Monday
Feb142011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Are science writers all lefties?
Feb 14, 2011 Blogs Climate: other Martin Robbins, writing at the Guardian, worries that the lack of right-wing science writers and bloggers is denting the credibility of science.
Seems like a reasonable surmise to me.
There's a lot of discussion of needing to find common ground in order to put forward a message successfully, which again is something we can probably agree on. I wonder if he might find things easier in this regard if he stopped using the d-word?
Reader Comments (74)
I can't link to the Grauniad article.
Link works from here. Full URL is:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2011/feb/13/3.
I believe there is similar hand-wringing in the USA. Didn't Kerry Emmanuel just out himself as a Republican?
I hope Aynsley Kellow is about - he has much of interest to say about this in Science and Public Policy.
Guardian journalists need to get out more and meet scientists, rather than rely on Greenpeace, WWF etc for their input.
Perhaps they would like to write an article on confirmation bias, followed by something on groupthink failures
The comments are classic Guardian - chose between
1) scientists have to be clever people, and clever people are left wing, ergo scientists must be left wing
or
2) right wingers are thick pillocks so unfit to be scientists. If you need proof of this, they are all climate deniers so obviously stupid.
I wish you wouldn't draw my attention to this sort of rubbish before I've had my mid-morning coffee your grace, I'm struggling to cope.
Me and my missus are both 'leftie' whatever that means. She's finishing her PhD and she's also probably more 'leftie' than me. I have Libertarian tendencies which leads to interesting dinner table discussions.
However in pure science, politics is probably not foremost. I think the problem is with 'Science Writers'. They as a class that don't exactly 'do' science. They exist to get attention to a particular polemic using 'Science' as a medium.
In my local parish Jo Nova is a science 'communicator'. She doesn't present science as such - rather a set of sound bites and drive-by shootings in support of anti-Green (I can't quantify it better than that).
Regarding Martin Robbins. The problem is to get credible 'Right Wing' science writers. So far there are precious few. And those that are so tagged inevitably end up objectively as pretty moderate.
How about the debate comes down to credible people expressing well supported views rather than politically inspired wannabees using 'climate' as a platform to get fame and power?
David C
I have had to stop reading CiF. Too irritating. The 'journalism' is bad enough; the nonsense in comments is unendurable.
Leave them to it.
The problem is not the left wing domination of science, it is the left wing domination of the universities. I do know one or two academics who are prepared to advance opinions which are not left wing, but they usually speak in hushed voices and only to trusted friends.
Jerry
What you say is reasonable.
But to me, at any rate, the problem is the way the green movement has contaminated environmental (including climate) science with 'values'. Specifically, left-leaning 'values'.
Values have no place in scientific thinking, and the resulting bastardised mess is of very little use to anyone.
Real scientists and science writers shouldn't care too much about politics. By this I mean that science carries too much weight to be bogged down by politics. Policy making is more of a hobby than a real profession. At least that's how I see it.
Is it a novel idea for science writers to leave their (political) baggage at the door when they report for work?
Tony Hansen
But that's not the name of the game. The purpose of 'environmental science' writing is to advance an environmentalist agenda. While commentators such as Ben Pile point out that it is simplistic to reduce this to 'leftist', it is still an agenda.
The science that gets written about is presented as supporting material rather than the heart of the story.
Most professional scientists work for universities. They are therefore fairly badly paid and the good ones earn a lot less than they would if they went into industry or the city. They do it for the love of their subject. It is therefore not surprising if their world view is not one of free-market capitalism.
I think that the introduction of significant fees for university tuition will change this as it will inject some competition into the university arena and those good teachers will start to get rewarded and the bad ones will lose out. Gradually you will see a market appear and there will be winners and losers. Then I would expect to see more right wing free market profs.
I do remember Oxford University refusing to give Margaret Thatcher an honorary doctorate. Enough said?
