washington. It’s a bitch being a liberal atheist here, to be sure. The Herald hasn’t ever exactly been much of a newspaper- and people actually complain that it has become too liberal (?!) over the years. This sadly doesn’t surprise me a hell of a lot. This is an area with a lot of conservative religious presence, a major Mormon center (migrants up this way to work at Hanford during WW2), Seventh-Day Adventists and splinter groups, Mennonites up in the farmland, and Roman Catholics from the large number of Hispanic migrants.

Weirdly enough, I still want to move home. Yakima is worse because of the crime rate. 😉 Eastern Washington has fascinating landscapes from the volcanic and glacial activity (the “scablands”) and it’s sunny 300 days of the year, with only 8-11 inches of rain. Perfect for us seasonal affective types. My oldest is now attending University of Washington at Tacoma so she at least is getting away from the pervasiveness of conservativism for a while.

I am resident of the Tri – Cities. Sadly this is par for the course for this area as far as media goes. I am a long time reader of this blog, and I don’t subscribe to the local paper for obvious reasons. There are a lot of fundies and Mormons here, but there is also a national lab and the Hanford site hosting more PhD’s per capita then anywhere in the country. (don’t quote me on that fact, but it’s a phrase I have heard often since I have lived here.) I think that most educated non religious people don’t buy the paper due to its poor coverage of things that are important to us, so the paper puts out this garbage to appease the fundies who are buying the paper.

PS:  Washington is a nice state, I’m sure.

There was a bid back when I was a kid to make a splinter state out of eastern Washington/ parts of Idaho/ eastern Oregon and call it “Lincoln”. Thank the FSM it never went anywhere, what a nightmare that state would have been!

I know a great retired atheist scientist who often writes in to the Tri-City herald with witty comebacks to their terrible journalism. I’ll keep an eye out to see if he gets published and if so, I’ll be sure to share his response to this awful article!
The Tri-Cities IS overly conservative, but I still happily call it my home. You just have to know where to look for the good 😉

HEY! I grew up there, too. Graduate of Hanford high, dad worked at battelle, mom at 100 area, brother at battelle and my older brother is still at ch2m hill. It’s funny people all think Washington is so liberal… lol… it’s like how they think the whole state is covered in trees. NOT EASTERN WA!! lol… and it’s friggin’ jesusland over there, too. Mormon presence is so large now they had to build a temple (out on gage in kennewick… i know because they assimilated my older brother). I live in western wa now, and i hate the rain… I’d move to spokane and just deal with the cranks, if i could.

Nice to find others who managed to avoid becoming part of the hyper-religious group think of the tri-cities area. It’s amazing that an area that has so many great minds packed together would also be soooooo religious. I never once spoke up about being a non-believer while I was growing up. And every friend I had there growing up still (according to their FB profile) is immersed in the god-think. Any friend I had that grew out of that also left the area.

Anyway, this article doesn’t surprise me a bit. My brother’s a geologist… and he’s also a mormon. Which means he has to subscribe to the notion that the Garden of Eden is in Minnesota. Cognitive dissonance… go figure.

Why I left Young-earth Creationismby Glenn R. Morton

But eventually, by 1994 I was through with young-earth creationISM.
Nothing that young-earth creationists had taught me about geology turned
out to be true. I took a poll of my ICR graduate friends who have worked
in the oil industry.  I asked them one question.

 “From your oil industry experience, did any fact that you were
taught at ICR, which challenged current geological thinking, turn out in
the long run to be true? ,”

That is a very simple question.  One man, Steve Robertson, who
worked for Shell grew real silent on the phone, sighed and softly said
‘No!’  A very close friend that I had hired at Arco, after hearing
the question, exclaimed, “Wait a minute.  There has to be one!” 
But he could not name one.  I can not name one.  No one else
could either.  One man I could not reach, to ask that question, had
a crisis of faith about two years after coming into the oil industry. 
I do not know what his spiritual state is now but he was in bad shape the
last time I talked to him.

When I was growing up in Kennewick, it was quite common for the teenagers to transfer to Seattle, and/or go back and forth.  In fact, in my circle of friends, people that spent any time on the west coast were considered cooler by proxy.  It isn’t too surprising that the people I respected all left for Seattle.  The hics were too busy fussing with their cowboy hats and pickup trucks.

OTOH, maybe such a state could become where all the fundie crazies could go, those that the rest of us could persuade to move there, anyway. Then they’d rapidly run their theist paradise into the ground, become an even bigger laughing stock and their insane Christian literalism would lose even more ground, socially and politically.

Totally OT here but with so many Tri-City folks on this thread we should have a get-together or something. The Yakima paper used to have an atheist group listed in the meetings section, but when I showed up at Borders I didn’t see anyone all suspiciously atheist-looking hanging around. (You know how we are and stuff.)

They just did a really brief story (showed the picture, brief mention) on KXLY (Spokane station) about this. Sigh…

Plenty of conservatives in Spokane but also lots of more liberal leaning folks. Definitely a big step up from Tri-Cities as far as that goes.

Terriffic!

The origin and disposal of more water than the Earth actually has is a good question that challenges the silly myth, but the idea about the air being thinner I don’t think works as a good de-bunker, because if somehow all that extra water were to appear and become deep enough to cover Mt. Everest, it would have pushed the atmosphere up with it. The air pressure would be slightly reduced, because having to cover a larger sphere, the air would occupy a volume of space that would be slightly greater, but maybe not enough to suffocate or freeze the occupants of the ark.  They would still be at “sea level” even if the sea were 29,029 feet higher than usual.

My hometown, too. And now you know why I don’t live in my hometown. My folks are looking to get out as soon as Dad retires from Hanford.

I keep hoping Texas will secede from the Union and do exactly what you’ve described.

Best answer Yet!!