Tag: science journalism

PSA about Business Today

If you get your space news from the website businesstoday.in, this post is for you. Business Today has published several articles over the last few weeks about the Starliner saga with misleading headlines and claims blown far out of proportion. I’d been putting off writing about them but this morning, I spotted the following piece:

Business Today has produced all these misleading articles in this format, resembling Instagram reels. This is more troubling because we know tidbits like this are more consumable as well as are likely to go viral by virtue of their uncomplicated content and simplistic message. Business Today has also been focusing its articles on the saga on Sunita Williams alone, as if the other astronauts don’t exist. This choice is obviously of a piece with Williams’s Indian heritage and Business Today’s intention to maximise traffic to its pages by publishing sensational claims about her experience in space. As I wrote before:

… in the eyes of those penning articles and headlines, “Indian-American” she is. They’re using this language to get people interested in these articles, and if they succeed, they’re effectively selling the idea that it’s not possible for Indians to care about the accomplishments of non-Indians, that only Indians’, and by extension India’s, accomplishments matter. … Calling Williams “Indian-American” is to retrench her patriarchal identity as being part of her primary identity — just as referring to her as “Indian origin” is to evoke her genetic identity…

But something more important than the cynical India connection is at work here: in these pieces, Business Today has been toasting it. This my term for a shady media practice reminiscent of a scene in an episode of the TV show Mad Men, where Don Draper suggests Lucky Strike should advertise its cigarettes as being “toasted”. When someone objects that all cigarettes are toasted, Draper says they may well be, but by saying publicly that its cigarettes are toasted, Lucky Strike will set itself out without doing anything new, without lying, without breaking any rules. It’s just a bit of psychological manipulation.

Similarly, Business Today has been writing about Williams as if she’s the only astronaut facing an extended stay in space (and suggesting in more subtle ways that this fate hasn’t befallen anyone before — whereas it has dozens of times), that NASA statements concern only her health and not the health of the other astronauts she’s with, and that what we’re learning about her difficulties in space constitute new information.

None of this is false but it’s not true either. It’s toasted. Consider the first claim: “NASA has revealed that Williams is facing a critical health issue”:

* “NASA has revealed” — there’s nothing to reveal here. We already know microgravity affects various biochemical processes in the body, including the accelerated destruction of red blood cells.

* “Williams is facing” — No. Everyone in microgravity faces this. That’s why astronauts need to be very fit people, so their bodies can weather unanticipated changes for longer without suffering critical damage.

* “critical health issue” — Err, no. See above. Also, perhaps in a bid to emphasise this (faux) criticality, Business Today’s headline begins “3 million per second” and ends calling the number “disturbing”. You read it, this alarmingly big number is in your face, and you’re asking to believe it’s “disturbing”. But it’s not really a big number in context and certainly not worth any disturbance.

For another example, consider: “Given Williams’ extended mission duration, this accelerated red blood cell destruction poses a heightened risk, potentially leading to severe health issues”. Notice how Business Today doesn’t include three important details: how much of an extension amounts to a ‘bad’ level of extension, what the odds are of Williams (or her fellow Starliner test pilot Barry Wilmore) developing “health issues”, and whether these consequences are reversible. Including these details would deflate Business Today’s ‘story’, of course.

If Business Today is your, a friend’s and/or a relative’s source of space news, please ask them to switch to any of the following instead for space news coverage and commentary that’s interesting without insulting your intelligence:

* SpaceNews

* Jeff Foust

* Marcia Smith

* Aviation Week

* Victoria Samson

* Jatan Mehta

* The Hindu Science

End of the line

The folks at The Wire have laid The Wire Science to rest, I’ve learnt. The site hasn’t published any (original) articles since February 2 and its last tweet was on February 16, 2024.

At the time I left, in October 2022, the prospect of it continuing to run on its own steam was very much in the picture. But I’ve also been out of the loop since and learnt a short while ago that The Wire Science stopped being a functional outlet sometime earlier this year, and that its website and its articles will, in the coming months, be folded into The Wire, where they will continue to live. The Wire must do what’s best for its future and I don’t begrudge the decision to stop publishing The Wire Science separately – although I do wonder if, even if they didn’t see sense in finding a like-for-like replacement, they could have attempted something less intensive with another science journalist. I’m nonetheless sad because some things will still be lost.

Foremost on my mind are The Wire Science‘s distinct sensibilities. As is the case at The Hindu as well as at all publications whose primary journalistic product is ‘news’, the science coverage doesn’t have the room or license to examine a giant swath of the science landscape, which – while in many ways being science news in the sense that it presents new information derived from scientific work – can only manifest in the pages of a news product as ‘analysis’, ‘commentary’, ‘opinion’, etc. The Wire has the latter, or had when I left and I don’t know how they’ll be thinking about that going ahead, but there is still the risk of science coverage there not being able to spread its wings nearly as widely as it could on The Wire Science.

I still think such freedom is required because we haven’t figured out how best to cover science, at least not without also getting entangled in questions about science’s increasingly high-strung relationship with society and whether science journalists, as practitioners of a science journalism coming of age anew in the era of transdisciplinary technologies (AI, One Health, open access, etc.), can expect to be truly objective, forget covering science by the same rules and expectations that guide the traditional journalisms of business, politics, sports, etc. If however The Wire‘s journalists are still thinking about these things, kudos and best wishes to them.

Of course, one thing was definitely lost: the room to experiment with forms of storytelling that better interrogate many of these alternative possibilities I think science journalism needs to embrace. Such things rarely, if ever, survive the demands of the everyday newsroom. Again, The Wire must do what it deems best for its future; doing otherwise would be insensible. But loss is also loss. RIP. I’m sad, but also proud The Wire Science was what it was when it lived.

The foundation of shit

I’ve been a commissioning editor in Indian science, health, and environment journalism for a little under a decade. I’ve learnt many lessons in this time but one in particular still surprises me. Whenever I receive an email, I’m quick to at least shoot off a holding reply: “I’m caught up with other stuff today, I’ll get back to you on this <whenever>”. Having a horizon makes time management much easier. What surprises me is that many commissioning editors don’t do this. I’ve heard the same story from scores of freelancing writers and reporters: “I email them but they just don’t reply for a long time.” Newsrooms are short-staffed everywhere and I readily empathise with any editor who says there’s just no time or mental bandwidth. But that’s also why the holding email exists and can even be automated to ask the sender to wait for <insert number here> hours. A few people have even said they prefer working with me because, among other things, I’m prompt. This really isn’t a brag. It’s a fruit hanging so low it’s touching the ground. Sure, it’s nice to have an advantage just by being someone who replies to emails and sets expectations – but if you think about it, especially from a freelancer’s point of view, it has a foundation of shit. It shouldn’t exist.

