NOW THEY TELL US: Nate Silver: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources —including scientists. “Here’s the scandal. In March 2020, a group of scientists — in particular1, Kristian G. Andersen the of The Scripps Research Institute, Andrew Rambaut of The University of Edinburgh, Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney, and Robert F. Garry of Tulane University — published a paper in Nature Medicine that seemingly contradicted their true beliefs about COVID’s origins and which they knew to be misleading. . . . In the Slack and email messages, the authors worked to manipulate the media narrative about COVID-19’s origins and to ensure that their private uncertainty wasn’t conveyed in conversations with reporters. They also thought they were going to get away with it.”
Plus:
The COVID origins story has also been a journalistic fiasco, with the lab leak having been dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” and as misinformation even though many prominent scientists believed it to be plausible all along. Perhaps it’s tempting to give the media a pass — they were manipulated by the “Proximal Origin” authors, after all. But I’m not inclined to, for two reasons.
First, the coverage of the recently leaked emails and Slack messages at major center-left outlets like The New York Times has been pathetic. The Times portrayed Andersen as the victim of a Republican witch-hunt — rather than someone at the center of a major scientific scandal of his own making.
And second, journalists ought to have decent bullshit detectors — including toward scientists, academics and other experts.
Related: Elite Journalists Love Big Brother: Prominent reporters and powerful officials know each other, share attitudes, and trust each other. Even Nate Silver says so: “I also think journalists are more prone toward being manipulated by bad apples in academia and science than they were ten or twenty years ago. As a result of increasing educational polarization, both journalists and the expert class of scientists and academics are far more aligned politically than they once were (the very large majority are left-of-center and vote Democratic in American elections).”
It’s one of the problems posed by a ruling class monoculture, especially when the ruling class has gone crazy.