The really depressing thing about the Viriginia governor race

If you don't know the story, it's summarized here. Essentially, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell is taking some political flack for a thesis he wrote 20 years ago during his Masters program. The thesis contained many pieces of pretty old school right wing agenda. For example, McDoinnell wrote that working women and feminists are "detrimental" to the family and that government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators."

I won't talk much more about McDonnell -- you can find plenty of bloggers and news stories covering his thesis and the political situation. The part that gets to me is a little different than the political issue of his thesis. Rather, I can't believe CNN is calling his work a "research paper" (Eg. in the article linked above).

Lets be clear here. McDonnell's thesis was written at an unabashedly evangelical university, started by Pat Robertson to further a Christian right-wing social agenda. It was originally named Christian Broadcasting Network University (seriously), eponymous for Pat Robertson's TV network. Here's what The Washington Post has to say on the thesis:

'The thesis wasn't so much a case against government as a blueprint to change what he saw as a liberal model into one that actively promoted conservative, faith-based principles through tax policy, the public schools, welfare reform and other avenues.

He argued for covenant marriage, a legally distinct type of marriage intended to make it more difficult to obtain a divorce. He advocated character education programs in public schools to teach "traditional Judeo-Christian values" and other principles that he thought many youths were not learning in their homes. He called for less government encroachment on parental authority, for example, redefining child abuse to "exclude parental spanking." He lamented the "purging of religious influence" from public schools. And he criticized federal tax credits for child care expenditures because they encouraged women to enter the workforce.

"Further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching status-quo of nonparental primary nurture of children," he wrote.'

That's what CNN considers research? As far as I can tell, McDonnell's thesis had nothing but public policy proposals in it. There was no research into anything. Do they have any idea how this makes people perceive real research? How am I, a scientist-in-training, supposed to ever be able to tell any layperson that I do "research" too, and expect them to understand that what I do is as different from McDonnell's thesis as any two pieces of academic work can be? Is it any wonder the average non-college-educated American thinks that science and Christian science are kinda sorta pretty much the same thing?

I guess I might be hyperbolizing, but I see this kind of minor, subtle slip-up, where academia isn't even the focus of the news article, to be much more detrimental to the dissemination of academic understanding to the public than bad science writing. This is so small that the average person won't notice it enough to really think about the claim that McDonnell conducted research. Where a bad summary of a real research finding in the scientific press can cause laypeople to question the value of a field of study or a particular finding, or may misinform them about the finding itself, it will at least cause them to engage with and think about it. This kind of sloppy writing, on the other hand, both reflects and reaffirms incorrect public opinion about academia mostly without being consciously acknowledged, let alone challenged.