There’s a problem on the other side of this coin here. I picked up the habit of the holding email when I was with The Wire (before The Wire Science) – a very useful piece of advice SV gave me. When I first started to deploy it, it worked wonders when engaging with reporters and writers. Because I wrote back, almost always within less than half a day of their emails, they submitted more of their work. Bear in mind at this point that freelancers are juggling payments for past work (from this or other publications), negotiations for payment for the current submission, and work on other stories in the pipeline. In the midst of all this – and I’m narrating second-hand experiences here – to have an editor come along who replies possibly seems very alluring. Perhaps it’s one less variable to solve for. I certainly wanted to take advantage of it. Over time, however, a problem arose. Being prompt with emails means checking the inbox every <insert number here> minutes. I quickly lost my mind over having to check for new emails as often as I could, but I kept at it because the payoff stayed high. This behaviour also changed some writers’ expectations of me: if I didn’t reply within six hours, say, I’d receive an email or two checking in or, in one case, accusing me of being like “the others”.

I want my job to be about doing good science journalism as much as giving back to the community of science journalists. In fact, I believe doing the latter will automatically achieve the former. We tried this in one way when building out The Wire Science and I think we’ve taken the first steps in a new direction at The Hindu Science – yet these are also drops in the ocean. For a community that requires so, so much still, giving can be so easy that one loses oneself in the process, including on the deceptively trivial matter of replying to emails. Reply quickly and meaningfully and it’s likely to offer a value of its own to the person on the other side of the email server. Suddenly you have a virtue, and because it’s a virtue, you want to hold on to it. But it’s a pseudo-virtue, a false god, created by the expectations of those who deserve better and the aspirations of those who want to meet those expectations. Like it or not, it comes from a bad place. The community needs so, so much still, but that doesn’t mean everything I or anyone else has to give is valuable.

I won’t stop being prompt but I will have to find a middle-ground where I’m prompt enough and at the same time the sender of the email doesn’t think I or any other editor for that matter has dropped the ball. This is as much about managing individual expectations as the culture of thinking about time a certain way, which includes stakeholders’ expectations of the editor-writer relationship in all Indian newsrooms publishing science-related material. (The fact of India being the sort of country where the place you’re at – and increasingly the government there – being one of the first things getting in the way of life also matters.) This culture should also serve the interests of science journalism in the country, including managing the tension between the well-being of its practitioners and sustainability on one hand and the effort and the proverbial extra push required for its growth on the other.

A Q&A about philosophy in journalism

Earlier this year, Varun Bhatta, assistant professor of philosophy at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, reached out to ask me some questions for something he was writing about the representation of philosophical ideas in journalism. He interviewed others as well and subsequently wrote and published his article with The Wire on March 2, 2024.

I’m pasting the conversation the two of us had in full below, with Varun’s permission. Varun also wrote the introductory note, as a preface to the questions. His questions are in bold; my responses are in normal type.

Preface

Newspaper journalists, while writing on a topic, use theories and ideas from history, sociology, economics, sciences and other disciplines to establish the relevance of the topic and analyse the pertinent questions. However, rarely do they draw from philosophical theories that are equally relevant to the topic. Why is it that, for instance, we do not see social/moral/political philosophers’ views also being presented in articles on social topics? Similarly, while presenting a scientific topic, it is not common to find insights from the philosophy of science. Why is that philosophy glaringly absent in newspaper journalism that otherwise seamlessly synthesises views from numerous domains while presenting on a topic?

The non-engagement with philosophy is a characteristic of journalism across the world. There have been a few initiatives – both from journalists and philosophers – to bridge this gap in the Global North. One of the well-known projects in this regard was the column The Stone at the New York Times. Irish Times still runs a philosophy column Unthinkable. There have been very few journalists who have expressed their fruitful engagement with philosophy. (See here and here.) Also, the new kind of journalism brought by Aeon and The Conversation has provided the much-required niche space for philosophy. 

The situation in India, however, is abysmal. Indeed, this is largely due to the poor state of philosophy in India and this is not a new point. However, what is not known is the story from the other side. What is Indian journalists’ perception of philosophy and why is that they do not use philosophy? Regarding this, I want to interview a few print/online newspaper journalists and editors. I am also planning to converse with a few journalism faculty as the non-engagement with philosophy might be a symptom of the journalism curriculum that is largely taught in India.

Understanding the perspectives of journalists, I think, is the first step towards remedying the gap in the Indian context. This can open up the conversation between journalists and philosophers to create meaningful journalism projects to make philosophy relevant to the Indian public.

Q&A

1. Why do you think journalists do not draw from philosophical theories/ideas while analysing a topic and writing articles? I am asking this because online/print newspaper journalists draw from theories/ideas of other disciplines (social sciences, history, sciences) in spite of these being nuanced and complex (for both writers and readers).

It depends what exactly you mean by ‘philosophy’ because from where I’m sitting I disagree with the assertion in your question that Indian journalists don’t use philosophical ideas or theories in their work. They use it both directly and indirectly. They use it directly when making decisions about what kind of events, stories, and phenomena they’d rather cover and why. When I say I’m a journalist biased towards principles encoded in the Indian Constitution, there’s a philosophy of journalism at work there. I’m mindful of the philosophical position of falsifiability when I conclude there’s no point trying to fact-check or rebut a claim like “Sanskrit is a good language for AI”. Journalists use philosophy indirectly when drawing on all those other fields, which have been informed and honed by philosophical deliberations unique to them. For example, a philosophy of history determines how we narrativise the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation in addition to archaeological, genetic, and climatological data.

If your question is why journalists don’t write articles containing ideas from philosophy and the views of philosophers, there are two answers.

