Wednesday, February 01, 2006

The story behind the Wedge Strategy becoming public

The Seattle Weekly has published a story on the Discovery Institute, including original scans of the "Wedge Strategy" and the story of how it was leaked to the Internet by Matt Duss and Tim Rhodes. More at Pharyngula, including the Wedge in PDF.

I found this paragraph interesting, considering how much the Discovery Institute spends on PR:
Seattle Weekly began making inquiries for this story in mid-2005, but neither Chapman nor any Discovery Institute fellow has been willing to be interviewed. A last attempt to elicit comment, e-mailed to spokesperson Rob Crowther on Jan. 4, elicited the following: "With the start of the new year all of the Fellows and staff are quite busy and their schedules are completely full. I think you'll find more than enough information on our website that you are welcome to quote from. If you want to submit questions in writing, I'd be happy to pass those along and see if anyone has time to respond, but I can't make any guarantees." A number of questions were submitted; none was answered.

2 comments:

Frank Walton said...

The discovery institute has already dealt with the "paranoia" and "conspiracy."

Lippard said...

Who is using terms like "paranoia" and "conspiracy" besides the Discovery Institute? What the Wedge Document shows is that they've had a concerted strategy to push their views into the public sphere--but they've skipped ahead of the "do the science first" provision of the Wedge Strategy and gone right into the PR aspect. The Discovery Institute is not a scientific organization, it's a religious and political one--and a rather dishonest and scientifically inept one at that (as Casey Luskin continues to demonstrate).