I was given the opportunity last week to house-sit for a couple who lives in a huge top-floor loft in SoHo, so I extended an invitation for lunch inside the grand palatial estate (at least it seems that way to someone like me who lives in a small Hell’s Kitchen studio between 10^th and 11th) to a girlfriend of mine.

We were chatting away when she noticed a really old Sunday New York Times issue sitting on the bottom shelf of the television carousel in the living room. When I crouched down to examine it, the date said Aug. 29—the exact same date we were there having lunch! My friend said, “Man, that’s spooky!”

The year of the paper was 1982, the same year I graduated from high school. While I certainly didn’t want to tamper with the fragile, severely yellowed newspaper, I was so curious to see its contents I ended up reading the whole thing that night as I lounged on my friends’ king-size bed in their huge bedroom

One of the stories in the A-section was about a new Gallup poll that revealed 44 percent of respondents, a quarter of whom were college graduates, said they accepted the statement, “God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.”

The poll was based on personal interviews with 1,518 adults in more than 300 areas of the United States. Only 9% were said to have agreed with the statement: “Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. God had no part in this process.”

What struck me immediately in reading the relatively short piece, written by staffer Richard Severo, was how unbelievably biased it was. I just knew I had to copy it down for others to see for themselves.

Below is the copy verbatim, and let me emphasize first that this represents the whole story beyond the pure statistics given from the Gallup Poll. Let me also emphasize that one of the very first things you learn in Journalism school is that a news article should contain comments from both sides of an issue.

Okay, judge for yourself and then try and tell me the New York Times doesn’t have a long track record of pure liberal bias:

Bishop John S. Spong, the Episcopal Bishop of Newark, said he did not know of a single reputable biblical scholar who would say that God created man in the last 10,000 years, “since there is enormous evidence to the contrary.” He called the poll’s findings a “sorry reflection” on academic achievement in this country.

However, he said that quite possibly, the numbers of Americans holding this view suggested that modern people could not cope with the enormous amount of change that had occurred in their lifetimes. As a result, they “tend to retreat into yesterday’s security systems,” he said. He said that such fears about the future had thus strengthened the simple answers offered by what he called “the right-wing reactionary people” in organized religion.

Dr. Ashley Montagu, an anthropologist at Princeton University, said he was not surprised at the high number of Americans espousing the creationist view, including those with college training. He said Henry Noble McCracken, the late president of Vassar College, “once observed that college has ruined many a good truck driver.”

Bishop Kenneth Hicks of the United Methodist Church in Arkansas said it seemed “almost incredible” to him that 44 percent of those questioned believed that creation occurred in the last 10,000 years. Bishop Hicks, who opposed recent efforts to introduce the teaching of creationism in Arkansas public schools, said the Gallup findings suggested that some religious organizations had done a poor job in teaching the meaning of Scripture.

Another Methodist official, the Rev. Jeanne Audrey Powers, who is on the staff of the Commission on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns, called the phrasing of the questions offensive because they referred not to the creation of humankind or of men and women, but to the “creation of man” only.

(Editor’s Note: If you remember, I recently wrote about how Dr. Edward Blick, an emeritus professor of aerodynamics, nuclear engineering and geological engineering at the University of Oklahoma, who also worked on Project Mercury at NASA, as well as the F4 fighter, firmly rejects both the possibility of an “old Earth” and “processes of evolution” occurring in plant and animal life. To read, click on “Back Issues” and scroll down to the article, “Jesus Juice, Daddy-O/MEDIAONE and Monkey Business,” dated July 21, 2006.)