First, all journalism needs to be in the public interest, and I’ve no idea a) what a philosophy in the public interest sounds like, which is because I don’t know what constitutes philosophy news, that could lend itself to news reports, news analyses, and news features. Is there a community, collective or organisation of philosophers in India that’s trying to reach out to more people? Where can I engage with an articulation of what I’m missing out on when I skip a comment from a philosopher for a news article? On a related note, many of us in journalism have studied journalism, which is its own field – just like philosophy – with its own tools to develop ways to frame the world, to make sense of it. I have no idea where philosophy is situated here, if at all.

b) Even if I was familiar with what philosophers are experts on, I’d imagine philosophy as a field of study faces the same resistance to being represented in the news as exotic fields (from the PoV of the publics) like high-energy physics or mathematics. When I’m trying to write on the latter, I’m banking on some sort of numerical literacy on the readers’ part. It’s impossible to explain the Langlands programme to someone who doesn’t know (or care) what functions or sets are. I haven’t had the chance to consider the level of philosophical literacy in India but I don’t think it’s very good. So broaching that kind of thinking and reasoning in an article – especially in a news article – requires the author to lay the groundwork first, which is precarious. The more words there are, the more careful you need to be about holding a reader’s attention.

There also need to be concrete developments and they need to be in the public interest, and unless a writer and/or an editor comes along who can extract these nuggets from a paper or in conversation with an expert – and in interesting ways – it’s going to have no engagement. Worse, it’s going to impose a disproportionately high opportunity cost on news-producers’ time and labour by expecting them to be able to separate philosophical wheat from chaff. I believe this goes for both whole articles about philosophy and articles that include philosophical considerations in the mix. The Hindu is trying to step around this ‘concrete developments’ requirement with two daily pages called ‘Text & Context’ and one online-only (for now) science page every weekday. These are both fairly recent developments, which is to say securing such space in a newspaper or any news-focused outlet is difficult and needs the underlying organisation to be ‘healthy’ as well as a sound editorial justification of its own.

We also need to be clear there are differences between newspapers and magazines, their sizes, remits, and frequencies of publication. Publications that take it slower and with more pages than a newspaper – or, more generally, articles that are composed over a longer time (much longer than news reports, of course) and are also lengthier (more than a few hundred words at least) are also likelier to have the time and the room to include philosophical deliberations. This is the sort of room we need (in space and time) to lay the groundwork first. Otherwise, such ideas just vanish under the unforgiving demands of the inverted pyramid.

Now the second answer: If I have to pay a writer Rs 5,000 to write a 1,000-word article about some idea or event that’s of interest in philosophical circles, and I expect (based on historical data) that 10,000 people will engage sincerely with the article, I need each one of those people to be able to readily contribute 50 paise to the publication for me to break even – and this is hard. The size of the engaged audience will actually be more like 1,000, requiring each one of those people to contribute Rs 5. And this is extraordinarily difficult given the prevailing ratios of the sizes of the overall audience, the engaged audience, and the paying audience. Similarly, if I add another page in the newspaper so I can accommodate more philosophy-centred material and charge readers Re 1 extra to pay for it (assuming here that advertisers won’t be interested in advertising on this page), will I have enough new readers to offset those who will stop buying the paper because of the higher cover price? I doubt it.

2. I think the previous question needs to be invoked at the editorial level as well. Given that editors do request the writers to make changes (like including some data on the topic or getting a comment from a particular expert), the absence of philosophy in articles might largely be due to editorial decisions and policies: what is considered as “pertinent”, “readable”, “good” etc. For instance, one of the unsaid editorial policies seems to be that philosophical discussions are best suited for op-ed columns. This kind of presumption has resulted in the ghettoisation of philosophy to certain zones in newspaper journalism.

2a. As an editor, what are your thoughts on the points? What might be the actual, pragmatic challenges journalism faces in this context?

2b. Since editors play an equally important role in “setting the agenda” and changing the reading styles of the public, what might be the ways to overcome these challenges? How to break the wall around philosophy in journalism, so that it can be accommodated/incorporated in mainstream journalism?

Imagine the industry of journalism to be like a wave propagating through a medium. Let’s divide this wave into two parts: the wavefront and the wake. Newsrooms operating at the wavefront are distinguished by the resources to experiment and innovate, take risks, and pay more than competitively for the best exponents of particular skills in the market. Newsrooms in the wake are just about staying profitable (or even breaking even), innovating in incremental fashion, avoiding risks, and trying to pay competitively. Of course neither group is monolithic – most sufficiently large news organisations have some departments that are doing well and some that are fighting to stay alive – but this is a simplification to illustrate a point. I believe your questions are about newsrooms in the wake; they’re definitely more interesting in this context. With this in mind:

2a) Newsrooms need to make money to pay their journalists without compromising editorial independence and editorial standards. This is the single largest challenge right now. In the face of this challenge, especially since the rise of news aggregators and social media platforms as sites of news consumption, so many publications have shut shop, downsized or relinquished independence, or some combination of all three. Once a newsroom’s finances are sufficiently in the green and they can graduate from the wake to the wavefront, pertinence, readability, etc. can and do become the first questions an editor asks. Of course, I may not be saying any of this if the times weren’t what they are.

2b) I’m not sure there’s a wall around journalism that blocks philosophy. In fact journalists don’t have the freedom to choose (or decline, for that matter) what they consider to be ‘news’. But the flip side of this is no particular enterprise can be said to be entitled to a journalist’s attention. The reason this is so is because of how public interest is constructed.

For example, there’s a contest – very simply speaking – these days between a journalism that holds we’re doing the country a disservice by turning our heads away from everything that’s going wrong and another that’s particular about pointing its head in the opposite direction. Another example of a similar contest is centred on whether journalists should make plain their biases – because everyone is biased in some way – or if they should cover the news without losing (a reasonable) equipoise.

In these or any other scenarios, whatever constitutes the public interest is built jointly by journalists and the consumers of the knowledge they produce, and will vary from one publication to the next. The Hindu, The Wire, and The New York Times have different covenants with their readers about what public interest looks like, or ought to look like. The construction of the public interest is a shared and complicated enterprise that takes time.

As a result, most journalism, in the present era at least, follows some publics; journalism doesn’t lead them. This also means – taking all of these business, economic, and social forces together – that when people aren’t interested in philosophy-related matters, there’s not much an editor (in a newsroom-in-the-wake) can do to change that.

3. I need your comment on another editorial decision about the op-ed columns that have a specific implication for the Indian context. One of the ways academic journalism scales up the dissemination is by publishing the articles with Creative Commons licence. For instance, The Conversation and Aeon are using this method. The idea seems to be working very well. Create a niche space for academic journalism that usually does not have space in mainstream journalism and make up for the readership through free or paid syndication. This approach seems to be working well, and has provided a good working model.

However, in an uneven world, this does not favour everyone equally. Given its international scale/level/reach, this works well for the Global North academicians who have access to these platforms. Indian scholars do not have easy access to Aeon or The Conversation. And Indian online platforms have easy access to quality articles without having to deal with Indian scholars.

