The Wire Science – Close Read

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.

On Agnihotri’s Covaxin film, defamation, and false bravery

Vivek Agnihotri’s next film, The Vaccine War, is set to be released on September 28. It is purportedly about the making of Covaxin, the COVID-19 vaccine made by Bharat Biotech, and claims to be based on real events. Based on watching the film’s trailer and snippets shared on Twitter, I can confidently state that while the basis of the film’s narrative may or may not be true, the narrative itself is not. The film’s principal antagonist appears to be a character named Rohini Singh Dhulia, played by Raima Sen, who is the science editor of a news organisation called The Daily Wire. Agnihotri has said that this character is based on his ‘research’ on the journalism of The Wire during, and about, the pandemic, presumably at the time of and immediately following the DCGI’s approval for Covaxin. Agnihotri and his followers on Twitter have also gone after science journalist Priyanka Pulla, who wrote many articles in this period for The Wire. At the time, I was the science editor of The Wire. Dhulia appears to have lovely lines in the film like “India can’t do this” and “the government will fail”, the latter uttered with visible glee.

It has been terribly disappointing to see senior ICMR scientists promoting the film as well as the film (according to the trailer, at least) confidently retaining the name of Balram Bhargava for the character as well; for the uninitiated, Bhargava was the ICMR director-general during the pandemic. (One of his aides also has make-up strongly resembling Raman Gangakhedkar.) In Pulla’s words, “the political capture of this institution is complete”. The film has also been endorsed by Sudha Murthy and received a tone-deaf assessment by film critic Baradwaj Rangan, among other similar displays of support. One thing that caught my eye is that the film also retains the ICMR logo, logotype, and tagline as is (see screenshot below from the trailer).

The logo appears on the right of the screen as well as at the top-left, together with the name of NIV, the government facility that provided the viral material for and helped developed Covaxin. This is notable: AltBalaji, the producer of the TV show M.O.M. – The Women Behind Mission Mangal, was prevented from showing ISRO’s rockets as is because the show’s narrative was a fictionalised version of real events. A statement from AltBalaji to The Wire Science at the time, in 2019, when I asked why the show’s posters showed the Russian Soyuz rocket and the NASA Space Shuttle instead of the PSLV and the GSLV, said it was “legally bound not to use actual names or images of the people, objects or agencies involved”. I don’t know if the 2019 film Mission Mangal was bound by similar terms: its trailer shows a rocket very much resembling the GSLV Mk III (now called LVM-3) sporting the letters “S R O”, instead of “I S R O” ; the corresponding Hindi letters “स” and “रो”; and a different logo below the letters “G S L V” instead of the first “I” (screenshot below). GSLV is still the official designation of the launch vehicle, and a step further from what the TV show was allowed. And while the film also claims to be based on real events, its narrative is also fictionalised (read my review and fact-check).

Yet ICMR’s representation in The Vaccine War pulls no punches: its director-general at the time is represented by name and all its trademark assets are on display. It would seem the audience is to believe that they’re receiving a documentarian’s view of real events at ICMR. The film has destroyed the differences between being based on a true story and building on that to fictionalise for dramatic purposes. Perhaps more importantly: while AltBalaji was “legally bound” to not use official ISRO imagery, including those of the rockets, because it presented a fiction, The Vaccine War has been freed of the same legal obligation even though it seems to be operating on the same terms. This to me is my chief symptom of ICMR’s political capture.

Of course, that Agnihotri is making a film based on a ‘story’ that might include a matter that is sub judice is also problematic. As you may know, Bharat Biotech filed a defamation case against the Foundation for Independent Journalism in early 2022; this foundation publishes The Wire and The Wire Science. I’m a defendant in the case, as are fellow journalists and science communicators Priyanka Pulla, Neeta Sanghi, Jammi Nagaraj Rao, and Banjot Kaur, among others. But while The Wire is fighting the case, it will be hard to say before watching The Vaccine War as to whether the film actually treads on forbidden ground. I’m also not familiar with the freedoms that filmmakers do and don’t have in Indian law (and the extent to which the law maps to common sense and intuition). That said, while we’re on the topic of the film, the vaccine, defamation, and the law, I’d like to highlight something important.

In 2022, Bharat Biotech sought and received an ex parte injunction from a Telangana court against the allegedly offending articles published by The Wire and The Wire Science, and had them forcibly taken down. The court also prevented the co-defendants from publishing articles on Covaxin going forward and filed a civil defamation case, seeking Rs 100 crore in damages. As the legal proceedings got underway, I started to speak to lawyers and other journalists about implications of the orders, whether specific actions are disallowed on my part, and the way courts deal with such matters – and discovered something akin to a labyrinth that’s also a minefield. There’s a lot to learn. While the law may be clear about something, how a contention winds its way through the judicial system is both barely organised and uncodified. Rahul Gandhi’s own defamation case threw informative light on the role of judges’ discretion and the possibility of a jail term upon conviction, albeit for the criminal variety of the case.

The thing I resented the most, on the part of sympathetic lawyers, legal scholars, and journalists alike, is the view that it’s the mark of a good journalist to face down a defamation case in their career. Whatever its origins, this belief’s time is up in a period when defamation cases are being filed at the drop of a hat. It’s no longer a specific mark of good journalism. Like The Wire, I and my co-defendants stand by the articles we wrote and published, but it remains good journalism irrespective of whether it has also been accused of defamation.

Second, the process is the punishment, as the adage goes, yet by valorising the presence of a defamation case in a journalist’s record, it seeks to downplay the effects of the process itself. These effects include the inherent uncertainty; the unfamiliar procedures, documentation, and their contents and purposes; the travelling, especially to small towns, and planning ahead (taking time off work, availability of food, access to clean bathrooms, local transport, etc.); the obscure rules of conduct within courtrooms and the varying zeal with which they’re implemented; the variety and thus intractability of options for legal succour; and the stress, expenses, and the anxiety. So please, thanks for your help, but spare me the BS of how I’m officially a good journalist.

