A tale from the trenches of science journalism

I get called fairly often for quick fact checks by science journalists, which is a good thing. I’ve also written a fair number of science pieces for publication, which get improved by good editors, which is also a good thing. But there are also ugly tales of bad editing and the difficult realities of getting science stories published, and I got one this morning that I post with the author’s permission.

I just read your post on journalist integrity, which reminded me to thank you again for your help with my article on zebrafish hair cells. I’m a recent graduate of an institutional science writing program and have been struggling to land freelance jobs as a science writer. My day job is in genetics research. One of my first real writing assignments was that article where I asked for your advice. Of course, I also interviewed the author of the study discussed in my piece. He corrected me when I asked if the inner ear in humans is similar to a fish’s lateral line. When I submitted the article, just shy of the 800 words I was asked to write, the editor said that the published piece had to be shortened a little. A few weeks later I checked the publication and found my article reduced to 360 words. I wasn’t happy, of course, but every journalist has dealt with this. However, when I began to read the piece I didn’t recognize it as anything I had written. I became worried so I did a sentence by sentence comparison. To my complete horror, out of 360 words there was only one sentence in the published piece and 3 or 4 fragments of sentences I had actually written; and the article was published with my name on it! I cannot in good faith use this article in my portfolio. Even more distressing, there in the published piece was the incorrect statement about likening the inner ear in humans to the lateral line in fish. The editor wrote it in without checking with me. Removed was any mention of neuromasts. The researcher I interviewed and I are colleagues, so what will he think when he reads this piece? I’m new at this, so whatever credibility I might have had is now lost. I don’t want to burn bridges with the editor since this is all I have going for me, but I need my name removed from that article. The entire thing should be withdrawn. It’s inaccurate and unethical.

I’ve heard a lot of stories like this. I’ve also talked to a fair number of science students who want to do science journalism, and they are typically idealistic and want to do right by the science…but what’s the point when media priorities are all focused on short-term profit, and when the management can willfully mangle your story?

One rotten apple

I recently argued that to scientists, accuracy is the most important element of a story (surprising, no?) in response to a journalist trying to claim that character and plot were more important. I also tried to make the case that accuracy and an interesting narrative aren’t mutually incompatible — and I should have added that accuracy ought to be the number one priority for science journalists, too.

In case you’re wondering why so many scientists are distrustful of science journalists, you should take a look at this account from Ben Goldacre. A masters student in psychology gave a talk at a science conference to present her preliminary findings, which, sad to say, were picked up by the Telegraph.

Here’s the title of the Telegraph story.

Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped, claim scientists
Women who drink alcohol, wear short skirts and are outgoing are more likely to be raped, claim scientists at the University of Leicester

Here’s the actual title of the press release from the University of Leicester describing the work.

Promiscuous men more likely to rape

There seems to be a significant discrepancy in emphasis, yes?

Goldacre called up the student researcher, and got the straight story: the Telegraph title is factually wrong, they found no statistically significant result corresponding to that claim. And here’s the reaction of the investigator:

When I saw the article my heart completely sank, and it made me really angry, given how sensitive this subject is. To be making claims like the Telegraph did, in my name, places all the blame on women, which is not what we were doing at all. I just felt really angry about how wrong they’d got this study.

I think science journalism is valuable and important, and in order to earn the trust of both scientists and the public, it needs to make honest, accurate reporting its chief value. Lately, there have been too many instances of a violation of that trust — and bending a story to more comfortably fit a common and erroneous stereotype is a perfect example of bad reporting.

It probably does produce more contented readers, though. Or at least, in this case, contented male readers.

Cheesy pablum for Jebus

Oh, dog. Discussion of the conflict between science and religion. Francis Collins comes up first. Atheists are shrill. Human genome. Morality is a pointer to god. C.S. Lewis. Fine tuning. Atheists are arrogant. Atheists are fundamentalists. Atheism is irrational. Read my BioLogos website. The usual appalling Collins drivel.