These issues are pertinent for most of the academicians in India. But I want to articulate the problem from the perspective of philosophy. This method of republishing further widens the gap between philosophers and journalism in India. This way of operating does not provide enough motivation for Indian newspaper editors to work with Indian scholars. In spite of publishing philosophy articles, Indian editors do not seem to be interested/invested in working/collaborating with Indian philosophers and commissioning articles. (Republishing international articles has a further implication: it deepens the imbalance between Western and Eastern philosophical systems.)

Would like to know your comments/thoughts on the above note.

I’m uncomfortable with providing a general comment. Please let me know if you have specific questions.

Free/paid syndication option of articles in international platforms indeed provides straightforward access to quality content for Indian platforms. And given the restriction of resources like time and finances, and largely the dearth of good Indian academicians who can write for the public, it is understandable what the Indian platforms are doing. Having said that, do you agree that there are implications of this shortcut approach? The first implication is about the politics of knowledge and representation, whose views are represented, etc. The second implication is the perpetuation of Indian journalism’s impatience to work with local scholars. If it does not invest and work with, say Indian philosophers, even for op-eds, the problem persists.

I agree wholeheartedly with the first implication. To republish from publications in the US, Europe and the UK that syndicate their articles on a Creative Commons licence is effectively to represent the views of the scholars quoted in those articles – mostly from Global North countries – instead of the views of others, especially those from India (from the PoV of Indian newsrooms and readers). However, it’s important to ask whether this really imposes the sort of opportunity cost that prevents Indian journalists from still trying to work with and represent the views of Indian scholars in other articles. My answer is ‘no’ simply because of the difference in the amount of effort expended in republishing an article and reporting on a scholar’s work, views, etc. Put another way, it takes me a few minutes to identify an article on, say, The Conversation that will work ‘well’ on my site and a few more minutes to republish it. Doing so won’t subtract from the responsibilities of or resources available to a reporter on my team. So if/when a publication says it is making do with stories from The Conversation, the problem arises with people in the newsroom who are choosing not to engage with Indian scholars – irrespective of whether it can or does republish articles from other outlets.

I also want to clarify something about the “dearth of good Indian academicians who can write for the public” in your question: there isn’t so much a dearth of good academicians who can write, there’s a dearth of academicians who believe communication at large is important at all. I’ve been fortunate enough to find more than a few scientists who are eager to write, and to be frank their numbers are increasing, but my experience is that the vast majority of scientists working in India distrust the media too much and/or don’t believe that the scientific work they undertake needs to be communicated to non-scientists – much less that they need to be the ones doing it. (I’m also setting aside the fact that many of the better scientists working in the country also shoulder many responsibilities beyond teaching and research, especially important administrative tasks, and communication – especially of the form that their employers may not recognise when considering people for promotions, etc. – only adds to this burden.) My point here is that the task of finding scientists to write is a lot more arduous than might seem at first glance.

I feel the same way about the second implication you’ve set out in your question: journalists are not impatient per se; what you may perceive as impatience is likelier than not the effect of newsroom mechanics that expect journalists to be productive to a degree that precludes prolonged engagement with scholars. Also, the distinction I pointed out in my first set of replies matters greatly. If you’re writing for a magazine or if you’re writing a news feature, you’ll have the time and the word limit for such engagement. But if you’re writing a news report for a newspaper, you will have neither the time and the word limit for nor – importantly – any expectation from your readers of slow-cooked material in the article. Finally, while I’ve tried to describe what is, I don’t think I’m prepared to call it justification. I think large newsrooms, especially those departments of such newsrooms that are closer to the wavefront than others, should try (honestly) to establish opportunities for slow-cooked material in their products.

Waters and bridges between science journalism and scicomm

On November 24-25, the Science Journalists’ Association of India (SJAI) conducted its inaugural conference at the National Institute of Immunology (NII), New Delhi. I attended it as a delegate.

A persistent internal monologue of mine at the event was the lack of an explicit distinction between science communicators and science journalists. One of my peers there said (among other things) that we need to start somewhere, and with that I readily agree. Subhra Priyadarshini, a core member of SJAI and the leader de facto of the team that put the conference together, also said in a different context that SJAI plans to “upskill and upscale science journalism in India”, alluding to the group’s plans to facilitate a gateway into science journalism. But a distinction may be worthwhile because the two groups seem to have different needs, especially in today’s charged political climate.

Think of political or business journalism, where journalists critique politics or business. They don’t generally consider part of their jobs to be improving political or business literacy or engagement with the processes of these enterprise. On the other hand, science journalists are regularly expected – including by many editors, scientists, and political leaders – to improve scientific literacy or to push back on pseudoscience. (For what it’s worth, pseudoscience isn’t a simple topic, especially against the backdrop of its social origins as well as questions about what counts as knowledge, how it’s created, who creates it, etc.).

When science institutions believe that X is science journalism when it’s in fact Y, then whenever they encounter Y, they’re taken aback, if not just offended. We have seen this with many research institutes whose leaders are friendly with the media when the latter is reporting on the former’s work, but become hostile when journalists start to ask questions about any wrongdoing or controversy. (One talking point supported by people insice NCBS, when the Arati Ramesh incident played out in 2021, was whether the publics are entitled to details of the inner workings of a publicly funded institute.) Scientists should know what science journalism really is, lest they believe it’s a new kind of PR, and change their expectations about the terms on which journalists engage with them.

This recalibration is important now when journalists are expected to bend over or not report on some topics, ideas or people. Are communicators expected to bend over also? I’m not so sure. Journalism is communication plus the added responsibility of abiding by the public interest (which transforms the way the communication happens as well), and the latter imposes demands that often give science journalism its thorn-in-the-side quality.

Understanding what journalism really is could improve relationships between scientists and science journalists, let scientists know why a (critical) journalism of science is as important as the communication of science, and the ways in which both institutions – of science and of journalism – are publicly answerable.

[After a few hours] So does that mean the difference between science journalism and science communication is what scientists understand them to be?

I think accounting for the peculiarities of both space (in India) and time (today) could produce a fairer picture of the places and roles of science journalism and communication. Specifically, that science journalism in India is coming of age at this particular time in history is important, especially because it will obviously evolve to respond to the forces that matter today. Most of all, unlike any other time before, today is distinguished by trivial access to the internet, which gives explainers and communicative writing more weight than before for their ability to be used against misinformation and to temper people’s readiness to consume information on the internet with the (editorial and scientific) expertise and wisdom of communicators and journalists.

