Those Ignorant Americans

An article that appeared today in the Mail & Guardian of South Africa has some of the worst coverage of intelligent design that I've ever seen. Notice who they quote and don't quote, their use of quotation marks, etc. Here are some excerpts:

By a vote of 6 to 4, the Kansas Board of Education on Tuesday adopted new science teaching guidelines, under which evolutionary concepts must be presented to students alongside theories that life could have had divine origins....

The theory [of evolution] has been under fierce attack from proponents of the so-called theory of "intelligent design" that is largely based on the Bible's Book of Genesis....

Six years ago, the board called for purging most references to the universally accepted theory [of evolution] from the state school curricula, prompting an outcry in the scientific community -- along with a lot of ridicule....

In 2002, Ohio became the first state to require students to learn about "evidence" critical of Darwinism when it adopted a guideline insisting that school students "critically analyse aspects of evolutionary theory".

They're wrong about the scientific status of evolution, wrong about what intelligent design is, and wrong about what happened in Kansas. One of the reasons why many people in other nations have such a negative view of America is that they rely on sources like the Mail & Guardian for their information.