Science Journals Delivering “Political Science”

Townhall.com ^ | Feb. 23, 2006 | Michael Fumento

[DeweyCA]

Just more evidence of PC science. People need to realize that "scientists" are not always purely objective people searching for truth. No often science is being manipulated to achieve political ends (usually liberal). These scientists are often liberal profs who must gain the "correct" results in order to get published, and in order to be accepted by their liberal colleagues.

[DeweyCA]

No often science is being manipulated to achieve political ends (usually liberal).

Too often science is being manipulated to achieve political ends (usually liberal).

That's better.

[John Jorsett]

It has now prompted much soul-searching in media land. “How could we have been fooled?” reporters are asking themselves in print.

Well, just maybe:

[Fido969]

JAMA has become useless.

[Constitutionalist Conservative]

BTTT

[raj bhatia]

"Bottom line: First, there needs to be an outside body of peer-reviewers not picked by the journals themselves. Second, the media need to stop treating medical and science journals as somehow sacrosanct. Like seemingly everything in today’s world, they’ve gone political."

And where will the "outside body of peer-reviewers" come from? The exact same place Science/Nature chooses them from. Experts in their fields with years of research experience. Any suggestion that Science cherry picks reviewers to suit some agenda is simply poppycock--ask anyone who has submitted a paper to these journals. The quality of papers more than anything testify to this.

The media treats these Journals as sacrosanct because every researcher worth his salt dreams of publishing here. Literally every significant advance over the last century has found its outlet in Science/Nature.They have built decades of credibility publishing the finest science there is--right from Maxwell's publication of his equations to Nanotubes today.

The article is hatchet job by a pathetic kook.

[G Larry]

It's been going on for more than 35 years!
Why is this news?

[untenured]

Why Most Published Research Writings are False.

[TimeLord]

"Discover" is a science magazine aimed more @ the layman. I subscribed for years, & devoured every issue, until liberal propaganda began trickling in. Eventually I stopped subscribing. Same w/ "National Geographic."

[the_Watchman]

Last May, a Korean report in Science magazine prompted headlines around the world by declaring it had made tremendous advances in the heretofore disappointing field of embryonic stem cell (ES cell) research. It has now prompted much soul-searching in media land. “How could we have been fooled?” reporters are asking themselves in print.

This lead paragraph certainly isn't plain to me. Is it missing a word or sentence? Are we to have prior knowledge that the Korean report turned out to be fraudulent? Were they fooled by not realizing that prior results had been "disappointing"?

[GreenFreeper]

While scientific fraud certainly happens, I happen think it is pretty rare. Perhaps I'm just a foolish optimist though.

[Carry_Okie]

While scientific fraud certainly happens, I happen think it is pretty rare. Perhaps I'm just a foolish optimist though.

It's way too common. I've seen a credible scientist outwardly threatened with never getting another peer review if he didn't change his findings so that the group could keep the money coming. He caved.

There was over a billion in funding involved, not to mention a green stranglehold on tens of millions of acres of land that the bureaucrats are condemning to an eventual catastrophe. You're way too optimistic.

[Faraday]

The article is hatchet job by a pathetic kook.

Well you've got the ad hominem method mastered. Now, do you have anything of substance to say about the content of the article?

[Faraday]

From the TownHall web site:

About Michael Fumento:

Michael Fumento is an author, journalist, and attorney specializing in science and health issues. He is a regular contributor to Townhall.com, and a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He received his undergraduate degree while serving in the Army, where he achieved the rank of sergeant. In 1985 he was graduated from the University of Illinois College of Law.

He has been a legal writer for the Washington Times, editorial writer for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and was the first "National Issues" reporter for Investor's Business Daily. In 2005 he reported from Iraq as an embed with the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force in Fallujah.

Mr. Fumento was the 1994 Warren T. Brookes Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., a fellow with Consumer Alert in Washington, D.C., and a science correspondent for Reason magazine.