The distinction of today also births the possibility of defining Indian science journalism separately from Indian science communication using the matter of their labels, expectations, purposes, and problems.

Labels – ‘Journalism’ and ‘communication’ are fundamentally labels used to describe specific kinds of activities. They probably originated in different contexts, to isolate and identify tasks that, in their respective settings, were unlike other tasks, but that wouldn’t have to mean that once they were transplanted to the science communication/journalism enterprise, they couldn’t have a significant – maybe even self-effacing – overlap. So it may be worthwhile to explore the history of these terms, in India, as it pertains to science journalists.

Expectations – The line between journalism and communication is slender. Many products of science-journalism work are texts that are concerned, to a not-insignificant extent, with communicating science first, with explaining a relevant concept, idea, etc. in its proper technical, historical, social, etc. context. Journalism peels away from communication with the added requirement of being in the public interest, but good communication can be in the public interest as well. (Economics seemed to pose a counter-argument but with a self-undermining component: did science communication in India have such a successful ‘scene’ before science journalism in India became a thing? I have my doubts although I’m not exactly well-informed – but a bigger issue is what editors in and product managers of newsrooms considered ‘science journalism’ to be in the first place. If they conflated it with communication, this counter-example is moot.)

Purposes – What is political journalism a journalism of? (To my mind, the answer to this question needs to be some activity that, when it is performed, would sufficiently qualify the performer as a practitioner of political journalism.) Is it a journalism of political processes, political thought, political outcomes or political leaders? Considering politics is a social enterprise, I think it’s a journalism of our political leaders: stories about these people are the stories about everything else that constitutes politics. Similarly, science journalism can be a journalism of the people of science – and it’s ease to see that, this way, it opens doors to everything from clever science to issues of science and society.

Problems – Journalism and communication may also be distinguished by their specific problems. For journalists, for example, quotes from scientists are more crucial than they are for communicators. Indian science journalism is thus complicated differently by the fact that many scientists don’t wish to speak to members of the press, for fear of being misquoted, of antagonising their bosses (who may have political preferences of their own), of lacking incentives to do so (e.g. “my chances of being promoted don’t increase if I speak to reporters”), and/or of falling afoul of the law (which prohibits scientists at government institutes from criticising government policies in the press). By extension, an association like SJAI that pools journalists (and communicators) together should also be expected to help alleviate journalists’ specific needs.

To its credit, SJAI 2023 did to the extent that it could, and I think will continue to do so; the point is that any other (science-)journalistic body in the country should do so as well and also ensure it doesn’t lose sight of the issues specific to each community.

An ‘expanded’ heuristic to evaluate science as a non-scientist

The Hindu publishes a column called ‘Notebook’ every Friday, in which journalists in the organisation open windows big or small into their work, providing glimpses into their process and thinking – things that otherwise remain out of view in news articles, analyses, op-eds, etc. Quite a few of them are very insightful. A recent example was Maitri Porecha’s column about looking for closure in the aftermath of the Balasore train accident.

I’ve written twice for the section thus far, both times about a matter that has stayed with me for a decade, manifesting at different times in different ways. The first edition was about being able to tell whether a given article or claim is real or phony irrespective of whether you have a science background. I had proposed the following eight-point checklist that readers could follow (quoted verbatim):

  1. If the article talks about effects on people, was the study conducted with people or with mice?
  2. How many people participated in a study? Fewer than a hundred is always worthy of scepticism.
  3. Does the article claim that a study has made exact predictions? Few studies actually can.
  4. Does the article include a comment from an independent expert? This is a formidable check against poorly-done studies.
  5. Does the article link to the paper it is discussing? If not, please pull on this thread.
  6. If the article invokes the ‘prestige’ of a university and/or the journal, be doubly sceptical.
  7. Does the article mention the source of funds for a study? A study about wine should not be funded by a vineyard.
  8. Use simple statistical concepts, like conditional probabilities and Benford’s law, and common sense together to identify extraordinary claims, and then check if they are accompanied by extraordinary evidence.

The second was about whether science journalists are scientists – which is related to the first on the small matter of faith: i.e. that science journalists are purveyors of information that we expect readers to ‘take up’ on trust and faith, and that an article that teaches readers any science needs to set this foundation carefully.

After having published the second edition, I came across a ‘Policy Forum’ article published in October 2022 in Science entitled ‘Science, misinformation, and the role of education’. Among other things, it presents a “‘fast and frugal’ heuristic” – a three-step algorithm with which competent outsiders [can] evaluate scientific information”. I was glad to see that this heuristic included many points in my eight-point checklist, but it also went a step ahead and discussed two things that perhaps more engaged readers would find helpful. One of them however requires an important disclaimer, in my opinion.

DOI: 10.1126/science.abq80

The additions are about consensus, expressed through the questions (numbering mine):

  1. “Is there a consensus among the relevant scientific experts?”
  2. “What is the nature of any disagreement/what do the experts agree on?”
  3. “What do the most highly regarded experts think?”
  4. “What range of findings are deemed plausible?”, and
  5. “What are the risks of being wrong?”

No. 3 is interesting because “regard” is of course subjective as well as cultural. For example, well-regarded scientists could be those that have published in glamorous journals like Nature, Science, Cell, etc. But as the recent hoopla about Ranga Dias having three papers about near-room-temperature superconductivity retracted in one year – with two published in Nature – showed us, this is no safeguard against bad science. In fact, even winning a Nobel Prize isn’t a guarantee of good science (see e.g. reports about Gregg Semenza and Luc Montagnier). As the ‘Policy Forum’ article also states:

“Undoubtedly, there is still more that the competent outsider needs to know. Peer-reviewed publication is often regarded as a threshold for scientific trust. Yet while peer review is a valuable step, it is not designed to catch every logical or methodological error, let alone detect deliberate fraud. A single peer-reviewed article, even in a leading journal, is just that—a single finding—and cannot substitute for a deliberative consensus. Even published work is subject to further vetting in the community, which helps expose errors and biases in interpretation. Again, competent outsiders need to know both the strengths and limits of scientific publications. In short, there is more to teach about science than the content of science itself.”

Yet “regard” matters because the people at large pay attention to notions like “well-regarded”, which is as much a comment about societal preferences as what scientists themselves have aspired to over the years. This said, on technical matters, this particular heuristic would fail only a small part of time (based on my experience).