The real issue is not ‘that all science writers are lefties’, as they are clearly not. There are hundreds and thousands of books published by science writers that do not subscribe to the left-wing viewpoint about the world; Matt Ridley's ‘The Rational Optimist’ being a sterling recent example.
The problem is more ‘that all science writers, working in the publicly funded domain are lefties’.
As usual, it is the link to public funding that dictates the political persuasion of people, even if they think the opposite in their hearts.
good teachers : I do not know what I should think by that.
It is hard for, say, a physics teacher to compete with online wikipedia and the Feynman curriculum.
what should the "good teaching" be there?
You might think a person that is good at giving his presentation and can enthuse his listening public?
Think standup comedian.
Well, for the 500k+ people there are working in the arts/meejah/fashion/music industry, I think we know 10 standup comedians worth listening to? there is no reason why this proportion should be different for our underpaid professors, really.
Maybe there are , amongst the 100 physics professors in the country 2 who are outstanding teachers anyways.. why are we so stupid to limit their work to the happy few students who tumbled in their bins?
I can remember having a few good professors..they had crap assistants, so their followup was crap anyways.
Also, i can only pity the oxbridge ones where all is ideal: outstanding professors outstanding assistant and followup outstanding material outstanding buiuldings outstanding women outstanding food outstanding concerts.everything kwolitti.
pity them when they enter , after 5 years, the real word: is all crap for the rest of their lives then isn't it.
I do not know if comprehensive surrounding outstandingness provides the conditions for,erm outstanding ness btw.
Take gardening: A plant can suffer from too many nutrients pruning and care.
With a cactus, guess what: You should *NOT* water it.
so my conclusion is: in our academia we are growing too many turnips and spinach
not enough cactuses.
If they were competent journalists, it really shouldn't matter much what their political persuasions were. I know that some artifacts of their viewpoint would be inevitable, but the basic job is to describe the established (real) facts and the relevant theories.
Most lefty science journos are to science writing what sociologists are to science.
How about you guys describe the objective truth and safe the subjective spin for the last paragraph (marked as opinion, please)?
I agree with just about all the comments above, but in particular with Gendau, i.e. I think most science journalists tend to be gullible and dim, and their leftie tendencies are incidental. In fact it could be argued that certain science writers (in the UK at least) are actually propagating corporate interests, inadvertently at least. Think GM crops and seeds, which have very little benefit for farmers over conventionally developed seeds, but make lots of profit for the agri-chemical industry; and pharmaceutical companies who make a fortune out of some dubious drugs and vaccines (with the help of the government who do all the scare.mongering/marketing and distribution for free).
"I have had to stop reading CiF. Too irritating. The 'journalism' is bad enough; the nonsense in comments is unendurable." That's pretty much why we stopped taking the Guardian years ago. It was not just the stupidity and malice, it was the distinct flavour of insanity.
What does Martin Robbins mean by "right wing"?
This is not a problem confined to science; many of the leaders in the field of computers and software are inexplicably wedded to the fallacious ideas contained in Socialism and collectivism. Just look at Tim Berners Lee and his contention that the state must impose 'Net Neutrality' (violent theft of services provided by ISPs) and the calls by others for new taxes so that the stolen loot can be redistributed to the creative.
The worst of the lot are scientists who are also atheists:
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=2545
They are not only violent, but openly call for other people's children to be brainwashed into their way of thinking; as if these men were the part owners of every child in 'society'.
All these illogical scientists, technologists and software engineers that are collectivist statists, if they were to employ the scientific method to this, would identify the state itself as the problem.
For example, atheists do not like being forced to live under governments that are guided by religion; the problem is not religion, but the democratic state that controls them through its mob rule.
Thankfully, people are beginning to wake up to this, and scientists, even scientists that are atheists, are beginning to apply rigorous thinking to this problem. With the correct tools to hand:
http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp
They are able to properly define the problem, and then, the honest ones, to a man, accept the truth; the state is the cause of everyone's problems, we can live and in fact thrive without it, and the logical thing to do is to work to eliminate the state permanently.