Mr. Fumento was a nominee for the prestigious National Magazine Award. His articles have appeared around the world, including Readers' Digest, The Atlantic Monthly, Forbes, The New Republic, USA Weekend, The Washington Monthly, Reason, The Weekly Standard, National Review, Policy Review, The Bulletin (Australia), BioScience News & Advocate (New Zealand), and The American Spectator. He's published in such newspapers as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, The Sunday Times of London, The Sunday Telegraph of London, the Jerusalem Post, the Apple Daily (Hong Kong), the Los Angeles Times, Investor's Business Daily, Washington Times, and the Chicago Tribune.

His television appearances include Nightline; ABC World News; ABC News 20/20; numerous programs on CBS; NBC; CNN; and Fox; PBS; MacNeil-Lehrer; CNBC; the BBC; the Canadian Broadcasting Network; C-SPAN; the Christian Broadcasting Network; Donahue; This Week with David Brinkley, ESPN, and many others.

Mr. Fumento has lectured on science and health issues throughout the nation and the world, including Great Britain, France, the Czech Republic, Greece, Austria, China, and South America. He has authored five books:

The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS
Science Under Siege
Polluted Science
The Fat of the Land
BioEvolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World

Michael Fumento lives in Arlington, Virginia with his wife and two cats.

Yup. A real pathetic kook.

[MikeHu]

"Bottom line: First, there needs to be an outside body of peer-reviewers not picked by the journals themselves. Second, the media need to stop treating medical and science journals as somehow sacrosanct. Like seemingly everything in today’s world, they’ve gone political. "

Now there is -- the Internet, which is the most-demanding of peer-reviews not cherry-picked and limited to only those predisposed to see things the way they do -- assuming the same premises which is usually the flaw of why they arrive at the wrong conclusions together. Job number one has to be questioning the assumptions and premises because once they are invalid, logic cannot override a false conclusion -- but will confer legitimacy.

It's happening not only in science but all the realms of reporting -- how it is revealed that the reporting is deficient and there is no "objective," godlike viewpoint because of their journalism or mass communications training. The difference is that nobody else goes around claiming "objectivity," but these journalists -- and once they start without their presumption about these things, there's a chance that they can realize their own limitations in the understanding.

That is the weakness -- the presumption (overestimation) of one's understanding which journalists are trained to conceal. The real contribution to science and understanding is learning those inflection points at which the presumed known is really the great unknown -- and then entire worlds of inquiry open up. But if one reports on the presumed known as though they were absolute certainties, that precludes further inquiry and thought on the matter -- and that's the fatal flaws in the understanding that when finally re-examined, produce breakthroughs.

That's the problem of academic writing -- that it seeks to exclude the audience rather than inviting the largest audience possible. In this way, academics have cut themselves off from the general, larger audience -- and so their pronouncements are irrelevant and unread. The AP style is becoming similarly unreadable because of the more engaging style of communications manifested by Internet writing that observes no protocols and thus are free to question everything. Internet writing subsumes all others; that is the march of evolution -- in science and understanding. It doesn't just present another alternative to add to all the clutter -- it replaces all the other with a better, more useful language -- that is also the thought process.

[GreenFreeper]

It's way too common.

Well any at all is way too common for my liking. All I am saying is that I have been a part of, or collaborated on, quite a few papers and I have never seen or even suspected any dishonesty. That said, the vast majority of this didn't deal with big money grants (primarily in academia and internal reports on apolitical topics). More the type of research people do because they have genuine concern/interest rather than some political or monetary ambition.

[adorno]

Too often science is being manipulated to achieve political ends (usually liberal).

That's better.

Exactly what I was thinking!

Why didn't the author write what you did? Was he being politically correct or trying not to seem too harsh with the "Science" journals and writers? The author of this article needed to go straight out and tell it like it is.

[CyberSpartacus]

You cannot be a green without being blind.

[GreenFreeper]

There is a difference between being green and being a watermelon. Conservation is a conservative principal!

[dhuffman@awod.com]

'Science' cannot be manipulated. The demotic public is too ignorant to discern science from hucksterism. The science wars have been going on for at least a generation. For a cartoon of the conflict, read Alan Sokal's essay, 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Qunatum Gravity'. For a balanced look read the genre epitomized by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt's 'Higher Superstition' or 'The Flight From Science and Reason'. Tagline...