It would fail a lot more if it is applied in the middle of a cultural shift, e.g. regarding expectations of the amount of effort a good scientist is expected to dedicate to their work. Here, “well-regarded” scientists – typically people who started doing science decades ago, have persisted in their respective fields, and have finally risen to positions of prominence, and are thus likely to be white and male, and who seldom had to bother with running a household and raising children – will have an answer that reflects the result of these privileges, but which would be at odds with the direction of the shift (i.e. towards better work-life balance, less time than before devoted to research, and contracts amended to accommodate these demands).

In fact, even if the “well-regarded” heuristic might suffice to judge a particular scientific claim, it still carries the risk of hewing in favour of the opinions of people with the aforementioned privileges. These concerns also apply to the three conditions listed under #2 in the heuristic graphic above: “Reputation among peers”, “credentials and institutional context”, “relevant professional experience”, all of which have historically been more difficult for non-cis-het male scientists to acquire. But we must work with what we have.

In this sense, the last question is less subjective and more telling: “What are the risks of being wrong?” If a scientist avoids a view and simultaneously also avoids an adverse outcome for themselves, then it’s possible they avoided the view in order to avoid the outcome and not because the view is implicitly disagreeable.

The authors of the article, Jonathan Osborne and Daniel Pimentel, both of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, have grounded their heuristic in the “social nature of science” and the “social mechanisms and practices that science has for resolving disagreement and attaining consensus”. This is obviously more robust (than my checklist grounded in my limited experiences), but I think it could also have discussed the intersection of the social facets of science with gender and class. Otherwise, the risk is that, while the heuristic will help “competent outsiders” better judge scientific claims, it will do as little as its predecessor to uncover the effects of intersectional biases that persist in the “social mechanisms” of science.

The alternative, of course, is to leave out “well-regarded” altogether – but the trouble there, I suspect, is we might be lying to ourselves if we pretended a scientist’s regard didn’t or ought not to matter, which is why I didn’t go there…

The identity of scientific papers

This prompt arose in response to Stuart Ritchie’s response to a suggestion in an editorial “first published last year but currently getting some attention on Twitter” – that scientists should write their scientific papers as if they were telling a story, with a beginning, middle and end. The act of storytelling produces something entertaining by definition, but it isn’t the same as when people build stories around what they know. That is, people build stories around what they know but that knowledge, when it is first produced, isn’t and in fact can’t be reliably produced through acts of storytelling. This is Ritchie’s point, and it’s clearly true. As Ash Jogalekar commented on Twitter on Ritchie’s post

(This is different from saying scientific knowledge shouldn’t be associated with stories – or that only it should be, a preference that philosopher of science Robert P. Crease calls “scientific gaslighting”.)

Ritchie’s objection arises from a problematic recommendation in the 2021 editorial, that when writing their papers, scientists present the “take-home messages” first, then “select” the methods and results that produced those messages, and then conclude with an introduction-discussion hybrid. To Ritchie, scientists don’t face much resistance, as they’re writing their papers, other than their own integrity that keeps them from cherry-picking from their data to support predetermined conclusions. This is perfectly reasonable, especially considering the absence of such resistance manifested in science’s sensational replication crisis.

But are scientific papers congruent with science itself?

The 2021 editorial’s authors don’t do themselves any favours in their piece, writing:

“The scientific story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. These three components can, and should, map onto the typical IMRaD structure. However, as editors we see many manuscripts that follow the IMRaD structure but do not tell a good scientific story, even when the underlying data clearly can provide one. For example, many studies present the findings without any synthesis or an effort to place them into a wider context. This limits the reader’s ability to gain knowledge and understanding, hence reducing the papers impact.”

Encouraging scientists to do such things as build tension and release it with a punchline, say, could be a recipe for disaster. The case of Brian Wansink in fact fits Ritchie’s concerns to a T. In the most common mode of scientific publishing today, narrative control is expected to lie beyond scientists – and (coming from a science journalist) lies with science journalists. Or at least: the opportunities to shape science-related narratives are available in large quantities to us.

A charitable interpretation of the editorial is that its authors would like scientists to take a step that they believe to be marginal (“right there,” as they say) in terms of the papers’ narratives but which has extraordinary benefits – but I’m disinclined. Their words hew frustratingly but unsurprisingly close to suggesting that scientists’ work isn’t properly represented in the public imagination. The most common suggestions I’ve encountered in my experience are that science journalists don’t amplify the “right” points and that they dwell on otherwise trivial shortcomings. The criticisms generally disregard the socio-political context in which science operates and to which journalists are required to be attuned.

This said, and as Ritchie also admits, the scientific paper itself is not science – so why can’t it be repurposed to ends that scientists are better off meeting than one that’s widely misguided? Ritchie writes:

“Science isn’t a story – and it isn’t even a scientific paper. The mere act of squeezing a complex process into a few thousand words … is itself a distortion of reality. Every time scientists make a decision about “framing” or “emphasis” or “take-home messages”, they risk distorting reality even further, chipping away at the reliability of what they’re reporting. We all know that many science news articles and science books are over-simplified, poorly-framed, and dumbed-down. Why push scientific papers in the same direction?”

That is, are scientific papers the site of knowledge production? With the advent of preprint papers, research preregistration and open-data and data-sharing protocols, many papers of today are radically different from those a decade or two ago. Especially online, and on the pages of more progressive journals like eLife, papers are accompanied by peer-reviewers’ comments, links to the raw data (code as well as multimedia), ways to contact the authors, a comments section, a ready-reference list of cited papers, and links to other articles that have linked to it. Sometimes some papers deemed to be more notable by a journal’s editors are also published together with commentary by an independent scientist on the papers’ implications for the relevant fields.

Scientific papers may have originated as, and for a long time have been, the ‘first expression’ of a research group’s labour to produce knowledge, and thus perfectly subject to Ritchie’s concerns about transforming them to be more engaging. But today, given the opportunities that are available in some pockets of research assessment and publishing, they’re undeniably the sites of knowledge consumption – and in effect the ‘first expression’ of researchers’ attempts to communicate with other scientists as well as, in many cases, the public at large.

It’s then effectively down to science journalists, and the resistance offered by their integrity to report on papers responsibly – although even then we should beware the “seduction of storytelling”.

I think the 2021 editorial is targetting the ‘site of knowledge consumption’ identity of the contemporaneous scientific paper, and offers ways to engage its audience better. But when the point is to improve it, why continue to work with, in Ritchie’s and the editorial’s words, a “journal-imposed word count” and structure?