Perhaps the 'lefties' have the urge to be noticed and vent their spleens at every opportunity, while the 'righties' just quietly get on with the job.
Perhaps the 'lefties' have the urge to be noticed and vent their spleens at every opportunity, while the 'righties' just quietly get on with the job.
Perhaps science writers are failed scientists.
I do not believe this is a political divide with respect to those doing the science. Politics are a distant second when it comes to a man's vested economic interest. Was it Upton Sinclair who said it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding...
I think the politics thing is dead on when it comes to the consumers of said science. In the U.S. of course, liberals are convinced conservatives are morons. Religious fundamentalists. Creationists. War mongers. Flat earthers. It's nearly impossible to open a liberal's mind on global warming, because he's convinced it's all of a piece.
Of course, there are exceptions. I'm a very liberal guy. Naturally enough, I used to assume AGW was a huge problem. But something about the piety of the other side, their dead certainty, their intolrance of debate, got my alarm bells ringing. Two years on I'm firmly on the other side...
Life is too short to take sides. One doesn't go very far or fast on a crowded Freeway, Motorway, or Interstate. One can get very lost very fast by going offroad in a desert, and it's lonely. Stay on the less traveled middle grade highways and you go farther faster, don't often get lost, and usually have someone interesting to talk to, though thay may not often agree with you. You're also less likely to have your pocket picked. Most people are lemmings. Beware of lemmings.
It's an interesting article -- but it's still all about how to get us "wrong-headed" guys to come around to "right thinking" Liberal views.
An article about how to promote thoughtful research and how to come up with the right answers as opposed to political pablum would be far more persuasive to me. Any article like this which is about "How to sell a viewpoint to the other side." is inevitably of little or no interest...
A journalist friend confessed that most of his classmates chose academic paths that led to journalism largely because they just could not "get" grade nine science and math.
"the likes of Alom Shaha have tackled ethnic diversity in atheism"
Only a Guardian journalist could come up with a line like that.
I have known scientists right across the spectrum of political belief and their political beliefs didn't seem to be a factor in their practice of science. The real problem seems to occur when mediocre scientists become advocats of some political cause or other to advance their somewhat dull and lacklustre careers, as in the purveying of shaky science and frequently anti-science to further the idea of AGW.
I flick each day through the Telegraph where the awful Louise Gray and the McLean bloke witter on with their asinine cut-and-paste disaster du jour and the Guardian and its CiF but find that the silliness and the nasty rants don't interest me much. Marxism and journalism are a dreadfully boring and silly mix, but they have built a career for the egregious Monbiot who, surprisingly, can occasionally write sensible stuff such as his latest piece railing against the production of ethanol in the UK. But Monbiot is a very practised railer so I suppose it is reasonable to expect him to have sensible target once in every while.
"..lack of right-wing science writers and bloggers is denting the credibility of science."
Could this also suggest that he thinks the most frequently left-wing science writers are denting the credibility of science?
A bullet point in my submision to the Lisbon conference:
The training and composition of media organisations such as the Society of Environmental Journalists must be addressed so its outputs can reflect the state of knowledge correctly.
Fred Pearce seems to have got it. Now we just need to get the rest to take their fingers out of their ears when anyone mentions the CRU emails.
The social sciences have their own mainstream problems.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/science/08tier.html?_r=1
Science writers in general aren't lefties, although professional journalists most certainly are. That's a demonstrable fact that's been proven again and again by independent and credible surveys.
For example, here's the result of the 2008 Pew survey of America journos:
Journalists’ Ideology
http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2008/Journalist%20report%202008.pdf
85 percent of print and internet journos self-identify as "moderate" or liberal, only 8 percent as conservative.
Oddly, Pew provides no tabular data for this short "Journalists’ Ideology" section, while there are 25 results tables shown for each and every of the preceding sections.
