We on the right have grown to expect bias in political journalism — but most of us probably thought that science literature would always be objective, and exempt from radical leftist opinion. If so, then our thoughts were mistaken.
Every once in a while, I receive emailed articles from science journals, for example, Scientific American. Most of these are of interest to science junkies like myself — but a disturbing and growing number of them have less to do with science than with left-wing political propaganda. Much of it is unashamedly anti-Trump.
It seems (sarcasm here) that by questioning the (questionable) evidence of global warming, President Trump is seeking to inundate the entire world with rising oceans. In reality, thousands of government grants are at risk, billions of dollars of them, unless the scientists receiving the money can prove that global warming is manmade, and that human effort can reverse it.
Of course, the scientists can prove no such thing, which is why their journal articles increasingly give the impression of “hair-on-fire” panic.
More recently, I am beginning to notice an even more sinister trend, one which hints at anti-Semitism. In an article at Space.com, a site oriented toward NASA news, the authors seem to twist and turn through verbal contortions, straining to avoid any mention of the word, “Israel,” even though the science news therein was discovered by studying ancient Jewish records.
The article describes the geography of the featured discovery as being that of “Judah, an ancient kingdom situated around what is now Jerusalem.” This seems like an awful lot of words to substitute for the word, “Israel.”
The article credits Israeli scientist [quote], “Erez Ben-Yosef, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University,” with analyzing much of the information, but yet again, avoids mentioning that he is an Israeli scientist. In other articles, I find no shortage of phrases such as, a French scientist, or a scientist at Britain’s Oxford University, and so forth.
It is perhaps possible that I am being a bit overly sensitive in my appraisal of this one article, but I noticed its omissions largely because the piece fits the mold of many other science articles I have read over the past year, articles which in my view are ever more politically oriented toward leftist opinions.
For example, some time ago, in American Thinker, I quoted this:
“As Scientific American has reported in the run-up to the election, Trump’s views on science, health and medicine appear unformed at best, ignorant and destructive at worst.”
To be sure, science journalists are entitled to their political opinions, right, left or otherwise — but the danger is that their partisan agendas can easily come into conflict with actual science. It happened in the old Soviet Union, where thankfully, communist scientists set back their nation’s progress far enough to help result in an American victory in the Cold War.
It could easily happen here, where for so many scientists, the competition is fierce and unrelenting. The dictum is, “publish or perish.” The chase for government grant money, much of it wasted, goes to research into the mating habits of this or that exotic species of salamander and the like. Literally billions of taxpayer dollars are at risk, if these grants are closely scrutinized, which is likely to happen under a Trump presidency.
