Thank you, Editor of Nature.com, for telling the scientific and skeptic blogging community that we are not, in fact, continually banging our heads against a metaphorical brick wall over ever-increasing Stupidity and Arrogance.
You wrote, in this op-ed about bad journalism and the Leveson inquiry:
But science has a way to respond that others do not. Through online forums, blogs and Twitter, a cottage industry has grown up around instant criticism of dodgy scientific claims and dubious findings. This parallel journalism is increasingly coming to the attention of the mainstream press — as demonstrated by the rising number of stories in the press that were first broken by blogs.
It may seem thankless at times, but the army of online commentators who point out the errors, the inconsistencies and the confounding factors, and from time to time just scream ‘bullshit’, have the power to hold the press to account. This ongoing war of attrition against those who would put their own agendas above the facts cannot take away their platform, but it can chip away at something they prize even more: their relevance, and with it their pernicious influence.
That helps, it really does. For someone in the “real” press to write that makes a lot of fardels easier to bear: all the exhausting work battling trolls; uncounted hours drained by debunking the same lies over and over; seeing the innocent and vulnerable plundered and left to die; seeing friends viciously insulted or threatened by fanatics seeking at best to silence critics, perhaps get them fired from their jobs, at worst threatening physical and sexual abuse; seeing the quacks, unrestrained by science or even a basic sense of decency, trumpeting their poisonous wares…
There’s still a lot of work to be done. It would help if more professional journalists in more newspapers had the guts to denounce quacks, charlatans and frauds, although maybe the much-needed reform of English libel laws would cure some of that pusillanimity. But seriously: yes, thanks, that’s much appreciated.
And you can bet your life we aren’t going to stop. We’re not professional journalists and don’t have the (sometimes nominal) protection a Press Card gives, but if a wrongdoer takes one of us out, hundreds of others will spring up in his or her place. That’s the Streisand effect. That’s solidarity.
That’s us.
Related articles
- A few simple checks would transform science reporting (newscientist.com)
- Leveson Inquiry: Newsroom culture creates ‘ethics pressure’ (independent.co.uk)