Gee, this all seems very similar to the hedging and obsfucation seen in climate
propagandareporting, doesn't it? How could that be? (e.g., "Hide the decline").Meanwhile, China is now the world's second-largest economy:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8322550/China-is-the-worlds-second-largest-economy.html#
And couldn't give a stuff about Chicken Little.
It isn't so much an intelligence thing, it's a knowledge thing. Anyone who knows anything will have a left wing bias. That's why the tabloids are able to spread their vile attacks against (for example) the poor and Muslims. Their readers don't know anything.
However nowadays, the Guardian is just a corporate rag that supports right wing politicians like Obama and Blair, both economically miles to the right of Ted Heath and Richard Nixon.
Academics are generally well informed and educated, therefore they will be well left of centre. Global warming has been incorrectly labelled a left wing issue, so their is knee jerk support from academics.
Another problem is that many climate technicians (scientists) will have taken up their career for specifically environmental reasons. In my view, that is the heart of the problem in that industry.
Jerry, 10:34am. I think you have been misled re Jo Nova, and your comments may mislead others in turn. She is both qualified in science, and has a susbtantial record in communicating science to others (http://joannenova.com.au/about/)
Her blog often carries thoughtful, sometimes provocative pieces with a high level of scientific interest, and questioning, e.g. earlier this one earlier this month: http://joannenova.com.au/2011/02/the-urban-heat-island-effect-could-africa-be-more-affected-than-the-us/ .
She is, quite rightly in my opinion, particularly exercised by climate-alarm-driven policy and the public debate in and around it, and it seems to me she makes honest, forthright, well-argued and supported contributions to that debate. To describe her work as 'drive-by shootings' is plainly perverse.
It is worth remembering that the company at the heart of the AGW scam, Enron supported GW Bush against Al Gore who helped them enter carbon trading into the Kyoto Protocol. They thought Bush could pull it off, but the negative 95-0 vote in the senate made the choice of president irrelevant.
@lapogus
"Think GM crops and seeds, which have very little benefit for farmers over conventionally developed seeds, but make lots of profit for the agri-chemical industry."
This is yet another Green con. Please don't stray from your area of excellence as I enjoy your writing, but I must pull you up on this. If GM crops didn't offer benefits to farmers, then they wouldn't plant them. Herbicide tolerance tolerance and insect resistance offer HUGE benefits to growers and environment alike, largely through enabling the use of benign, cheap and NON-PROPRIETORY products (glyphosate, as in Roundup, has been off-patent for decades, despite what the meeja might have disinformed you with). Who can argue with insecticide resistance? It even uses Soil Association - approved Bacillus thuringensis (BT) toxins (assuming SA approval is worth seeking - some people strongly believe otherwise) and means that only target insects are controlled since they have to eat the plant (i.e. be a damaging pest) first.
I can also assure you that without a healthy plant protection industry, billions of us would have a significantly diminished (i.e. hungry) lifestyle.
Not sure about the left/right thing. Isn’t it now more a case of people being divided up into authoritarian, anti-authoritarian and a great supine mass in between who want to be looked after, and accept being told what to do and how to think? The majority here fall into the authoritarian/ supine camp, therefore the majority of the scientists and the media are there as well, whilst the anti-authoritarians (don’t tell me what to do, what to think, and just leave me alone) are a minority.
John Shade
I'm afraid I have to disagree with you re Jo Nova.
I live in the same city as her. I read what she writes. She is at least 'anti-green' but more likely 'right-wing' (I have no problem with the latter but it's pertinent to the thread).
I know intimately the topics she agitates on in Western Australia. I've worked professionally in environmental science here and am fully familiar with air-pollution laws, noise laws and all the other environmental laws.
Her attempts to turn the personal tragedy of a Western Australian cattle lot farmer into an anti-green campaign is shameful.
It can only be described as a 'drive-by-shooting'. She has done this before with an Eastern States farmer in dire straits.
