Science Group Seeks to Separate Fact From Fiction on TV

Hollywood has been taking its whacks recently from religious, ethnic and political critics. Lined up next, paddles in hand, are scientists and self-described skeptics.

Astronomer Carl Sagan, scientist-author Stephen Jay Gould, editors of scientific magazines and secular humanist leaders are dismayed by what they call pseudoscientific programs on television with little or no input from establishment science.

Hoping to dampen television’s enthusiasm for quasi-documentaries about UFOs, abductions by aliens, psychic phenomena and even biblical creationism, organizers of the World Skeptics Congress recently called on a Hollywood friend to lend his name as chairman of a new watchdog group.

That friend is Steve Allen, the original host of NBC’s “Tonight Show,” whose descriptive titles start with composer, pianist, comedian and author of 47 books. His old PBS series, “Meeting of Minds,” featuring debates on ethics and philosophy between actors portraying intellectual and political leaders from history, is still aired occasionally.

When the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal held the skeptics congress in Buffalo, N.Y., in June, the organizers gave Allen a lifetime achievement award “for cultivating the public appreciation of critical thinking and science.”

They then selected Allen to head the new Council for Media Integrity, a watchdog group that they said would “monitor and rebut media programs that convey unfounded claims and mislead the public about science.”

Council members include Sagan, Gould, Nobel laureate chemist Glenn Seaborg and editors of Scientific American and New Scientist, among others.

“Someone has got to speak up for science,” Allen said in a recent interview, acknowledging at his office in Van Nuys that scientists are often too busy for such efforts and that a celebrity has a better chance of having his or her views heard.

“Even in a semi-rational society, it should not be necessary to defend science,” he said. “But, my God, the world relies on science as a description of reality. How dumb can we be that we prefer dreams, legends and fairy tales as substitutes?”

The average American, he said, “knows almost nothing about astronomy, but a lot of them know quite a bit about astrology, which is not at all scientific.”

Allen describes himself as a humanist, but not a secular humanist. “I do not deny the possibility of God,” he said.

An example of the sort of programming that draws the skeptics’ anger, he said, was a documentary-style show about Noah’s Ark that treated the subject as a historical event.

“It’s a myth--an important myth--but a myth just the same,” Allen said.

In another example, scientists and skeptics objected to an NBC special this year titled “The Mysterious Origins of Man,” narrated by Charlton Heston, which presented a minister saying that fossilized human and dinosaur footprints were found together in Texas--proving the two lived at the same time, a key argument of creationists.

Missing from the program, scientists said, was their view that the “human prints” were actually erosion marks and that dinosaurs had been extinct for 65 million years before humans evolved.

An NBC spokesman, contacted by a reporter after the show aired a second time in June, said simply: “It was an entertainment program, and we have the right to run it.”

Allen said print news organizations and broadcast news programs generally maintain journalistic integrity.

“It’s the non-news portions of television that seem to open their doors to any kind of nonsense. They don’t seem to require any proof,” he said. “There has got to be some other standard than ratings.”

It is questionable whether Allen and the debunking Council for Media Integrity can succeed in changing entertainment practices where others have had only marginal impact, including Christian churches, ethnic minority groups and politicians such as Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole.

All he can do, Allen said, is speak out and write letters to entertainment executives.

“I don’t get many answers to my questions,” he said.

Most of the investigative work of the Council for Media Integrity will be handled by Joe Nickell, a former magician and detective who is now a staff member of the parent Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, based in Amherst, N.Y., which publishes Skeptical Inquirer magazine.

“I will marshal evidence for or against some claim on television,” Nickell said. He also appears as what he calls the “token skeptic” on talk shows when the topic is scientifically suspicious.

It is still undecided whether the council should seek public attention by rating TV programs on a scale ranging from “pure pseudoscience” to “responsible science” or making “stinker” awards for shows that are “an utter rip-off of the truth,” Nickell said.

“Some scientists want something catchy, but others want to appear respectable and not flippant,” Nickell said.

Allen said he favors all of the above.

“You need hard science but have to popularize the science, too--just like people popularize God, Shakespeare and a lot of other important things,” he said.