This case illustrated the problem of [[fake news]], as the [[atheist]], bigoted reporter [[H.L. Mencken]] distorted what happened at the trial and misled the world about it. A review of the transcript reveals that [[William Jennings Bryan]] got the better of [[Clarence Darrow]], and yet Mencken reported the opposite in an extreme manner. Indeed, Darrow himself gave up and asked the jury to find his client John Scopes guilty, so that the cowardly Darrow could renege on his promise to take the witness stand himself in exchange for cross-examining Bryan.
Uncommondescent.com declared: "It is a little known fact that [[William Jennings Bryan]] agreed to be interrogated by [[Clarence Darrow]] only if Bryan could in turn interrogate Darrow views of [[evolution]]. Darrow agreed, but then right after interrogating Bryan [, [Darrow] directed the judge to find Scopes guilty, thereby closing the evidence and thus preventing Bryan from interrogating Darrow."<ref>http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/the-vise-strategy-squeezing-the-truth-out-of-darwinists/</ref> Generally speaking, [[Atheism and Debate|leading evolutionists generally no longer debate creation scientists]] as the evolutionists tend to lose the debates.<ref>https://www.icr.org/article/811/</ref>
The trial gained notoriety after it was dramatized in a grossly false manner for both stage (1955) and screen (1960), bizarrely entitled ''[[Inherit the Wind]]''. Both of these false dramatizations were promoted to try to smear [[Christianity]].<ref>"'Inherit the Wind' relentlessly distorts what happened in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925."[http://www.beliefnet.com/story/2/story_226_1.html]</ref><ref>As recently as April 17, 2007, the ''Village Voice'' endorsed a new Broadway rendition of ''Inherit the Wind'' as "a dramatization of the 1925 [Scopes] trial."[http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0716,feingold,76394,11.html]</ref> In the real trial Bryan made a fool of Darrow, not vice-versa, as demonstrated by the publicly available transcript that includes notations of laughter by the gallery, as quoted below.<ref>https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111scopes.html</ref>