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June 27, 2006
Beware of the Language of News Releases; But Have a Great Fourth of July Weekend in Manhattan
Earlier this month I told of a claim by the Lord's Witnesses that there was an 85% probability of a nuclear attract on Manhattan on June 9 or 10. Yesterday they issued a news release with the following headline,
Bible Scholars Widen the Window to 5 days for a Nuclear Terrorist Attack on the United Nations between June 29 and July 4
Well they not only widened the window, they also moved it into the future. If they hadn't done that some cynical skeptics might think they were wrong in their first prediction!
However, this post is not only to make fun of the numerologists de jour. It is also to make a serious point about news releases. Anyone can issue one. I issued hundreds in my professional career. PRWeb is a news release distribution service and a fairly good one. But you must write the release; they don't. And because many journalists and editors are lazy, it's best to write your release so that if it gets published just the way you wrote it you will be very happy with the results. And that is exactly what the Lord's Witnesses did. Look at some of the language in their release,
The Lords’ Witnesses Bible Scholars have discovered a symbolic bible code, which tells the reader how many symbolic meanings each bible account has and which helps determine what these meanings are. This is where their confidence in their biblical forecasting comes from.
Notice the use of the words "Bible Scholars." If you were to read this in a newspaper or your favorite weekly rag, you would think that it was the journalist or editor calling these numerologists Bible scholars. Rather, they are calling themselves Bible Scholars. Also, notice the use of the third person. If an editor publishes this as written, it will look to many people that his or her paper is giving it's endorsement to this nonsense. It may even look like they researched it themselves rather than simply publishing the contents of a news release. This use of language in news releases is something that every reader of every article needs to be aware of and discount. If you read that someone is called an authority, ask, "On whose authority are they an authority?" Anytime you see the third person pronoun or any language that is in the third person, ask, "Where did that language come from?"
Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars
Update: I didn't see Chris Heard's post on this before I put mine up. Go take a look.
Posted by Duane Smith at June 27, 2006 2:49 PM | Read more on Religion |
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Comments
Yeah, and you didn't admit I was right about the dilettante's either.... Shame on ya!
;-)
Posted by: Jim at June 28, 2006 1:17 PM
Jim,
I have a problem condemning dilettantes in general. I'm not even exactly sure what it means. And reading your frequent posts on the subject hasn't helped me all that much. By one reasonable definition, I am a dilettante. The problem with the Lord's Witnesses is not that they are dilettantes but that they are erroneously exploiting an ancient text for their own purposes. But they are far from alone in that. Many that I would not call dilettantes, using the same definition that might make me a dilettante, do the same. The problem is not that they are dilettantes. The problem is that they are so wrong that it isn't even worth debunking them. There is simple nothing to learn from their nonsense.
This particular bunch has "successfully" combined the worse of isogesis with incredibly bad math. But A. Dean Forbes and Frances Andersen, for example, have combined exegesis (or at least good word studies) with great math and have produced some extremely interesting and instructive results. Now I'm not claiming that Forbes and Andersen are dilettantes. I am claiming that they use a nonstandard methodology to product instructive results while the Lord's Witnesses use nonstandard methodology to produce nonsense.
Posted by: Duane at June 28, 2006 1:57 PM
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