Anonymity in journalism and a conflict of ethics

I wrote the following essay at the invitation of a journal in December 2020. (This was the first draft. There were additional drafts that incorporated feedback from a few editors.) It couldn’t be published because I had to back out of the commission owing to limitations of time and health. I formally withdrew my submission on April 11, 2022, and am publishing it in full below.

Anonymity in journalism and a conflict of ethics

Tiger’s dilemma

I once knew a person, whom I will call Tiger, who worked with the Government of India. Tiger was in a privileged position within the government, not very removed from the upper echelons in fact, and had substantial influence on policies and programmes lying in their domain. (Tiger himself was not a member of any political parties.) Tiger’s work was also commendable: their leadership from within the state had improved the working conditions of and opportunities for people in the corresponding fields, so much so that Tiger was generally well-regarded by their peers and colleagues around the country. Tiger had also produced high-quality work in their domain, which I say here to indicate Tiger’s all-round excellence.

But while Tiger ascended through government ranks, the Government of India itself was becoming more detestable – feeding communal discontentment, promoting pseudoscience, advancing crony capitalism and arresting/harassing dissidents. At various points in time, the actions and words of ministers and senior party leaders outright conflicted with the work and the spirit that Tiger and their department stood for – yet Tiger never spoke a word against the state or the party. As the government’s actions grew more objectionable, the more Tiger’s refusal to object became conspicuous.

I used to have trouble judging Tiger’s inaction because I had trouble settling a contest between two ethical loci: values versus outcomes. The question here was that, in the face of a dire threat, such as a vengeful government, how much could I ask of my compatriots? It is undeniably crucial to join protests on the streets and demonstrate the strength of numbers – but if the government almost always responds by having police tear-gas protesters or jail a few and keep them there on trumped-up charges under draconian laws for months on end, it becomes morally painful to insist that people join protests. I might wither under the demand of condemning anyone, but especially the less privileged, to such fates. (The more-privileged of course can and should be expected to do more, and fear the consequences of state viciousness less.)

If Tiger had spoken up against the prime minister or any of the other offending ministers, Tiger would have lost their position within the government, could in fact have become persona non grata in the state’s eyes, and become earmarked for further disparagement. As symbols go, speaking up against an errant government is a powerful one – especially when it originates from a person like Tiger. However, speaking up will still only be a symbol, and not an outcome. If Tiger had stayed silent to continue to retain their influential place within the government, there is a chance that Tiger’s department may have continued its good work. The implication here is that outcomes trump values.

Then again, I presume here that the power of symbols is predictable or even finite in any way, or that they are always inferior to action on the ground, so to speak. This need not be true. For example, if Tiger had spoken up, their peers could have been motivated to speak up as well, avalanching over time into a coordinated, collectivised refusal to cooperate with government initiatives that required their support. It is a remote possibility but it exists; more importantly, it is not for me to dismiss. And it is at least just as tempting to believe values trump outcomes, or certainly complement them.

Now, depending on which relationship is true – values over outcomes or vice versa – we still have to contend with the same defining question before we can draw a line between whom to forgive and whom to punish. Put another way, when confronted with deadly force, how much can you ask of your compatriots? There can’t be shame in bending like grasses against a punishing wind, but at the same time someone somewhere must grow a spine. Then again, not everyone may draw the line between these two sides at the same place. This is useful context to consider issues surrounding anonymity and pseudonymity in journalism today.

Anonymity in journalism

Every now and then, The Wire and The Wire Science receive requests from authors to not have their names attached to their articles. In 2020, The Wire Science, which I edit, published at least three articles without a name or under a pseudonym. Anonymity as such has been commonly around for much longer vis-à-vis government officials and experts being quoted saying sensitive things, and individuals whose stories are worth sharing but whose identities are not. It is nearly impossible to regulate journalism, without ‘breaking’ it, from anywhere but the inside. As evasive as this sounds, what is in the public interest is often too fragile to survive the same accountability and transparency we demand of government, or even what the law offers to protect. So the channels to compose and transport such information should be able to be as private as individual liberties and ethical obligations can allow.

Anonymity is as a matter of principle possible, and journalists (should) have the liberty, and also the integrity, to determine who deserves it. It may help to view anonymity as a duty instead of as a right. For example, we have all come across many stories this year in which reporters quoted unnamed healthcare workers and government officials to uncover important details of the Government of India’s response to the country’s COVID-19 epidemic. Without presuming to know the nature of relationships between these ‘sources’ and the respective reporters, we can say they all likely share Tiger’s (erstwhile) dilemma: they are on the frontline and they are needed there, but if they speak up and have their identities known, they may lose their ability to stay there.

The state of defence reporting in India could offer an important contrast. Unlike health (although this could be changing), India’s defence has always been shrouded in secrecy, especially on matters of nuclear weapons, terrorist plots, military installations, etc. Not too long ago, one defence reporter began citing unnamed sources to write up a series of articles about a new chapter of terrorist activities in India’s north. A mutual colleague at the time told me he was unsettled by the series: while unnamed sources are not new, the colleague explained, this reporter almost never named anyone – except perhaps those making banal statements.

Many health-related institutions and activities in India need to abide by the requirements of the Right to Information Act, but defence has few such obligations. In such cases, there is no way for the consumers of journalism – the people at large – to ascertain the legitimacy of such reports and in fact have no option but to trust the reporter. But this doesn’t mean the reporter can do what they wish; there are some simple safeguards to prevent mistakes. One as ubiquitous as it is effective is to allow an offended party in the story to defend itself, with some caveats.

