On Monday’s Charlie Rose show, the host couldn’t get through a interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson without asking about climate change and what to do about all those “scientific deniers?” Rose: “Do we have too many scientific deniers in our country or do we give too much prominence to those who want to look the other way on science?”
On Sunday, 60 Minutes devoted 12 minutes towards fawning over scientist/celebrity Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yet, the Charlie Rose-hosted segment never mentioned his repeated fake quotes, including a slam against George W. Bush that Tyson repeated for years. Instead, Rose fawned that the TV personality has followed “Carl Sagan as the country's most captivating scientific communicator.”
When you’re coming up with New Year’s resolutions just in time for the start of 2015, you may want to exclude advice from certain people the news media turn to as experts, but who fail to live up to the hype. Despite being continually cited by the media, these five scientists, celebrities and journalist-wannabes have all been criticized, debunked or refuted in the past year.
Citing the 45th anniversary last week of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon, Bill Maher on Friday night sneered: “I always hear that the moon landing was the last great thing that America did. I think the last great thing America did was giving health care to 30 million people.”
That prompted a roar of applause from the Los Angeles audience for Maher’s July 25 Real Time show on HBO, and after it died down a bit, Maher insisted: “I find that to be so much more of a significant achievement than landing on the moon.”
According to an article last Sunday in the online magazine Salon, there's a new intellectual dynamic duo in town: French economist Thomas Piketty and American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who've become media superstars almost simultaneously over the past few months thanks to Piketty's book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" and Tyson's TV series "Cosmos."
Writer Paul Rosenberg places Piketty and Tyson at the forefront of an evidence-driven pushback against faith-based right-wing doctrine. He lauds each for offering "a big-picture story that helps us collectively make sense of our lives. In Piketty's case, this comes from his insight that capitalism does not just naturally evolve to a state of broader general prosperity." For Tyson, it's his "almost quasi-religious" quest for knowledge about the universe - a quest which evokes "terror" in devoutly anti-science conservatives.
Newly minted NBC late night host Seth Meyers took a cheap shot at members of Congress on the Friday March 14th edition of “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”
During an interview with “Cosmos” presenter Neil deGrasse Tyson, Meyers laughed at his guest who argued that those that “don’t know science in the 21st century” should “just move back to the cave because that’s where we are going to leave you as we move forward.” [See video below.]