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Reporter of Bill Nye, Moonbat story speaks
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Clouds hang over Bill Nye's Waco lecture.
When Tim Woods attended a lecture of Bill Nye's at McClennan Community College, he could hardly have known it would become the an Internet sensation. "I’m constantly baffled by the stories that get the most hits," Woods says in a telephone conversation. You can do a story that's immensely important, and a story about a lost cat takes off.
During a lecture, Bill Nye had recited a Bible verse, Genesis 1:16, “God made two great lights - the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars," then pointed out that the moon, actually, was a reflector.
How Woods characterized the audience reaction, and others characterized his characterization, would cause blog swarm. And how others characterized the characterizatons of those characterizing his characterizations later (including yours truly) would cause the story to explode again, three years later.
In a story entitled "The Science Guy is Entertaining and Provocative in MCC Lecture," Woods said Nye surprised audiences by addressing such topics as Mars exploration, global warming and energy consumption, particularly oil and gas and "even ruffled a few religious feathers along the way."
Here is how Woods describes the events that followed in his story:
The Emmy-winning scientist angered a few audience members when he criticized literal interpretation of the biblical verse Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights - the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.” He pointed out that the sun, the “greater light,” is but one of countless stars and that the “lesser light” is the moon, which really is not a light at all, rather a reflector of light. A number of audience members left the room at that point, visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence. “We believe in a God!” exclaimed one woman as she left the room with three young children.
When the story first appeared, it took off, but it wasn't until 2007 that it really exploded on Democratic Underground and BSalert.com under the headline "Bill Nye Boo'd in Texas for Saying the Moon Reflects the Sun", generating 216,000 views at BS alone.
Woods thinks part of the reason it took off was "Waco" was on the paper's masthead, and it fed into the caricature of backwood, country bumpkins, in addition to the fact that the word "booed" was used. The city gained notoriety as the home of the Branch Davidians who actually lived nearby. "It's not just a bunch of uneducated, religious finatics. Waco has a Big 12 University, Texas State Technical College, McClellan Community College that trains 3/4ths of the health care workers in the are," Woods says, though he admits, people do take religion very seriously out there in central Texas. Baylor University is the largest Baptist University in the U.S., but Texas Baptists tend to be the most progressive and occasionally make noises about breaking off from the church over what they see as a rightward tack on issues like woman preachers, a literal interpretation of scripture and acceptance of modern science.
Even though the bulk of his story talked about how most everyone enjoyed the show, people latched onto the country bumpkin angle. Compounding the problem was that the 2007 post mentioned the story had been "removed" and people were left with BSAlert's interpretation of events. The wording of the post, in fact, was identical to a post that would surface again on ThinkAtheist in February 2009, which was latched onto by this Examiner.
The reason the link was dead was that by 2007, and certainly by 2009, it had been moved to the Waco Tribune-Herald's archives, where you have to pay to view it, and so, we were left with no way to confirm the bloggers' take.
"There was some mischaracterization of what happened," Woods says. It seemed like the story was always construed in such a way to make his hometown look like backwoods idiots. "The one that always floors me is they say, oh, he was booed. No, he wasn’t booed. I've gone back through the story, and nowhere does it say he was booed."
That one shocked us. We had read his story, yet still interpreted it as "booing". After re-reading his story, we realized we had taken the title of the original post (or, rather, repost of a post), and it had colored my reading of Woods' reporting. He says some people left -- more than one -- and his impression, and the impression of a lot of people there, was that it was over Nye's comment about the moon.
"Would you describe it as a huff?" we asked.
"No," Woods says, "More of a low murmur."
We went back and forth over how exactly to characterize they way they left, since it was not disruptive, yet noticeable, and definitely in reaction to what audience members interpreted as an attack on their religion.
Why were they offended, we asked, if the moon does reflect light from the sun? We still found it remarkable and newsworthy that not just one person, but several, could take offense at this statement of the obvious. It seems that it was just the fact that someone would say there was a contradiction, irregardless of what the contradiction was. Still, that seemed rather remarkable. Even if you say the moon reflecting light is a "light", and therefore an accurate description in the Bible, then what's the problem? It still seemed illustrative of an unthinking lashing out at an attack with no concern as to the validity of the attack. Woods didn't seem to object to this characterization.
"I imagine that anywhere you go, there are religious fundamentalists," Woods says, not just Waco.
This is true.We were not so interested in the location of the event, so much as the mindset the reaction seemed to describe. With the recent talk of secession, however, the Texas angle had again made the story ripe for flight.
Did the walk out make enough of a stir to generate a reaction from Bill Nye?
"There really wasn’t one," Woods said. "I actually went back and looked at my notes because I certainly would have written something down." The main point is that in a crowd of 600 people, a few walked out, and were obviously upset, but most were receptive.
"That’s something else that gets misconstrued," Woods says, of the woman in the story with three kids. "The woman never shouted. She didn’t even direct it at Bill Nye." She was sitting next to him, he says, and when she got up, she turned and said to him, "We believe in God."
This also shocked us. We went back to his story, and like most news reports, the writer is absent, and there's no sense of her proximity to Woods when this was said. We had pictured her at a distance. Combined with Woods' choice of "exclaimed", left us with the impression of a larger outburst than it was.
"She didn’t make some big spectacle," he says, though others noticed. His editor was there, and it was enough for him to notice, as well.
It appears that several things conspired to let the story catch fire. One was that someone had reposted an old post characterizing an old story, and there was no way to go back and compare their take with the original. With no original story online, we had relied on the date of their posting, and by the time we had attached the original text as an update, the story had taken a life of its own. Few bothered to make it past the original characterization to read the actual story, and even fewer noticed the date of the story, even after we posted an update pointing it out.
We had allowed our own interpretation to be colored by the original title, reading into the description of walkouts as "booing".
Woods piece actually does a very good job of keeping the whole incident in perspective, but most naturally read the most newsworthy aspect we had highlighted without reading the original article.
So, in the end, it is an illustrative story worthy of posting on, but not the booing crowd we made it out to be. A few religious people in a crowd of 600, storming out, visibly angry, and the lecture went on.
For Skeptics, it's not just an example of this kind of conditioning that allows people to close themselves off from any contrary evidence to their views, no matter how obvious and common sensical, but how, in the Internet age, stories take on a life of their own and are more likely to catch fire because they are cast in their most sensationalistic light.
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