A notable example of such an incident from the last decade was the 2014 Rolling Stone investigation about an alleged incident of rape on the University of Virginia campus. The reporter had trusted her source and hid her identity in the article, using only the mononym ‘Jackie’. Jackie had alleged that she had been raped by a group of men during a fraternity party. However, other reporters subsequently noticed a series of inconsistencies that quickly snowballed into the alarming revelation that Jackie had probably fabricated the incident, and Rolling Stone had missed it. In this case, Rolling Stone itself claimed to have been duped, but managing editor Will Dana’s note to readers published after a formal investigation had wound up contains a telling passage:

“In trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault, we made a judgment – the kind of judgment reporters and editors make every day. We should have not made this agreement with Jackie and we should have worked harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story.”

Another ‘defence’ is rooted in news literacy: as a reader, try when you can to consider multiple accounts of a common story, as reported by multiple outlets, and look for at least one independently verifiable detail. There must be something, but if there isn’t, consider it a signal that the story is at best located halfway between truth and fiction, awaiting judgment. Fortunately (in a way), science, environment and health stories frequently pass this test – or at least they used to. While an intrepid Business Standard reporter might have tracked down a crucial detail by speaking to an expert who wished to remain unnamed, someone at The Wire or The Hindu, or an enterprising freelance journalist, will soon have been able to get someone else on the record, or find a document in the public domain attesting to the truth of the claim.

Identity as privilege

I use the past-tense because, since 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – which formed the national government then – has been vilifying any part of science that threatens the mythical history the party has sought to construct for itself and for the nation. The BJP is the ideological disciple of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and soon after the BJP’s ascent, members of groups affiliated with these organisations have murdered at least three anti-superstition activists and others have disrupted many a gathering of scholars, even as senior ministers in government have embarked on a campaign to erode scientific temper, appropriate R&D activities into the party’s communal programme and degrade or destabilise the scope for research that is guided by researchers’ interests, in favour of that of bureaucrats.

Under the party-friendly vice-chancellorship of M. Jagadesh Kumar, the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi has slid from being a national jewel to being blanketed in misplaced suspicions of secessionist activity. In January, students affiliated with the BJP’s student-politics wing went on a violent spree within the JNU campus, assaulting students and damaging university property, while Kumar did nothing to stop them. In November, well-known professors of the university’s school of physical sciences alleged that Kumar was intervening in unlawful ways with the school’s administration. Moushumi Basu, secretary of the teachers’ association, called the incident a first, since many faculty members had assumed Kumar wouldn’t interfere with the school of physical sciences, being a physical-sciences teacher himself.

(Edit, April 11, 2022: Kumar was succeeded in February 2022 by Santishree Pandit, and at the end of the first week of April, members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad assaulted JNU students on campus with stones over cooking non-vegetarian food on the occasion of Ram Navami.)

Shortly before India’s COVID-19 epidemic really bloomed, the Union government revoked the licence of the Manipal Institute of Virology to use foreign money to support its stellar, but in India insufficiently supported, research on viruses, on charges that remain unclear. The party’s government has confronted many other institutes with similar fates – triggering a chilling effect among scientists and pushing them further into their ivory towers.

In January 2020, I wrote about the unsettling case of a BJP functionary who had shot off an email asking university and institution heads to find out which of their students and faculty members had signed a letter condemning the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019. I discovered in the course of my reporting two details useful to understand the reasonable place of anonymous authorship in journalism. First, a researcher at one of the IISERs told me that the board of governors of their institute seemed to be amenable to the argument that since the institute receives funds via the education ministry (formerly the human resource development ministry), it does not enjoy complete autonomy. Second, while the Central Civil Services (Conduct) Rules 1964 do prevent employees of centrally funded institutions, including universities and research facilities, from commenting negatively on the government, they are vague at best about whether employees can protest on issues concerning their rights as citizens of the country.

These two conditions together imply that state-funded practitioners of scientific activities – from government hospital coroners to spokespersons of billion-dollar research facilities, from PhD scholars to chaired professors – can be arbitrarily denied opportunities to engage as civilians on important issues concerning all people, even as their rights on paper seem straightforward.

But even under unimaginable pressure to conform, I have found that many of India’s young scientists are still willing to – even insistent on – speaking up, joining public protests, writing and circulating forthright letters, championing democratic and socialist programmes, and tipping off journalists like myself to stories that need to be told. This makes my job as a journalist much easier, but I can’t treat their courage as permission to take advantage. They are still faced with threats whose full magnitude they may comprehend only later, or may be unaware of methods that don’t require them to endanger their lives or careers.

Earlier, postdoctoral scholars and young scientists may have been more wary than anything else of rubbing senior scientists the wrong way by, say, voicing concerns about a department or institute in the latter’s charge. Today, the biggest danger facing them is indefinite jail time, police brutality and avoidance by institutes that may wish to stay on the party’s good side. (And this is speaking only of the more privileged male scientists; others have only had it increasingly worse.)

Once again: how much can we ask of our compatriots? How much in particular can we ask of those who have reason to complain even as they stand to lose the most – the Dalits, the women, transgender people, the poor, the Adivasi, the non-English non-Hindi speakers, environmentalists, healthcare workers, migrant labourers, graveyard and crematorium operators, manual scavengers, the Muslims, Christians and members of other minority denominations, farmers and agricultural traders, cattle-rearers, and indeed just about anyone who is not male, rich, Brahmin? All of these people have stories worth sharing, but whose identities have been increasingly isolated, stigmatised and undermined. All of these people, including the young scientists as well, thus deserve to be quoted or published anonymously or pseudonymously – or their views may never be heard.

Paying the price of fiction

There are limitations, of course, and this is where ethical and responsible journalism can help. It is hard to trust an anonymous Twitter user issuing scandalous statements about a celebrity, and even harder to trust an anonymous writer laying claim to the credibility that comes with identifying as a scientist yet making unsubstantiated claims about other scientists – as necessary as such a tactic may seem to be. The safest and most responsible way forward is for a ‘source’ to work with a journalist such that the journalist tells the story, with the source supplying one set of quotes. This way, the source’s account will enjoy the benefit of being located in a journalistic narrative, in the company of other viewpoints, before it is broadcast. The journalist’s fundamental role here is to rescue doubts about one’s rights from the grey areas it occupies in the overlap between India’s laws and the wider political context.

