The Fall of Scientific American Redux

For about fifteen years I joked “that’s why they sold for a dollar” whenever nonsense was published in Scientific American and my statement was both funny and factually correct.

They have been in decline for some time, their only hope of survival lay in what The Atlantic Ocean And Washingtonpost also got – a rich progressive (well, ‘progressive’ when it comes to other people paying taxes while hiding money abroad) who wants to say they own it as a vanity project. They have had this since 1986, thanks to the Holtzbrinck family from Germany.

They did a fine job and can still barely claim to be “the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States.” In 1950, the Democratic Party burned 3,000 copies of their magazine and were issued a cease and desist order by the Atomic Energy Commission for discovering too much information about the Truman administration’s hydrogen bomb. That is journalism that deserves subscribers.

When academia and journalism shifted far to the left in the 1990s, academic journals followed suit. I saw it in it Scientific American after the departure of John Rennie, who was hardly a centrist but understood the task. With the success of Science 2.0 and Scienceblogs they even started their own blog network (again), but the second time there was so little science it was…bizarre.(1)

Do you want to know if your child is blessed by being ‘pre-homosexual’? SciAm was there to help you see the signs. Would you rather shroud your claims about science and health in the progressive halo of anti-Semitism? Another Scientific American.(2) Vegetable scaremongering (unless they used toxic organic pesticides of course) and promoting useless supplements? Naturally. Cell phones cause cancer? I know, I know, you get it.

Famed skeptic Michael Shermer(3) probably saw the decline Scientific AmericanIt’s also ‘science’, but if the controls are clear you can pretend not to notice. Only when they stop are good manners no longer a problem. James Meigs op City magazine may be new to Scientific American’s cause, but he is right to note that the corporate media has been poor at covering science. Chemicals are killing us and miracle vegetables are saving us and those things are great for the eyes, and corporate media is an advertising system so ads are necessary but terrible for science.

He rightly blames postmodernism for infecting the academic and ironic ‘anti-corporate’ attitude – the biggest status symbol a progressive journalist gets is being paid by a giant company like New York Times – and their circular donations (Pulitzer Prize nonsense, which will then lead to an NYU Journalism Fellowship where they all undermine science because that’s what got them the Pulitzer) that leads to exclusion.(4)

COVID-19 struck briefly Scientific American has a new editorial director. I have no problem with Dr. Laura Helmuth, she has a degree in science and has the right qualifications, but City magazine notes that she was a safe choice from the tribe as well. The content soon followed, with claims that math was inherently sexist, the fight against obesity was racist, and that the legendary Ed Wilson was racist. Who isn’t a racist when social justice warriors use their prism?(5)

I was wrong in my optimism that a new voice would right the ship. In 2020 it was so important to Scientific American that Trump would not be re-elected, they supported a political candidate. Science had clearly left the building.

They’re just trying to survive, I understand that, and rewriting press releases doesn’t generate any advertising, while actual journalism takes too long and costs money. The political leanings of the SciAm leadership are all about unions and income equality, but they can’t actually do that. afford to pay it. But they went above and beyond when they compared everyone who wondered whether SARS-CoV-2 might have leaked from the nearby laboratory to the USSR KGB. They tried to argue that questions about how COVID-19 came about prevented scientists from discovering how it came about, which even postmodernist drifter Paul Feyerabend would have reason to dispute.

The simple truth is that science journalism was in the same situation as political journalists: they started seeking validation by doing progressive good works instead of doing their jobs. A critically thinking science journalist would at least wonder if gender dysphoria was the new ADD – over-diagnosed, over-prescribed and without clinical basis. Anyone at a major media company who did that was vilified; only 22-year-olds can become victims of a predatory culture, and only then their student loans.

COMMENTS:

(1) Of course the social justice warriors are going to eat their own community and after much moral challenge and calls to action they have wiped out their own community and called that a victory.

(2) Especially toxic considering that the family that owns them were Nazis who got their wealth through a personal endorsement from Hitler.

(3) I know a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean I take pictures with them. When I was working on the documentary “Big Fears Little Risks” while leading the American Council on Science and Health, I met Gerry Ohrstrom and he donated to that project. He invited me to a book launch party for Shermer that he was hosting at his home.

For added entertainment, Gerry had one of the best close-up magic artists I have ever seen. Dr. Shermer and I watched him closely and agreed that perhaps we should reconsider our position on the existence of supernatural things. He was that convincing. Then we both laughed and took this photo.

(4) Unfortunately, even scientific journals are now running science into the ground, and it’s something else we can blame Trump for. He caused progressives to lose their minds. People who were so far removed from reality that they declared the 2012 elections a “science” because their man had won, and were certain that a stagnant economy was the new normal, were outraged when he allowed the economy to boom and taxes imposed on the wealthiest states – what happened was states that voted Democratic.

A former editor-in-chief at the New York Times she even strangely announced that she had an Obama doll with her and was caressing it when she was angry thinking about Trump.

(5) Oddly enough, few progressives consider their own racist. The founder of Planned Parenthood was a proud eugenicist until progressive darling Adolf Hitler took it too far and she and the Sierra Club founder and others had to find new ways to achieve the same goal. It will be mentioned here and in a few other places that Oliver Wendell Holmes was racist, the famous economist Keynes that socialists love so much was racist, and don’t even get us started on every 20th century president except Teddy Roosevelt, Carter, and Reagan.