Maybe you've heard, maybe you haven't, but the pioneering 1980s Carl Sagan teevee series "Cosmos: A Personal Journey " is going to have a sequel: "Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey," produced by Seth McFarlane and Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan, and hosted by astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
Problem is, the series is being co-produced and will initially air on FOX, a network with an extensive history of blatant anti-science bias.
As per orders from the top of their corporate structure, FOX always presents 'science' in a sniggering fratboy 'look at the pencil neck geeks' format; they usually bring on a token 'scientist' (surprisingly both Tyson and Michio Kaku have sometimes assumed this 'punching bag' role, but I guess they pay in cold green cash) to (VERY) briefly explain the topic under discussion (almost always in a 10-second sound bite edited by a science-illiterate producer, and invariably emphasizing any apocalyptic or disastrous implications), upon which their imbecle anchor-bimbos, who uniformly sport IQs in the low-room-temperature range and who almost certainly never got a grade over a C-plus in any science class in their lives, yuck it up with all sorts of har-de-har-har snarky commentary about how all them crazy scientists are wasting our tax money again. They could have an episode including a line, "Scientists believe our sun will go nova in approximately seven billion years," and the FOX promos will say, "FLAMING DEATH COMING: SCIENTISTS PREDICT SUN WILL INCINERATE EARTH."
I am a semi-regular on several other forums which have NOTHING, repeat nothing, to do with politics. Their focus is on astronomy and even on model-building. You will notice the paragraph above makes NO REFERENCE WHATSOEVER TO POLITICS. None.
In fact, overt references to politics are banned from these boards because they usually ignite flame wars. Thus when writing the post above I was scrupulous to make sure there were no political references whatsoever, but only to the FOX anti-science agenda.
But when I posted a paragraph similar to the one above, holy crap -- they come flying out of the woodwork from all directions. It's been about 15 minutes since I made the posts and there are about 25 screeching messages in my inbox on both boards from outraged Fauxbots springing to the defense of the Fascist Foghorn.
You can guess most of them: "liberal dupe, Obama flunky, commie pinko, limp-wristed pansy, etc etc etc etc."
Curiously, few bother to dispute the substance of the post.