The National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools' Bible class curriculum is taught, claims the NCBCPS, in over 400 high schools around the United States, so the controversy is not a minor one, and one would assume that some digging into the subject would have been in order. There's a good deal to praise in Oswald's and Fabel's story, but the two seem not to have looked into the question of the history contained in the NCBCPS curriculum in much, if any, depth. A simple Google search on the terms "National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools" and "American History" produces, as its 3rd and 4th hits, Talk To Action posts by myself, mentioning Chris Rodda's posts on the subject, and one of Rodda's posts, on the NCBCPS curriculum, itself. So, were Oswald and Fabel, therefore, somehow negligent ? That might be unfair - the very concept that there has been, for several decades at least, a large scale, deliberate, and well funded effort to rewrite, and falsify, American history is foreign to the vast majority of Americans and journalists. The very idea seems still to lie outside the cognitive frame of all but a few historians and activists.

Beyond the possibility that the very existence of intentionally falsified US history is simply unimagineable for Oswald and Fabel, another factor is clearly at play in "The Latest Battle in the Bible Wars" depiction of the controversy over the presentation of history in the NCBCPS curriculum; the common journalistic tendency towards constructing false equivalence.

It's an almost ubiquitous journalistic habit to portray reality, and especially in the realm of societal conflict - that is to say whenever politics are involved - through a lens of feigned "objectivity" which shows two more or less legitimate, opposing poles of opinion. So, whether it's stated overtly or simply implied in the very construction of the narrative frame, the suggestion is that truth lies somewhere in the middle. The "he said, she said" default presentation of contemporary journalism has been expertly exploited, for decades, by the Christian right. Assumptions that "truth lies in the middle" are common but they are often wildly wrong. Take two clashing poles of opinion - what if one position is built on lies or is wildly counterfactual ?

The Moon Is 50% Cheese

If one side of an alleged "controversy" asserts the Moon is made of cheese, and another side (scientists) say its made mostly of rock, does that mean, according to the best journalistic practices of our thoroughly modern, or perhaps postmodern, age that the Moon is therefore 50% Camembert and 50% of the stuff scientists say it is composed of, anorthositic rock, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, aluminum, and so on ?

If people simply make assertions without proof, even if those are contra-indicated by a vast body of scientific research built up over decades or even centuries, does this mean that such assertions are nonetheless 50% correct ? Current journalistic convention would seem to suggest so.