Next up…you’d think anything would be a relief after that tepid, tired inanity, wouldn’t you? But no. Who is the complement to the pious, gullible, nice Dr Collins? Someone who might offer a different point of view? Someone who might spark some real discussion? Someone who might, you know, disagree?

It’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty.

Jebus. What a pile of brainless, self-congratulatory pudding pretending to be a discussion of substance. And then the reporters in attendance dish it up with a spoon, and they gum it over with their soft, toothless questions, and everyone dies of sugar poisoning.

No, I lied. The ending is even worse.

Francis Collins picks up his guitar and sings.

Praise the source of faith and learning that has sparked and stoked the mind
With a passion for discerning how the world has been designed.
Let the sense of wonder flowing from the wonders we survey
Keep our faith forever growing and renew our need to pray.

That’s where I began projectile vomiting. Horked up my spleen right on my keyboard, blood squirted out of my eyeballs, and my howls set the small vermin lurking in the walls of my house scuttling to throw themselves beneath the wheels of passing vehicles in a massive and merciful act of suicide.

Katherine Kersten, Minnesota’s little pillock

Minnesota has more than a few local conservative wingnuts; there are a few very popular blogs emanating from these parts to testify that, and in addition, the major metropolitan newspaper, the Star Tribune, has a shrill blitherer they regularly put front and center who has most of us scratching our heads in wonder that they keep such an incompetent hack on the staff. All the Minnesotan readers here know already who I’m talking about, and I don’t even need to mention her name…but for all of you lucky out-of-staters, I’ll fill you in: it’s Katherine Kersten. “Who?”, you all say, and that’s definitely the right attitude. But we locals have to deal with the spike in our blood pressure when we read the paper and stumble across her byline.

What brings up this keening harpy of the right today is that she published another of her inane columns this weekend, and her target is atheism. She doesn’t like it, nosir.

More and more, we see outright hostility to religion — particularly to Christianity. Consider the wild popularity of a recent spate of best-sellers by “New Atheist” superstars, including Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and Christopher Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”

Far from being dispassionate critics of faith, the New Atheists are zealous crusaders for their own creed: materialism. They are passionately committed to the idea that the universe is a random accident, that transcendent truth is a myth, and that man’s life has no inherent purpose or meaning.

Well, yes! I think that’s great. There are no higher purposes discernible, but we happen to be here, so I think that looking for knowledge and value and even personal purpose in what is and what we are is far more sensible than asking a cold and mostly empty universe to whisper marching orders to us. Let’s strip away imaginary cosmic dictators (who are always nothing but an Oz-like showpiece to empower little, petty, earthly dictators anyway) and search for meaning in how we live our lives and how we can better the world for our children.

I accept the simplistic summary of my premises, but you know that Kersten has to go a step further, and tell me why I think that way…and of course she gets it wrong. I don’t think she actually has read the books she’s complaining about.

Why the growing audience for notions like these?

Religion poses a serious challenge to our cherished idea of personal autonomy. Unlike our forebears, we define freedom as the right to live as we choose — to “be ourselves” — unconstrained by social norms or a morally grounded sense of guilt or shame.

Atheists may not believe in gods, but we do believe in social norms. We also believe in limits to our rights to live as we choose — much as I might like to, I appreciate that bulldozing my neighborhood so that I can turn it into a slug and snail breeding ground would impose on my neighbors’ rights, so I don’t do it. I even appreciate that maintaining happy and cooperative neighbors is a greater good than having my own personal escargot farm.

I should think Kersten might have noticed that Christopher Hitchens always seems to appear in public fully dressed…and even in clothes that are quite conventional. I wonder why, if he’s unconstrained by social norms, he doesn’t appear naked, or dressed up as a clown?

She might have also noticed that Richard Dawkins doesn’t seem to have any pending arrest warrants (well, Oklahoma did try to criminalize him, but that’s different). He also seems to have succeeded in working within the social norms of academia, which, contrary to wingnut delusions, is actually not an anarcho-socialist ultra-Darwinian environment.