The way she worked on both cases was very simple. 'St Jo' tries to help beleagured farmer afflicted by evil greenies. If she wins 'St Jo' has prevailed against the evil might of the Greenie. If she loses, 'St Jo' has fought the good fight against the evil Greenie.
In all cases she wins.
This is not Science communication. This is outright self aggrandisment in the fictional name of 'Anti-Green'
The liberal bias of many forms of media is quite well documented. What is so funny about the liberal propaganda from the Guardian and the Independent is that they are ranting at such tiny circulations:
Dec 2011 circulation figures for broadsheet newspapers (ignoring FT):
Daily Telegraph 631,280
The Times 448,463
Guardian 264,819
Independent 175,002
The Daily Telegraph has 71% as much circulation as all three of the others added together and both the DT and the Times outsell the combined figures for the Guardian and the Independent, in the case of the DT by 43%! There have been some years where the DT has outsold all the other broadsheets combined.
Taking the DT as a percentage of the total gives about 43%, about the level in the population who respond as conservative.
More interesting is the BBC liberal bias - in 2007 the Daily Mail ran the story about BBC employees on Facebook who had ticked their porlitical affiliation. The proportion of BBC employees who had ticked their political alignment gave the following results: from a sample of 1,800 74% ticked Liberal/Very Liberal, 19% ticked moderate and 0.7% ticked conservative or very conservative.
Jeff Randall left the BBC as he said it was virtually impossible to continue with a career where you were right wing and virtually everyone around you are left wing/liberal. He joined the Telegraph. There is at least one other reporter who has stated the same thing publicly in an article at the Telegraph.
What does this tell us about science writing - nothing at all, I think. One of the previous science writers at the Daily Telegraph sent me into apoplexy when he described Pi as a recurring number. If only!
The problem with science writers in newspapers is that they really don't know very much about science. After all the Telegraph is blessed with Louise Gray.
Isn't the real problem that nowadays most scientists are civil servants or are otherwise directly or indirectly employed by Government.
They lack business experience and are quick to identify with media fantasies as to how business really works.
Why worry about the absence of right wing science writers when we have books like "The hot topic" by Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King"? (published 2008) I have just been given a copy of this book. On the cover is written: "This is a fantastic book. It's just what the world needs right now." I took a quick look at it. On pp. 10-11 is a figure with the (in)famous hockey stick, with ref. to Jones et al., Science, vol. 292, pp. 662-7, 2001. It applies a trick worse than "hide the decline"! Two curves in the original figure, one (red) from a proxy and one (black, from 1856) with direct T measurements, have been merged into one, and in the period after 1856 the red one has been deleted. In the figure text is written: "The different lines reflect data that come from different sources and methods, but they all show the same dramatic increase in temperature in the last few decades." Inspection reveals that this is not correct. Only the one curve with the direct T measurements shows this, but it now appears to represent continuous data back 1000 years. This, of course, is the well known "divergence problem". In my opinion this figure represents outright fraud, and it is endorsed by the former advisor to the British government, Sir David King. I wonder if he actually read the book. He used to be a respected scientist.
What he's actually asking for is not more "right wing" bloggers & scientists but more people writing in the Guardian who have credibility with the "right wing" to promote the same eco-fascist propaganda the Guardian always does.
There is no shortage of inteligent "right wing" bloggers who would be willing to air their views in the Guardian but, because they will not air the Guardian's views instead they ain't gonna be published there.
The real problem is that the Guardian, like the BBC is a loathsome (as they say) government funded propaganda organisation posing as news deliverers. That is why they lack credibility.
Isn't the real problem that nowadays most scientists are civil servants or are otherwise directly or indirectly employed by Government.
They lack business experience and are quick to identify with media fantasies as to how business really works.
I think it is only some months where the DT has outsold the all the other broadsheets, not some years as I stated above.
David C
I think you have clearly pointed to the problem. Unlike your friends, I decided it was better to look else where for a career than in academia and so left. You have to be left wing through and through to get ahead there. This shows up throughout the science world as well.