However, it is often also necessary to let scientists, researchers, professors, doctors, etc. to say what they need to themselves, so that they may bring to bear the full weight of their authority as well as the attitudes they don as topical experts. There is certainly a difference between writing about Pushpa Mittra Bhargava’s statements on one hand and allowing Pushpa Mittra Bhargava to express himself directly on the other. Another example, but which doesn’t appeal to celebrity culture (such as it is in the halls of science!), is to let a relatively unknown but surely qualified epidemiologist write a thousand words in the style and voice of their choice about, say, the BJP’s attempts to communalise the epidemic. The message here is contained within the article’s arguments as well as in the writer’s credentials – but again, not necessarily in the writer’s religious or ethnic identity. Or, as the case may be, in their identity as powerless young scientists.

Ultimately, the most defensible request for anonymity is the one backed by evidence of reasonable risk of injury – physical or otherwise – and the BJP government has been steadily increasing this risk since 2014. Then again, none of this means those who have already received licence to write anonymously or pseudonymously also have license to shoot their mouths. Journalists have a responsibility to be as selective as they reasonably can to identify those who deserve to have their names hidden – with at least two editors signing off on the request instead of the commissioning editor alone, for example – and those who are selected to be reminded that the protection they have received is only for the performance of a necessary duty. Anonymity or even pseudonymity introduces one fiction into the narrative, and all fictions, now matter how trivial, are antithetical to narratives that offer important knowledge but also a demonstration of what good journalism is capable of. So it is important to not see this device as a reason for the journalist to invent more excuses to leave out or obfuscate yet other details in the name of fear or privacy. In fact, the inclusion of one fiction should force every other detail in the narrative to be that much more self-evidently true.

Though some authors may not like it, the decision to grant anonymity must also be balanced with the importance and uniqueness of the article in question. While anonymity may grant a writer the freedom to not pull their punches, the privilege also foists more responsibility on the editor to ensure the privilege is being granted for something that is in the public interest as well as can’t be obtained through any other means. One particular nuance is important here: the author should convince the editor that they are compelled to speak up. Anonymity shouldn’t be the only reason the article is being written. Otherwise, anonymity or pseudonymity will easily be excuses to fire from behind the publication’s shoulders. This may seem like a crude calculus but it also lies firmly in the realm of due diligence.

We may not be able to ask too much of our compatriots, but it is necessary to make sure the threats that face them are real and that they will not attempt to gain unfair advantages. In addition, the language must at all points be civil and devoid of polemic; every claim and hypothesis must be substantiated to the extent possible; if the author has had email or telephone conversations with other people, the call records and reporting notes must be preserved; and the author can’t say anything substantial that does not require their identity to be hidden. The reporter or the editor should include in the article the specific reason as to why anonymity has been granted. Finally, the commissioning editor reserves the right to back out of the arrangement anytime they become unsure. This condition simply reflects the author’s responsibility to convince the editor of the need for anonymity, even if specific details may never make it to the copy.

At the same time, in times as fraught as ours, it may be unreasonable to expect reporters and editors to never make a mistake, even of the Rolling Stone’s proportions (although I admit the Columbia University report on Rolling Stone’s mistakes is unequivocal in its assessment that the magazine made no mistakes it couldn’t have avoided). The straightforward checks that journalists employ to weed out as many mistakes as possible can never be 100% perfect, particularly during a pandemic of a new virus. Some mistakes can be found out only in hindsight, such as when one needs to prove the negative, or when a journalist is caught between the views of two accomplished scientists and one realises a mistake only later.

Instead, we should expect those who make mistakes to be prompt, honest and reflexive, especially smaller organisations that can’t yet afford independent fact-checkers. A period in which anonymous authorship is becoming more necessary, irrespective of its ad hoc moral validity, ought also to be a period in which newsroom managers and editors treat mistakes not as cardinal sins but as opportunities to strengthen the compact with their readers. One simple first step is to acknowledge post-publication corrections and modifications with a note plus a timestamp. Because let’s face it – journalists are duty-bound to walk the same doubts, ambiguities and fears that also punctuate their stories.

Broken clocks during the pandemic

Proponents of conspiracy theories during the pandemic, at least in India, appear to be like broken clocks: they are right by coincidence, without the right body of evidence to back their claims. Two of the most read articles published by The Wire Science in the last 15 months have been the fact-checks of Luc Montagnier’s comments on the two occasions he spoke up in the French press. On the first, he said the novel coronavirus couldn’t have evolved naturally; the second, he insisted mass vaccination was a big mistake. The context in which Montagnier published his remarks evolved considerably between the two events, and it tells an important story.

When Montagnier said in April 2020 that the virus was lab-made, the virus’s spread was just beginning to accelerate in India, Europe and the US, and the proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis to explain the virus’s origins had few listeners and were consigned firmly to the margins of popular discourse on the subject. In this environment, Montagnier’s comments stuck out like a sore thumb, and were easily dismissed.

But when Montagnier said in May 2021 that mass vaccination is a mistake, the context was quite different: in the intervening period, Nicholas Wade had published his article on why we couldn’t dismiss the lab-leak hypothesis so quickly; the WHO’s missteps were more widely known; China’s COVID-19 outbreak had come completely under control (actually or for all appearances); many vaccine-manufacturers’ immoral and/or unethical business practices had come to light; more people were familiar with the concept and properties of viral strains; the WHO had filed its controversial report on the possible circumstances of the virus’s origins in China; etc. As a result, speaking now, Montagnier wasn’t so quickly dismissed. Instead, he was, to many observers, the man who had got it right the first time, was brave enough to stick his neck out in support of an unpopular idea, and was speaking up yet again.

