“City Journal” Details the Ideological Capture of Science Journalism

James B. Meigs, a contributing editor of City Journal, recently did a detailed review of the ideological capture of science journalism. I feel compelled to share it, as it summarizes much of my observations, findings, and experiences while covering science-related topics for our website.

The piece opens with a story of science historian and editor-in-chief of Skeptic, Chapman University Adjunct Professor Michael Shermer, who had his contract with Scientific American canceled.

Why?

He had the audacity to suggest in a proposed piece that discrimination against racial minorities, gays, and other groups has diminished.

Shermer believes that the new style of science journalism “is being defined by this postmodern worldview, the idea that all facts are relative or culturally determined.” Of course, if scientific facts are just products of a particular cultural milieu, he says, “then everything is a narrative that has to reflect some political side.” Without an agreed-upon framework to separate valid from invalid claims—without science, in other words—people fall back on their hunches and in-group biases, the “my-side bias.”

Traditionally, science reporting was mostly descriptive—writers strove to explain new discoveries in a particular field. The new style of science journalism takes the form of advocacy—writers seek to nudge readers toward a politically approved opinion.

Meigs’ article covers Scientific American‘s dreadful coverage of the covid pandemic. Specifically, he cited its March 2021 piece, “Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth.”  Having had my articles throttled just for mentioning that the novel coronavirus could have originally come from a place where coronaviruses were being genetically manipulated and used for experiments, I can attest to the challenges of presenting alternative information that goes against the preferred political narrative.

Scientific American made it much, much more challenging for scientists (such as those who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration) to get out the truth. The societal-level issues we are contending with today (especially in education and public health) are directly tied to suppressing scientific debate while pandemic policies are being formulated.

The City Journal article also reviews how the climate is covered, and it aligns with my experiences when attempting to locate and present reasonable alternatives to the doomsday scenario pushed as today’s news.

As Shermer observed, many science journalists see their role not as neutral reporters but as advocates for noble causes. This is especially true in reporting about the climate. Many publications now have reporters on a permanent “climate beat,” and several nonprofit organizations offer grants to help fund climate coverage.

Climate science is an important field, worthy of thoughtful, balanced coverage. Unfortunately, too many climate reporters seem especially prone to common fallacies, including base-rate neglect, and to hyping tenuous data.

As a reminder, the United Nations wired $5.4 million to 12 U.S. state governments between 2020 and 2022 for climate activism. Also, it is important to note that the Associated Press took $8 million in donations to fund climate coverage in 2022.

To counter the NGO-sponsored “science,” I seek out and promote the interpretation of experienced climate scientists who offer data and insights that are ignored as they go against the climate crisis narrative. And I will continue to do so. Good policy can only be built on credible theories based on reproducible data.

Meigs also looked at the Scientific American pieces related to puberty blockers and “gender-affirming care” for children. For example, its 2023 article, “What Are Puberty Blockers, and How Do They Work?”  made an unsubstantiated claim that such treatments are crucial to preventing suicide among gender-dysphoric children.

This is looking to be….less true.

When Oxford University researcher Michael Biggs examined the scandal-ridden, soon-to-be-shuttered Gender Identity Development Service at the United Kingdom’s Tavistock clinic, he observed four suicides in 11 years among 15,000 adolescent patients.

That’s a tragedy, yet it reflects an annual suicide rate of 13 per 100,000, which is only slightly higher than the US suicide rate of 11 per 100,000 among all 10- to 24-year-olds.

And there’s more.

Of the four individuals who committed suicide, two were on Tavistock’s waiting list while the other two were receiving the medical interventions that were supposed to save them.

This fact casts doubt on the “transition or die” trope, indicating other factors may be at work.

I conducted a detailed assessment of the “safety” of puberty blockers in 2022 and determined the claims they were reversible were false. French Senators described sex reassignment in minors as potentially “one of the greatest ethical scandals in the history of medicine.”

Another independent science writer also takes issue with the suppression of robust debate on this subject.

The independent journalist Jesse Singal, a longtime critic of slipshod science reporting, demolishes these misleading claims in a Substack post. In fact, the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria is a new and barely researched phenomenon, he notes: “[W]e have close to zero studies that have tracked gender dysphoric kids who went on blockers over significant lengths of time to see how they have fared.”

Singal finds it especially alarming to see a leading science magazine obscure the uncertainty surrounding these treatments. “I believe that this will go down as a major journalistic blunder that will be looked back upon with embarrassment and regret,” he writes.

The must-read article ends by begging for a return to “the core principles of science—and the broader tradition of fact-based discourse and debate—our society.”

I could not agree more. The lack of science in science reporting is disturbing.

If you love science, it would be worthwhile reading the whole thing.