It all seems rather obvious to me, but Kersten persists in denying the evidence to the contrary. This seems to be a universal property of the religious — after all, if you can believe with no evidence that dead gods have walked the earth and turned water into alcoholic beverages, it must be trivial to accept that fellow law-abiding citizens with similar cultural preferences must actually be slavering sociopaths and unconscionable hedonists.

But this is all Kersten has got, the raising of spectral straw-men atheists who lack all restraint.

Judeo-Christianity throws a wrench in this, teaching that universal standards of right and wrong trump our personal desires.

In addition, it raises troubling questions about the vision of scientific “progress,” so central to our modern age. The mere fact that we are capable of, say, genetically altering or cloning human beings doesn’t give us moral license to do so, it cautions.

I always like how these doctrinaire promoters of “Judeo-Christianity” primly declare that they have such moral authority, when their faith has such a poor track record of promoting morality. Christians have advocated slavery, have murdered people for the awful crime of miscegenation, have decreed that people who don’t have the kind of sex they prefer are second-class citizens. Christians are thieves, murderers, rapists, and jay-walkers; it seems that having a belief in a transcendent authority actually doesn’t equate to being necessarily law-abiding and ethical or even, shocking as that may be, immune from the temptations of their natures.

I would very much like to see the Judeo-Christian documents that caution us about genetic alterations and cloning. These aren’t very biblical concepts, you know — there’s nothing in Leviticus about them. These are new phenomena, and the scientists who have worked on them haven’t necessarily been Christian or Jewish…yet somehow we’ve worked out that there are moral challenges in the technology without any dictates from burning bushes or salamanders handing out golden tablets.

Funny, that. You’d almost think that people were autonomous agents who recognized perils and responsibilities, and worked out among themselves what kinds of behaviors were right and would lead to less troublesome futures.

The entirety of Kersten’s piece is full of these nonsensical examples.

What, for example, is the source of the bedrock American belief in human equality? It has no basis in science or materialism. Some people are brilliant, powerful and assertive, while others can’t even tie their shoelaces. If “reason” alone is the standard, the notion of equality appears to be nonsense.

How can I even sort out that godawful muddle?

A belief in human equality also has no basis in the Judeo-Christian literature, which endorses inequity everywhere: there are “chosen” people, there are slaves, there are the righteous and the wicked, the crippled are excluded from the temples, the women are inferior chattel, the foreigners may be slain or enslaved.

Kersten herself asserts that equality is a “bedrock American belief”, and then goes on to show that she doesn’t really believe it — some people are brilliant, and others are stupid, and reason demonstrates that (to which I would add, so do Katherine Kersten’s columns…at least, they expose the latter half of her comparison).

Equality does not mean that everyone is a clone of each other with identical abilities, which would be in contradiction to reason and evidence. It is equality of opportunity that we are assigning — everyone should have the same rights and be granted the same chance to exercise their abilities as best they can. And that is something entirely compatible with reason.

And why should we act with charity toward the poorest and weakest among us? “Reason” — untempered by compassion — suggests that autistic children and Alzheimer’s sufferers are drags on society. In ancient Rome, disabled babies were left on hilltops to die. Why lavish care and resources on them?

We Americans take the moral principles of equality and compassion for granted. Yet these ideas are deeply counterintuitive. We’ve largely forgotten that their source is the once-revolutionary Judeo-Christian belief in a loving God, who created human beings in his image and decreed charity to be the first of virtues.

Why do these wackjobs always assume that reason and compassion are antagonistic? Reason tells me that it is a smart idea to be compassionate to the less privileged: maybe they have some ability that my society would find useful, to be pragmatic about it; there is no reason to assume that if someone is destitute, I must therefore do what I can to make their life more miserable; someone may be poorer or weaker than I am, but in turn, I’m poorer and weaker than someone else — does this warrant that I suffer? I also possess empathy, and when I see others harmed, I feel an echo of that pain myself. And, of course, perhaps someday I will have Alzheimer’s, and I’d rather not encourage the growth of a culture that would someday discard me.