The problem here is that Luc Montagnier is a broken clock – in the way even broken clocks are right twice a day: not because they actually tell the time but because the time is coincidentally what the clock face is stuck at. On both occasions, the conclusions of Montagnier’s comments coincided with what conspiracists have been going on about since the pandemic’s start, but on both occasions, his reasoning was wrong. The same has been true of many other claims made during the pandemic. People have said things that have turned out to be true but they themselves have always been wrong, whenever they have been wrong, because their particular reasons for something to be true were wrong.

That is, unless you can say why you’re right, you’re not right. Unless you can explain why the time is what it is, you’re not a clock!

Montagnier’s case also illuminates a problem with soothsaying: if you wish to be a prophet, it is in your best interests to make as many predictions as possible – to increase the odds of reality coinciding with at least one prediction in time. And when such a coincidence does happen, it doesn’t mean the prophet was right; it means they weren’t wrong. There is a big difference between these positions, and which becomes pronounced when the conspiratorially-minded start incorporating every article published anywhere, from The Wire Science to The Daily Guardian, into their narratives of choice.

As the lab-leak hypothesis moved from the fringes of society to the centre and came mistakenly to conflate possibility with likelihood (i.e. zoonotic spillover and lab-leak are two valid hypotheses for the virus’s origins but they aren’t equally likely to be true), the conspiratorial proponents of the lab-leak hypotheses (the ones given to claiming Chinese scientists engineered the pathogen as a weapon, etc.) have steadily woven imaginary threads between the hypothesis and Indian scientists who opposed Covaxin’s approval, the Congress leaders who “mooted” vaccine hesitancy in their constituencies, scientists who made predictions that came to be wrong, even vaccines that were later found to have rare side-effects restricted to certain demographic groups.

The passage of time is notable here. I think adherents of lab-leak conspiracies are motivated by an overarching theory born entirely of speculation, not evidence, and who then pick and choose from events to build the case that the theory is true. I say ‘overarching’ because, to the adherents, the theory is already fully formed and true, and that pieces of it become visible to observers as and when the corresponding events play out. This could explain why time is immaterial to them. You and I know that Shahid Jameel and Gagandeep Kang cast doubt on Covaxin’s approval (and not Covaxin itself) after the time we were aware that Covaxin’s phase 3 clinical trials were only just getting started in December, and before Covishield’s side-effects in Europe and the US came to light (with the attendant misreporting). We know that at the time Luc Montagnier said the novel coronavirus was made in a lab, last year, we didn’t know nearly enough about the structural biology underlying the virus’s behaviour; we do now.

The order of events matters: we went from ignorance to knowledge, from knowing to knowing more, from thinking one thing to – in the face of new information – thinking another. But the conspiracy-theorists and their ideas lie outside of time: the order of events doesn’t matter; instead, to these people, 2021, 2022, 2023, etc. are preordained. They seem to be simply waiting for the coincidences to roll around.

An awareness of the time dimension (so to speak), or more accurately of the arrow of time, leads straightforwardly to the proper practice of science in our day-to-day affairs as well. As I said, unless you can say why you’re right, you’re not right. This is why effects lie in the future of causes, and why theories lie in the causal future of evidence. What we can say to be true at this moment depends entirely on what we know at this moment. If we presume what we can say at this moment to be true will always be true, we become guilty of dragging our theory into the causal history of the evidence – simply because we are saying that the theory will come true given enough time in which evidence can accrue.

This protocol (of sorts) to verify the truth of claims isn’t restricted to the philosophy of science, even if it finds powerful articulation there: a scientific theory isn’t true if it isn’t falsifiable outside its domain of application. It is equally legitimate and necessary in the daily practice of science and its methods, on Twitter and Facebook, in WhatsApp groups, every time your father, your cousin or your grand-uncle begins a question with “If the lab-leak hypothesis isn’t true…”.

The Wire Science is hiring

Location: Bengaluru or New Delhi

The Wire Science is looking for a sub-editor to conceptualise, edit and produce high-quality news articles and features in a digital newsroom.

Requirements

Good faculty with the English language
Excellent copy-editing skills
A strong news sense
A strong interest in new scientific findings
Know how to read scientific papers
Familiarity with concepts related to the scientific method and scientific publishing
Familiarity with popular social media platforms and their features
Familiarity with the WordPress content management system (CMS)
Ability to handle data (obtaining data, sorting and cleaning datasets, using tools like Flourish to visualise)
Strong reasoning skills
1-3 years’ work experience
Optional: have a background in science or engineering

Responsibilities

Edit articles according to The Wire Science‘s requirements, within tight deadlines
Make editorial decisions in reasonable time and communicate them constructively
Liaise with our reporters and freelancers, and work together to produce stories
Work with The Wire Science‘s editor to develop ideas for stories
Compose short news stories
Work on multimedia rendering of published stories (i.e. convert text stories to audio/video stories)
Work with the tech and audience engagement teams to help produce and implement features

Salary will be competitive.

Dalit, Adivasi, OBC and minority candidates are encouraged to apply.

If you’re interested, please write to Vasudevan Mukunth at science@thewire.in. Mention you’re applying for The Wire Science sub-editor position in the subject line of your email. In addition to attaching your resumé or CV, please include a short cover letter in the email’s body describing why you think you should be considered.

If your application is shortlisted, we will contact you for a written test followed by an interview.

A Q&A about my job and science journalism

A couple weeks ago, some students from a university in South India got in touch to ask a few questions about my job and about science communication. The correspondence was entirely over email, and I’m pasting it in full below (with permission). I’ve edited a few parts in one of two ways – to make myself clearer or to hide sensitive information – and removed one question because its purpose was clarificatory.

1) What does your role as a science editor look like day to day?

My day as science editor begins at around 7 am. I start off by catching up on the day’s headlines and other news, especially all the major newspapers and social media channels. I also handle a part of The Wire Science‘s social media presence, so I schedule some posts in the first hour.

