Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed - Promotion

Promotion

The promotion of the film was primarily managed by Motive Marketing, the agency that promoted the blockbuster film The Passion of the Christ, with another three public relations firms also hired. The producers spent millions on the promotion, targeted primarily to religious audiences. It provided sweepstakes and rewards to churches selling the most tickets, and offered sums of up to $10,000 to schools that sent their students to watch the film. In advance of the film's release, executive director Walt Ruloff, and producers Mark Mathis and Logan Craft provided interviews to various Christian media outlets promoting the movie and emphasizing its potential to impact the evolution debate. Motive Marketing also sent a representative to meet with religious leaders and stress the film's intelligent design creationist message, inspiring many to actively promote the film within their own religious communities. Some Christian media outlets promoted the film as well.

Organizations affiliated with the Discovery Institute helped publicize the film. It used its evolutionnews.org website and blog to publish over twenty articles tying its promotion of Expelled to its effort to pass the "Academic Freedom Bill" in Florida.

Stein appeared in the cable television programs The O'Reilly Factor and Glenn Beck to talk about the film. In his interview on O'Reilly commentator Bill O'Reilly characterized intelligent design as the idea that "a deity created life", and Stein responded that "There's no doubt about it. We have lots and lots of evidence of it in the movie." The Discovery Institute quickly issued a statement that when Bill O'Reilly conflated intelligent design with creationism he was mistakenly defining it as an attempt to find a divine designer, and lamented that "Ben referred to the 'gaps' in Darwin's theory, as if those are the only issues that intelligent design theory addresses."

Stein and the producers also hosted telephone press conference facilitated by Media Matter's representative Paul Lauer in which participating journalists were required to submit their questions in advance for screening and just two questions posed by members of the press were answered. One of the journalists participating, Dan Whipple of the Colorado Confidential, contrasted Ruloff's statement that "What we're really asking for is freedom of speech, and allowing science, and students, people in applied or theoretical research to have the freedom to go where they need to go and ask the questions" with the carefully staged and stringently controlled press conference, and called it "hypocritical in its supposed defense of 'freedom of expression'."

Read more about this topic:  Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

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