I also think there are a set of ideas that are entirely the product of reason: that we should build a whole culture that enables and sustains equal rights and equal opportunities for everyone, because that will maximize the happiness and productivity of our society. I really don’t need a deity to tell me that, and it rarely seems to be a message promoted by religious hierarchies.

There are even more curiosities in that passage. Why does the right always talk as if Americans are exceptional? Do the French lack compassion, maybe, or are Canadians opposing equal rights for women and gays and Hispanics? It’s as if Kersten thinks moral principles are unique to this country.

And guess what: compassion and equality are not counterintuitive. Well, at least not among people who are not brought up with right-wing religious values. Children brought up in healthy, loving families seem to naturally share their toys, love puppies and kittens, and socialize well with other kids…all without reading books about it, or receiving psychic messages from angels. The source of these ideas isn’t Judeo-Christian at all: I’ve seen no evidence that Chinese children, for instance, are amoral beasts (well, no more so than any other kids), or that Inuit adults are unfeeling and don’t believe in justice.

We do have intrinsic natures that have been necessary to our success as a species: empathy, and the tendency to respond in kind to the actions of others. These can be accentuated by culture. We don’t need any gods to be good to others, just the opportunity and the examples of our upbringing.

Ah, well. That’s enough, you can see what level of ignorance went into Kersten’s complaints — she continues on to invoke Hitler, of course (he was trying to replace Christianity with reason, would you believe) and eugenics, which she claims is what happens when science is unconstrained by religion.

This is what readers of the Star Tribune have to groan over week after week. I really pity them, although it’s also the kind of thing that contributes to the decline of newspapers — pandering to ideology instead of intellect puts them on a par with propaganda organs.

SciAm, how could you?

As another sign of the ongoing decline of our traditional science media, Scientific American runs a superficial article on plastic surgery with a rather dubious source.

We spoke with osteopathic physician Lionel Bissoon to help us get to the bottom (so to speak) of some of the cellulite hoopla. Bissoon runs a clinic for mesotherapy (injections of homeopathic extracts, vitamins and/or medicine designed to reduce the appearance of cellulite) in New York City, and is the author of the book The Cellulite Cure published in 2006.

Why, SciAm, why?

Also, I had to gag on the guys analysis of cellulite as a modern problem — he look at old photo albums from the 40s-60s, and “women had perfect legs”, despite not having photoshop. Does he really think they didn’t have photo retouching in the days before personal computers? Or that women’s legs have suddenly developed a fundamental difference in the last 50 years?

50 years ago, Scientific American also had a little more rigor.

Republicans can’t even admit their anti-evolution leanings

Chris Matthews ask Representative Mike Pence a simple question — “Do you believe in evolution?” — and Pence spends 5 minutes squirming avoiding giving an answer. He changes the subject repeatedly, to global warming and stem cells, and tries to pretend that the Republican party doesn’t have a serious problem with an anti-science agenda, which he himself is demonstrating.

I have to commend Matthews, too: he bulldogs that question and won’t let it go. Let’s see more of that from our media, please.

The mess at Interior

One of the peculiarities of our media right now is that, as everyone knows, the best political reporting is being done by a couple of comedy shows on cable. Another source that has been surprising me is Rolling Stone, which has unshackled a couple of wild men, Tim Dickinson and Matt Taibbi, to go after the corruption and insanity of American politics — one of those things we once upon a time expected our newspaper journalists to do. I guess the powers-that-be think it’s safe to let the drug-addled hippies and punks (and college professors) who read Rolling Stone to know about the failures of our government, but the bourgeoisie must not be perturbed.