Then, from 8 am onwards, I begin going through the publishing schedule – which is a document I prepare on the previous evening, listing all the articles that writers are expected to file on that day, as well as what I need to edit/publish and in which position on the homepage. At 9.30 am, my colleagues and I get on a conference call to discuss the day’s top stories and to hear from our reporters on which stories they will be pursuing that day (and any stories we might be chasing ourselves). The call lasts for about an hour.

From 10.30-11 am onwards, I edit articles, reply to emails, commission new articles, discuss potential story ideas with some reporters, scientists and my colleagues, check on the news cycle every now and then, make sure the site is running smoothly, discuss changes or tweaks to be made to the front-end with our tech team, and keep an eye on my finances (how much I’ve commissioned for, who I need to pay, payment deadlines, pending allocations, etc.).

All of this ends at about 4.30 pm. I close my laptop at that point but I continue to have work until 6 pm or so, mostly in the form of emails and maybe some calls. The last thing I do is prepare the publishing schedule for the next day. Then I shut shop.

2) With leading global newspapers restructuring the copy desk, what are the changes the Indian newspapers have made in the copy desk after the internet boom?

I’m not entirely familiar with the most recent changes because I stopped working with a print establishment six years ago. When I was part of the editorial team at The Hindu, the most significant change related to the advent of the internet had less to do with the copy desk per se and more to do with the business model. At least the latter seemed more pressing to me.

But this said, in my view there is a noticeable difference between how one might write for a newspaper and for the web. So a more efficient copy-editing team has to be able to handle both styles, as well as be able to edit copy to optimise for audience engagement and readability both online and offline.

3) Indian publications are infamous for mistakes in the copy. Is this a result of competition for breaking news or a lack of knack for editing?

This is a question I have been asking myself since I started working. I think a part of the answer you’re looking for lies in the first statement of your question. Indian copy-editors are “infamous for mistakes” – but mistakes according to whom?

The English language came to India in different ways, it is not homegrown. British colonists brought English to India, so English took root in India as the language of administration. English is the de facto language worldwide for the conduct of science, so scientists have to learn it. Similarly, there are other ways in which the use of English has been rendered useful and important and necessary. English wasn’t all these things in and of itself, not without its colonial underpinnings.

So today, in India, English is – among other things – the language you learn to be employable, especially with MNCs or such. And because of its historical relationships, English is taught only in certain schools, schools that typically have mostly students from upper-caste/upper-class families. English is also spoken only by certain groups of people who may wish to secret it as a class symbol, etc. I’m speaking very broadly here. My point is that English is reserved typically for people who can afford it, both financially and socio-culturally. Not everyone speaks ‘good’ English (as defined by one particular lexicon or whatever) nor can they be expected to.

So what you may see as mistakes in the copy may just be a product of people not being fluent in English, and composing sentences in ways other than you might as a result. India has a contested relationship with English and that should only be expected at the level of newsrooms as well.

However, if your question had to do with carelessness among copy-editors – I don’t know if that is a very general problem (nor do I know what the issues might be in a newsroom publishing in an Indian language). Yes, in many establishments, the management doesn’t pay as much attention to the quality of writing as it should, perhaps in an effort to cut costs. And in such cases, there is a significant quality cost.

But again, we should ask ourselves as to whom that affects. If a poorly edited article is impossible to read or uses words and ideas carelessly, or twists facts, that is just bad. But if a poorly composed article is able to get its points across without misrepresenting anyone, whom does that affect? No one, in my opinion, so that is okay. (It could also be the case that the person whose work you’re editing sees the way they write as a political act of sorts, and if you think such an issue might be in play, it becomes important to discuss it with them.)

Of course, the matter of getting one’s point across is very subjective, and as a news organisation we must ensure the article is edited to the extent that there can be no confusion whatsoever – and edited that much more carefully if it’s about sensitive issues, like the results of a scientific study. And at the same time we must also stick to a word limit and think about audience engagement.

My job as the editor is to ensure that people are understood, but in order to help them be understood better and better, I must be aware of my own privileges and keep subtracting them from the editorial equation (in my personal case: my proficiency with the English language, which includes many Americanisms and Britishisms). I can’t impose my voice on my writers in the name of helping them. So there is a fine line here that editors need to tread carefully.

4) What are the key points that a science editor should keep in mind while dealing with copy?

Aside from the points I raised in my previous answer, there are some issues that are specific to being a good science editor. I don’t claim to be good (that is for others to say) – but based on what I have seen in the pages of other publications, I would only say that not every editor can be a science editor without some specific training first. This is because there are some things that are specific to science as an enterprise, as a social affair, that are not immediately apparent to people who don’t have a background in science.

For example, the most common issue I see is in the way scientific papers are reported – as if they are the last word on that topic. Many people, including many journalists, seem to think that if a scientific study has found coffee cures cancer, then it must be that coffee cures cancer, period. But every scientific paper is limited by the context in which the experiment was conducted, by the limits of what we already know, etc.

I have heard some people define science as a pursuit of the truth but in reality it’s a sort of opposite – science is a way to subtract uncertainty. Imagine shining a torch within a room as you’re looking for something, except the torch can only find things that you don’t want, so you can throw them away. Then you turn on the lights. Papers are frequently wrong and/or are updated to yield new results. This seldom makes the previous paper directly fraudulent or wrong; it’s just the way science works. And this perspective on science can help you think through what a science editor’s job is as well.

Another thing that’s important to know is that science progresses in incremental fashion and that the more sensational results are either extremely unlikely or simply misunderstood.

If you are keen on plumbing deeper depths, you could also consider questions about where authority comes from and how it is constructed in a narrative, the importance of indeterminate knowledge-states, the pros and cons of scientism, what constitutes scientific knowledge, how scientific publishing works, etc.

