Duane Tate at Sotto Voce keyed in on the same article I did for April Fool's. It's an editorial in the April 2005 Scientific American in which they say they're going to give things like creationism equal attention for balance. Check it out at his blog: Unscientific Unamerican.
My favorite lines are:
Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.
And:
Good journalism values balance above all. ... [I]f politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do to otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong.
The sad part is that a lot of people these days might not even recognize that last quotation as satire!
That is a good piece of work. Bob Somerby himself could have written it.
The editorial (which apparently is only in the print edition, not online) is accompanied by a graphic showing what the "new" Scientific American would look like. The feature article on it is:
A Balanced Debate: Is the Earth Flat?
Accompanied by other features:
The Myth of the Atom
Let's Just Ignore CO2
Reason, Shmeason
15 Good Points by Creationists
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