A halfway point between the editorial’s recommendations and Ritchie’s objections (in his post, but more in line with his other view that we should do away with scientific papers altogether) is to publish the products of scientific labour taking full advantage of what today’s information and communication technologies allow: without a paper per se but a concise description of the methods and the findings, an explicitly labeled commentary by the researchers, the raw code, multimedia elements with tools to analyse them in real-time, replication studies, even honest (and therefore admirable) retraction reports if they’re warranted. The commentary can, in the words of the editorial, have “a beginning, a middle and an end”; and in this milieu, in the company of various other knowledge ‘blobs’, readers – including independent scientists – should be able to tell straightforwardly if the narrative fits the raw data on offer.

All this said, I must add that what I have set out here are far from where reality is at the moment; in Ritchie’s words,

“Although those of us … who’ve been immersed in this stuff for years might think it’s a bit passé to keep going on about “HARKing” and “researcher degrees of freedom” and “p-hacking” and “publication bias” and “publish-or-perish” and all the rest, the word still hasn’t gotten out to many scientists. At best, they’re vaguely aware that these problems can ruin their research, but don’t take them anywhere near seriously enough.”

I don’t think scientific papers are co-identifiable with science itself, or they certainly needn’t be. The latter is concerned with reliably producing knowledge of increasingly higher quality while the former explains what the researchers did, why, when and how. Their goals are different, and there’s no reason the faults of one should hold the other back. However, a research communication effort that has completely and perfectly transitioned to embodying the identity of the modern research paper (an anachronism) as the site of, among other things, knowledge consumption is a long way away – but it helps to bear it in mind, to talk about it and to improve it.

Saying bye to The Wire

Today, November 30, is my last day at The Wire Science and The Wire. I was part of their founding team and the seven years since have made for an exciting and enriching ride.

The two things I’m most grateful for were all the new friends I made in this time and the freedom to imagine a ‘The Wire‘s brand of science journalism’. We published a lot of science, health, environment and spaceflight writing of the very highest standard, and it’s my privilege to count the bylines of several stellar writers on the pages of The Wire Science.

Many of our articles have won awards and, equally importantly, renewed interest in areas of study and work, became books and teaching materials, the starting points for PhD programmes and, perhaps most gratifying of all, prompted people to think about science a bit differently.

Come January 2023, I will be joining The Hindu in a role that I’m quite excited by. I’m especially looking forward to focusing on my own work, which I haven’t been able to do for a while. Running The Wire Science was (and is) an exacting task and at The Hindu I’m also looking forward to lightening some of that load.

Thank you all for reading what The Wire Science has published – and, I hope, will continue to do so. Going ahead, please also divert a little bit of your reading time to The Hindu. 🙂 I’m counting on your constructive criticism, as always.

The strange NYT article on taming minks

I’m probably waking up late to this but the New York Times has published yet another article in which it creates a false balance by first focusing on the problematic side of a story for an inordinately long time, without any of the requisite qualifications and arguments, before jumping, in the last few paragraphs to one or two rebuttals that reveal, for the first time, that there could in fact be serious problems with all that came before.

The first instance was about a study on the links between one’s genes and facial features. The second is a profile of a man named Joseph Carter who tames minks. The article is headlined ‘How ‘the Most Vicious, Horrible Animal Alive’ Became a YouTube Star’. You’d think minks are “vicious” and “horrible” because they’re aggressive or something like that, but no – you discover the real reason all the way down in paragraph #12:

“Pretty much everyone I asked, they told me the same thing — ‘They’re the most vicious, horrible animal alive,’” Mr. Carter said. “‘They’re completely untamable, untrainable, and it doesn’t really matter what you do.’”

So, in 2003, he decided that he would start taming mink. He quickly succeeded.

Putting such descriptors as “vicious” and “horrible” in single-quotes in the headline doesn’t help if those terms are being used – by unnamed persons, to boot – to mean minks are hard to tame. That just makes them normal. But the headline’s choice of words (and subsequently the refusal by the first 82% (by number of paragraphs) of the piece to engage with the issue) gives the impression that the newspaper is going to ignore that. A similar kind of dangerous ridiculousness emerges further down the piece, with no sense of irony:

“You can’t control, you can’t change the genetics of an individual,” he said. “But you can, with the environment, slightly change their view of life.”

Why do we need to change minks’ view of anything? Right after, the article segues to a group of researchers at a veterinary college in London, whose story appears to supply the only redeeming feature of Carter’s games with minks: the idea that in order to conduct their experiments with minks, the team would have to design more challenging tasks with higher rewards than they were handing out. Other than this, there’s very little to explain why Carter does what he does.

There’s a flicker of an insight when a canal operator says Carter helps them trap the “muskrats, rats, raccoons and beavers” that erode the canal’s banks. There’s another flicker when the article says Carter buys “many of his animals” from fur farms, where the animals are killed before they’re a year old when in fact they could live to three, as they do with Carter. Towards the very end, we learn, Carter also prays for his minks every night.

So he’s saving them in the sort of way the US saves other countries?

It’s hard to say when he’s also setting out to tame these animals to – as the article seems to suggest – see if he can succeed. In fact, the article is so poorly composed and structured that it’s hard to say if the story it narrates is a faithful reflection of Carter’s sensibilities or if it’s just lazy writing. We never find out if Carter has ever considered ‘rescuing’ these animals and releasing them into the wild or if he has considered joining experts and activists fighting to have the animal farms shut. We only have the vacuous claim that is Carter’s belief that he’s giving them a “new life”.

The last 18% of the article also contains a few quotes that I’d call weak for not being sharp enough to poke more holes in Carter’s views, at least as the New York Times seems to relay them. There is one paragraph citing a 2001 study about what makes mink stressed and another about the welfare of Carter’s minks being better than those that are caged in the farms. But the authors appear to have expended no sincere effort to link them together vis-à-vis Carter’s activities.

In fact, there is a quote by a scientist introduced to rationalise Carter’s views: “It’s like any thoroughbred horse, or performance animal — or birds of prey who go out hunting. If asked, they probably would prefer to hunt.” Wouldn’t you think that if they were asked, and if they could provide an answer that we could understand, they would much rather be free of all constraints rather than being part of Carter’s circus?

There is also a dubious presumption here that creates a false choice – between being caged in a farm and being tamed by a human: that the minks ought to be grateful because some humans are choosing to stress them less, instead of not stress them whatsoever. Whether a mink might be killed by predators or have a harder time finding food in the wild, if it is released, is completely irrelevant.