A science editor has to know all these things and ensure that in the process of running a newsroom or editing a publication, they don’t misuse, misconstrue or misrepresent scientific work and scientists. And in this process, I think it’s important for a science editor to not be considered to be subservient to the interests of science or scientists. Editors have their own goals, and more broadly speaking science communication in all forms needs to be seen and addressed in its own right – as an entity that doesn’t owe anything to science or scientists, per se.

5) In a country where press freedom is often sacrificed, how does one deal with political pieces, especially when there is proof against a matter concerning the government?

I’m not sure what you mean by “proof against a matter concerning the government.” But in my view, the likelihood of different outcomes depends on the business model. If, for example, you the publisher make a lot of money from a hotshot industrialist and his company, then obviously you are going to tread carefully when handling stories about that person or the company. How you make your money dictates who you are ultimately answerable to. If you make your money by selling newspapers to your readers, or collecting donations from them like The Wire does, you are answerable to your readers.

In this case, if we are handling a story in which the government is implicated in a bad way, we will do our due diligence and publish the story. This ‘due diligence’ is important: you need to be sure you have the requisite proof, that all parts of the story are reliable and verifiable, that you have documentary evidence of your claims, and that you have given the implicated party a chance to defend themselves (e.g. by being quoted in the story).

This said, absolute press freedom is not so simple to achieve. It doesn’t just need brave editors and reporters. It also needs institutions that will protect journalists’ rights and freedoms, and also shield them reliably from harm or malice. If the courts are not likely to uphold a journalist’s rights or if the police refuse proper protection when the threat of physical violence is apparent, blaming journalists for “sacrificing” press freedom is ignorant. There is a risk-benefit analysis worth having here, if only to remember that while the benefit of a free press is immense, the risks shouldn’t be taken lightly.

6) Research papers are lengthy and editors have deadlines. How do you make sure to communicate information with the right context for a wider audience?

Often the quickest way to achieve this is to pick your paper and take it to an independent scientist working in the same field. These independent comments are important for the story. But specific to your question, these scientists – if they have the time and are so inclined – can often also help you understand the paper’s contents properly, and point out potential issues, flaws, caveats, etc. These inputs can help you compose your story faster.

I would also say that if you are an editor looking for an article on a newly published research paper, you would be better off commissioning a reporter who is familiar, to whatever extent, with that topic. Obviously if you assign a business reporter to cover a paper about nanofluidic biosensors, the end result is going to be somewhere between iffy and disastrous. So to make sure the story has got its context right, I would begin by assigning the right reporter and making sure they’ve got comments from independent scientists in their copy.

7) What are some of the major challenges faced by science communicators and reporters in India?

This is a very important question, and I can’t hope to answer it concisely or even completely. In January this year, the office of the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India organised a meeting with a couple dozen science journalists and communicators from around India. I was one of the attendees. Many of the issues we discussed, which would also be answers to your question, are described here.

If, for the purpose of your assignment, you would like me to pick one – I would go with the fact that science journalism, and science communication more broadly, is not widely acknowledged as an enterprise in its own right. As a result, many people don’t see the value in what science journalists do. A second and closely related issue is that scientists often don’t respond on time, even if they respond at all. I’m not sure of the extent to which this is an etiquette issue. But by calling it an etiquette issue, I also don’t want to overlook the possibility that some scientists don’t respond because they don’t think science journalism is important.

I was invited to attend the Young Investigators’ Meeting in Guwahati in March 2019. There, I met a big bunch of young scientists who really didn’t know why science journalism exists or what its purpose is. One of them seemed to think that since scientific papers pass through peer review and are published in journals, science journalists are wasting their time by attempting to discuss the contents of those papers with a general audience. This is an unnecessary barrier to my work – but it persists, so I must constantly work around or over it.

8) What are the consequences if a research paper has been misreported?

The consequence depends on the type and scope of misreporting. If you have consulted an independent scientist in the course of your reporting, you give yourself a good chance of avoiding reporting mistakes.

But of course mistakes do slip through. And with an online publication such as The Wire – if a published article is found to have a mistake, we usually correct the mistake once it has been pointed out to us, along with a clarification at the bottom of the article acknowledging the issue and recording the time at which the change was made. If you write an article that is printed and is later found to have a mistake, the newspaper will typically issue an erratum (a small note correcting a mistake) the next day.

If an article is found to have a really glaring mistake after it is published – and I mean an absolute howler – the article could be taken down or retracted from the newspaper’s record along with an explanation. But this rarely happens.

9) In many ways, copy editing disconnects you from your voice. Does it hamper your creativity as a writer?

It’s hard to find room for one’s voice in a news publication. About nine-tenths of the time, each of us is working on a news copy, in which a voice is neither expected nor can add much value of its own. This said, when there is room to express oneself more, to write in one’s voice, so to speak, copy-editing doesn’t have to remove it entirely.

Working with voices is a tricky thing. When writers pitch or write articles in which their voices are likely to show up, I always ask them beforehand as to what they intend to express. This intention is important because it helps me edit the article accordingly (or decide whether to edit it at all). The writer’s voice is part of this negotiation. Like I said before, my job as the editor is to make sure my writers convey their points clearly and effectively. And if I find that their voice conflicts with the message or vice versa, I will discuss it with them. It’s a very contested process and I don’t know if there is a black-and-white answer to your question.

It’s always possible, of course, if you’re working with a bad editor and they just remodel your work to suit their needs without checking with you. But short of that, it’s a negotiation.

Ads on The Wire Science

Sometime this week, but quite likely tomorrow, advertisements will begin appearing on The Wire Science. The Wire‘s, and by extension The Wire Science‘s, principal source of funds is donations from our readers. We also run ads as a way to supplement this revenue; they’re especially handy to make up small shortfalls in monthly donations. Even so, many of these ads look quite ugly – individually, often with a garish choice of colours, but more so all together, by the very fact that they’re advertisements, representing a business model often rightly blamed for the dilution of good journalism published on the internet.

