As a member of the media, I have to say I’m annoyed at how the public perceives us. Instead of arguing about how the media is too left-wing or too right-wing or has too many members named Geraldo Rivera, how about you all just agree that the media, simply speaking, is dumb?

I say this as we near the one-month anniversary since the first human clone, nicknamed “Eve,” was supposedly born. Not that this was the first announcement of its kind; in 1978, David Rorvik — a former journalist — wrote a book describing how he oversaw the creation of a human clone. This generated immediate cover stories and then Rorvik was nailed for fraud when he couldn’t produce any proof. Two decades later, we have another former journalist (see a pattern here?) named Rael, whose group of Raelians is partners with Clonaid, the group claiming to have created “Eve” last month. And CNN, followed by many other major news outlets, fell for what now— and then— appears to be a multimillion dollar scam.

It’s amazing to me how newspapers were able to create such lengthy, straight news stories about “Eve,” because after going through the evidence, which consisted of Clonaid representatives refusing to produce the mother, baby, DNA or any independent verification — there really wasn’t much else to write about. And the newspapers didn’t even try to fill space with such facts as how Rael and his followers operate out of Canada from a white barn they call “UFOLand.” Or how, according to legend, Rael was abducted by an alien eerily resembling Michael Jackson on a good-nose day. This alien told Rael that all humans were the creation of aliens and that Rael should build an embassy for the aliens’ second coming. Also, Rael was commanded to recruit a group of beautiful females that he would personally have to train in the correct ways of pleasuring the aliens when they arrived. Rael accepted these duties with all the humility of a Biblical prophet and that’s how he ended up today at the forefront of the biggest biotech breakthrough of the century. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

But of course the media couldn’t report on those facts because that would make us look really, well … dumb. And besides, can anyone honestly say that they’ve never had experiences similar to Rael’s after experimenting with hallucinogenic powders? But there isn’t enough LSD in all of San Francisco (the SF Chronicle, coincidentally, was one of the biggest newspapers to give the Raelians front-page coverage) to explain how the media forgot other suspicious aspects of the Raelians.

For example, it was fewer than a couple years since one of their labs, funded by a grieving father who believed the Raelians could resurrect his child, was shut down by the feds because it was run by a graduate student who specialized in cow ovaries. Last year, the Los Angeles Times reported that in his book “Yes to Human Cloning,” Rael wrote that he was “still laughing” at how, for the $3,000 it took to start Clonaid, the media gave him $15 million worth of coverage. When asked recently by MSNBC if “Eve” was just another publicity stunt, Rael replied, “If what [we] say is true, we are winning. If it’s not true, we are winning anyway,” because in his estimate, the worldwide media coverage this time was worth about $500 million.

“As soon as I heard about the Raelians’ cloning claim, I knew it was nonsense,” said Arthur Caplan, director at the Center of Bioethics. So why did the media give the Raelians so much coverage? The week after Christmas is usually one of the slowest times for news and after doing a week of stories about interest rates and consumer spending, it’s easy to see how a story containing all the ideal elements of news — sex, aliens, exotic technology and sex with aliens — must have looked like a godsend to desperate editors. Another obvious reason is that generally, media types — because we spend so much time learning about news judgment and integrity — often have the scientific background of J-Lo, which is why it seemed plausible to journalists that the UFO-worshipping Raelians could create a healthy human clone in five out of ten tries, whereas the rest of the world’s best scientists, using the boring standard scientific method they learned from their accredited universities, needed 277 tries to produce a cloned sheep.

Unfortunately, the results of this blunder aren’t as simple as stepping off the train and thanking CNN for another fun trip through the Media Circus. By making poor judgments like this, journalists risk confusing the one group that is even lower than they are on the knowledge-o-meter: politicians.

A couple weeks ago, a bipartisan bill was introduced in Congress to blindly ban all forms of human cloning, despite the fact that not all cloning is the same. But it’s easy to see why our congresspersons might think that supporting even the most innocent form of therapeutic cloning would put them in the same barn, so to speak, with a UFO abductee who thinks the key to eternal life is to upload your brain data into a baby clone, and thus send their political careers to wherever Trent Lott now resides.

On his Web site, Rael complains angrily that “every day, thousands of forest acres are cut down only so that journalists can write their stupidities on daily newspapers … whether something important happens or not” and that the Internet (or rather, his Web site) is the source of all the information anyone might need.

I assume he said this because the alien told him that no respectable newspaper would ever waste space on him and his cronies. Well, the aliens may know all the mysteries of life, but they sure don’t understand the media business.

Dan Nguyen is a senior in computer engineering and journalism and mass communication from Iowa City.