Then comes the most infuriating sentence of the lot, following the scientist’s quote: “Mr. Carter has his own theories.” Not ideas or beliefs but theories. Because scientists’ theories, tested as they need to be against our existing body of knowledge and with experiments designed to eliminate even inadvertent bias, are at least semantically equivalent to Carter’s “own theories”, founded on his individual need for self-justification and harmony with the saviour complex.

And then the last paragraph:

“Animals don’t have ethics,” he said. “They have sensation, they can feel pain, they have the ability to learn, but they don’t have ethics. That’s a human thing.”

I don’t know how to make sense of it, other than with the suspicion that the authors and/or editors grafted these lines to the bottom because they sounded profound.

Yes, scientific journals should publish political rebuttals

(The headline is partly click-bait, as I admit below, because some context is required.) From ‘Should scientific journals publish political debunkings?’, Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie, August 27, 2022:

Earlier this week, the “news and analysis” section of the journal Science … published … a point-by-point rebuttal of a monologue a few days earlier from the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight, where the eponymous host excoriated Dr. Anthony Fauci, of “seen everywhere during the pandemic” fame. … The Science piece noted that “[a]lmost everything Tucker Carlson said… was misleading or false”. That’s completely correct – so why did I have misgivings about the Science piece? It’s the kind of thing you see all the time on dedicated political fact-checking sites – but I’d never before seen it in a scientific journal. … I feel very conflicted on whether this is a sensible idea. And, instead of actually taking some time to think it through and work out a solid position, in true hand-wringing style I’m going to write down both sides of the argument in the form of a dialogue – with myself.

There’s one particular exchange between Ritchie and himself in his piece that threw me off the entire point of the article:

[Ritchie-in-favour-of-Science-doing-this]: Just a second. This wasn’t published in the peer-reviewed section of Science! This isn’t a refereed paper – it’s in the “News and Analysis” section. Wouldn’t you expect an “Analysis” article to, like, analyse things? Including statements made on Fox News?

[Ritchie-opposed-to-Science-doing-this]: To be honest, sometimes I wonder why scientific journals have a “News and Analysis” section at all – or, I wonder if it’s healthy in the long run. In any case, clearly there’s a big “halo” effect from the peer-reviewed part: people take the News and Analysis more seriously because it’s attached to the very esteemed journal. People are sharing it on social media because it’s “the journal Science debunking Tucker Carlson” – way fewer people would care if it was just published on some random news site. I don’t think you can have it both ways by saying it’s actually nothing to do with Science the peer-reviewed journal.

[Ritchie-in-favour]: I was just saying they were separate, rather than entirely unrelated, but fair enough.

Excuse me but not at all fair enough! The essential problem is the tie-ins between what a journal does, why it does them and what impressions they uphold in society.

First, Science‘s ‘news and analysis’ section isn’t distinguished by its association with the peer-reviewed portion of the journal but by its own reportage and analyses, intended for scientists and non-scientists alike. (Mea culpa: the headline of this post answers the question in the headline of Ritchie’s post, while being clear in the body that there’s a clear distinction between the journal and its ‘news and analysis’ section.) A very recent example was Charles Piller’s investigative report that uncovered evidence of image manipulation in a paper that had an outsized influence on the direction of Alzheimer’s research since it was published in 2006. When Ritchie writes that the peer-reviewed journal and the ‘news and analysis’ section are separate, he’s right – but when he suggests that the former’s prestige is responsible for the latter’s popularity, he’s couldn’t be more wrong.

Ritchie is a scientist and his position may reflect that of many other scientists. I recommend that he and others who agree with him consider the section from the PoV of a science journalist, when they will immediately see as we do that it has broken many agenda-setting stories as well as has published several accomplished journalists and scientists (Derek Lowe’s column being a good example). Another impression that could change with the change of perspective is the relevance of peer-review itself, and the deceptively deleterious nature of an associated concept he repeatedly invokes, which could as well be the pseudo-problem at the heart of Ritchie’s dilemma: prestige. To quote from a blog post in which University of Regensburg neurogeneticist Björn Brembs analysed the novelty of results published by so-called ‘prestigious’ journals, and published in February this year:

Taken together, despite the best efforts of the professional editors and best reviewers the planet has to offer, the input material that prestigious journals have to deal with appears to be the dominant factor for any ‘novelty’ signal in the stream of publications coming from these journals. Looking at all articles, the effect of all this expensive editorial and reviewer work amounts to probably not much more than a slightly biased random selection, dominated largely by the input and to probably only a very small degree by the filter properties. In this perspective, editors and reviewers appear helplessly overtaxed, being tasked with a job that is humanly impossible to perform correctly in the antiquated way it is organized now.

In sum:

Evidence suggests that the prestige signal in our current journals is noisy, expensive and flags unreliable science. There is a lack of evidence that the supposed filter function of prestigious journals is not just a biased random selection of already self-selected input material. As such, massive improvement along several variables can be expected from a more modern implementation of the prestige signal.

Take the ‘prestige’ away and one part of Ritchie’s dilemma – the journal Science‘s claim to being an “impartial authority” that stands at risk of being diluted by its ‘news and analysis’ section’s engagement with “grubby political debates” – evaporates. Journals, especially glamour journals like Science, haven’t historically been authorities on ‘good’ science, such as it is, but have served to obfuscate the fact that only scientists can be. But more broadly, the ‘news and analysis’ business has its own expensive economics, and publishers of scientific journals that can afford to set up such platforms should consider doing so, in my view, with a degree and type of separation between these businesses according to their mileage. The simple reasons are:

1. Reject the false balance: there’s no sensible way publishing a pro-democracy article (calling out cynical and potentially life-threatening untruths) could affect the journal’s ‘prestige’, however it may be defined. But if it does, would the journal be wary of a pro-Republican (and effectively anti-democratic) scientist refusing to publish on its pages? If so, why? The two-part answer is straightforward: because many other scientists as well as journal editors are still concerned with the titles that publish papers instead of the papers themselves, and because of the fundamental incentives of academic publishing – to publish the work of prestigious scientists and sensational work, as opposed to good work per se. In this sense, the knock-back is entirely acceptable in the hopes that it could dismantle the fixation on which journal publishes which paper.

2. Scientific journals already have access to expertise in various fields of study, as well as an incentive to participate in the creation of a sensible culture of science appreciation and criticism.

Featured image: Tucker Carlson at an event in West Palm Beach, Florida, December 19, 2020. Credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.