But I offer all of these opinions as caveats because I’m quite looking forward to having ads on The Wire Science. At least one reason must be obvious: while The Wire‘s success itself, for being an influential and widely read, respected and shared publication that runs almost entirely on readers’ donations, is inspiring, The Wire Science as a niche publication focusing on science, health and the environment (in its specific way) has a long way to go before it can be fully reader funded. This is okay if only because it’s just six months old – and The Wire got to its current pride of place after more than four years, with six major sections and millions of loyal readers.

As things stand, The Wire Science receives its funds as a grant of sorts from The Wire (technically, it’s a section with a subdomain). We don’t yet have a section-wise breakdown of where on the site people donate from, so while The Wire Science also solicits donations from readers (at the bottom of every article), it’s perhaps best to assume it doesn’t funnel much. Against this background, the fact that The Wire Science will run ads from this week is worth celebrating for two reasons: 1. that it’s already a publication where ads are expected to bring in a not insubstantial amount of money, and 2. that a part of this money will be reinvested in The Wire Science.

I’m particularly excited about reason no. 1. Yes, ads suck, but I think that’s truer in the specific context of ads being the principal source of funds – when editors are subordinated to business managers and editorial decisions serve the bottomline. But our editorial standards won’t be diluted by the presence of ads because of ads’ relative contribution to our revenue mix. (I admit that psychologically it’s going to take some adjusting.) The Wire Science is already accommodated in The Wire‘s current outlay, which means ad revenue is opportunistic, and an opportunity in itself to commission an extra story now and then, get more readers to the site and have a fraction of them donate.

I hope you’ll be able to see it the same way, and skip the ad-blocker if you can. 🙂

Eight years

On June 1 last year, I wrote:

Today, I complete seven years of trying to piece together a picture of what journalism is and where I fit in.

Today, I begin my ninth year as a journalist. I’m happy to report I’m not so confused this time round, if only because in the intervening time, two things have taken shape that have allowed me to channel my efforts and aspirations better, leaving less room for at least some types of uncertainty.

The first is The Wire Science, which was born as an idea around August 2019 and launched as a separate website in February 2020. From The Wire‘s point of view, the vision backing the product is “to build a constituency for science journalism – of contributors as well as readers – and drive a science journalism ecosystem.”

For me, this is in addition an opportunity to publish high-quality science writing that breaks away from the instrumental narratives that dominate most journalistic science pieces in India today.

The second thing that took shape was our readers’ and supporters’ appreciation for The Wire‘s work in general. I like to think we’re slowly breaking even on this front, indicating that we’re doing something right.

On these notes of focus, progress and hope – even though the last 12 months have been terrible in many ways – I must say I do look forward to the next 12 months. I’m sure lots of things are going to go wrong, just as they’ve been going wrong, but for once it also feels like there are going to be meaningful opportunities to do something about them.

For coronavirus claims, there is a world between true and false

In high school, you must have learnt about Boolean algebra, possibly the most fascinating kind of algebra for its deceptive ease and simplicity. But thanks to its foundations in computer science, Boolean algebra – at least as we it learnt in school – is fixated with ‘true’ and ‘false’ states but not with the state of ‘don’t know’ that falls in between. This state may not have many applications as regards the functioning of logic gates but in the real world, it is quite important, especially when the truth threatens to be spun out of control.

Amitabh Bachchan recently published a video in which he delivered a monologue claiming that when a fly alights on human faeces containing traces of the new coronavirus, flies off and then alights on some food, the food could also be contaminated by the same virus. The Wire Science commissioned a fact-check from Dr Deepak Natarajan, a reputed (and thankfully opinionated) cardiologist in New Delhi. In his straightforward article, Dr Natarajan presents evidence from peer-reviewed papers to argue that while we know the new coronavirus does enter the faeces of an infected person, we don’t know anything about whether the virus remains viable, or capable of precipitating an infection. Second, we know nothing of the participation of flies either.

The thing to remember here is that, during a panic – or in a pre-panic situation that constantly threatens to devolve into a panic – society as such has an unusually higher uptake capacity for information that confirms their biases irrespective of whether it is true. This property, so to speak, amplifies the importance of ‘not knowing’.

Thanks to scientism, there is a common impression among many experts and most non-experts that science has, or could have, the answers to all questions that could ever be asked. So when a scientist says she does not know something, there is a pronounced tendency among some groups of people – particularly, if not entirely, those who may not be scientistic themselves but believe science itself is scientistic – to assume the lack of an answer means the absence of an answer. That is, to think “If the scientist does not have an answer, then the science does not have an answer”, rather than “If the scientist does not have an answer, then the science does not have an answer yet” or even “If the scientist does not have an answer yet, she could have an answer later“.

This response at a time of panic or pre-panic forces almost all information to be classified as either ‘true’ or ‘false’, precluding the agency science still retains to move towards a ‘true’ or ‘false’ conclusion and rendering their truth-value to be a foregone conclusion. That is, we need evidence to say if something is true – but we also need to understand that saying something is ‘not true’ without outright saying it is ‘false’ is an important state of the truth itself.

It also forces the claimant to be more accountable. Here is one oversimplified but nonetheless illustrative example: When only ‘true’ and ‘false’ exist, any new bit of information has a 50% chance of being in one bin or the other. But when ‘not true/false’ or ‘don’t know’ is in the picture, new information has only a 33% chance of assuming one of the truth values. Further, the only truth value based on which people should be allowed to claim something is true is ‘true’. ‘False’ has never been good enough but ‘don’t know’ is not good enough either, which means that before we subject a claim to a test, it has a 66% chance of being ‘not true’.

Amitabh Bachchan’s mistake was to conflate ‘don’t know’ and ‘true’ without considering the possibility of ‘not true’, and has thus ended up exposing his millions of followers on Twitter to claims that are decidedly not true. As Dr Natarajan said, silence has never been more golden.