If you care about the environment, you must read Dickinson’s Obama’s Sheriff. It’s nominally about our new Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, but without saying much about him, it instead dives into the seedy, greedy world of the Interior Department of the past 8 years. Under Bush, we basically gave away our natural resources to anyone willing to chew them up and turn them into a pile of poisonous rubble and decaying trash.

Here’s a sample.

LESS WILDLIFE Julie MacDonald, a deputy assistant secretary at Interior, routinely overruled the department’s biologists, limiting the amount of “critical habitat” protected from drilling and other development. Federal judges overturned several of her decisions as “arbitrary and capricious,” and among federal scientists her name became synonymous with political interference. “It became a verb for us: getting MacDonalded,” said one staffer with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. When the inspector general reviewed 20 listings for endangered species in which MacDonald played a role, he found that she had “potentially jeopardized” 13 of them — a track record that “cast doubt on nearly every [endangered species] decision issued during her tenure.” Her decisions frequently benefited private interests, including her own: Her ruling that the Sacramento splittail fish is not an endangered species protected her family farm in California — an operation that clears as much as $1 million a year.

DECAYING PARKS By the time Bush left office, the National Park Service was stuck with a backlog of up to $14 billion in deferred maintenance. The marquee attraction at Dinosaur National Monument — a rock face of exposed Jurassic fossils — remains off-limits because the visitor center is unsafe, and inadequate storage facilities threaten to damage artifacts from the Battle of Little Big Horn. Because of the lack of funds, the government was unable to buy land surrounding Valley Forge and Zion National Park, putting the property at risk for “detrimental development.” Worst of all, the administration’s failure to create a grazing plan at Yellowstone Park to accommodate the plains buffalo — the animal that graces the Interior Department’s seal — contributed to the deaths of more than 1,100 bison last year. It was the greatest buffalo slaughter since the species was driven to near extinction by hunters in the late 1800s.

Keep in mind that this is only a taste — it goes on for page after depressing page. We’ve been robbed.

And what about Salazar? He gets a couple of paragraphs at the end, giving him props for being willing to go in and shake up the tradition of corruption…but also points out that he’s from the conservative rancher tradition, and is going to continue the policies of free give-aways of our resources. So, I guess we can expect less snow-bunny sex with mining representatives and less cocaine-snorting ministers, but the destruction will continue.

YouTube has banned the James Randi Educational Foundation!?!?

This is insane: YouTube has become an overzealous nanny, protecting kooks from offense, now banning the eminently respectable JREF.

There’s only one way to respond to this, in addition to writing letters of protest: I’m going to have to stop using YouTube at all. I’ll be posting no more YouTube videos until the JREF is fully reinstated, and even then I’ll be looking for alternatives (XTube? RedTube? No, I know…GodTube! (seriously, don’t go to any of those, they’re awful)). YouTube is ubiquitous, but it’s a common technology, there are lots of sites that can implement it, and there’s no need to tie ourselves to the one host that seems to be run by nervous nellies with brain rot.

High praise for British journalism

This is an amusing tale of creationist hypocrisy. Ken Ham is complaining that one of his staff members was “ambushed”, because he wasn’t given a solo interview, but had to share the discussion with a critic (meanwhile, Ham has no compunction about “ambushing”, in the same sense, scientific discussions). What I found most interesting, though, were Ken Ham’s complaints about the BBC.

This past week, Dr. Jason Lisle–our astrophysicist*—was invited to be on a BBC radio program out of Southampton , England (where I spoke a couple of weeks ago). We were told that it was just going to be an “examination of creationism.” Well, we are somewhat leery when it comes to dealing with the British media–by far, British journalists and commentators (and particularly those from the BBC) are the most mocking about biblical Christianity of all the media we’ve worked with over the years. We have had probably 20 different countries send reporters to the Creation Museum since we opened 22 months ago, and most of them have been fair and balanced in their coverage–but not so with the typical British reporter.

Take a bow, any typical British reporters reading this. Could you please come over here and give lessons to typical American reporters?

*You have to giggle at the idea of an astrophysicist who claims that the universe is only 6000 years old.