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A three-front assault.

It s enough to make us sick to our stomachs all the shoddy food-related public health articles and pseudo-science we see sometimes. And we re not the only ones in Reason.com, Baylen Linnekin, president of a Washington-based issue organization called Keep Food Legal, has a very thorough expose citing articles and naming names. In one example, California was praised by USA Today for perhaps bringing us to the turning point in combating childhood obesity.

Our Best and Worst Science chart sure got a reaction – mostly from those sites selling a veil of science legitimacy while providing very little.

When confronted with the truth, a prominent science journalist claimed that facts don't matter in op-eds. Science journalism is dead.

The annual World Science Festival was held last weekend in NYC and we were lucky enough to attend some of the events. One of the highlights was a panel conversation moderated by Carl Zimmer, talking to scientists about science and discussing the most pressing issues for today's scientific community. 

Perhaps the most problematic classification system in the scientific community is that of the impact factor, which attempts to rank journals by their relative importance. This factor for a particular journal is equal to the average number of times an article in the journal is cited in a given year. While this sounds useful, in practice, it has been a slow-motion train wreck.

Why hire a PhD or a person with a bachelor's degree in science? Instead, it's cheaper and easier to hire a social media intern who's spent the last few years copying and pasting press releases about scary toxins and miracle vegetables.

Why bother reading or reporting the original article when the story elements are laid out in front of you? 

Science journalism is plagued by several critical problems that jeopardize its credibility. If we want the public to be more science-minded, we have to correct these issues sooner rather than later.

2016 was a year to forget. A rough-and-tumble election, partisan rhetoric and "fake news," and the loss of many beloved and talented people -- from Prince to Carrie Fisher -- made this calendar cycle a bit more difficult than most. Surely, 2017 must have something better in store.
To ensure that it does, we all must resolve to make it so. And as a science journalist, I can do my part by adopting these four resolutions. I hope other journalists join me.

Two recent articles in my hometown newspaper show how hard a time the media have understanding and explaining science.
The "Organic Foods" Story

Academic journals, and the researchers who publish in them, are increasingly engaged in naked political advocacy rather than science. It's time we cut off public funding to peer-reviewed publications and reduce the number of academic scientists chasing after grant money.

Good news for everyone who writes science: Alan Alda is as terrified as the rest of us about getting it wrong.

In order to preserve their "independence," a growing cadre of medical journals is refusing to publish any research conducted by vaping-industry scientists. It's a policy marred by hypocrisy that will exclude good science from the peer-reviewed literature.

Sometimes general assignment reporters are asked to cover complex science and health stories, which produces an entirely predictable product: Articles that are nothing more than rehashed press releases, topped with click-bait headlines based on misunderstandings of the original research. And here are some other ways it happens. 
 

To make our society better informed, we have to fight back against the Fear Industry. We can do so by publicly identifying those people who spread misinformation. And then we encourage people to never listen to them again.

Here's the real scoop from someone who worked at the highest levels in the private sector, who started the Science 2.0 movement, and who now runs a pro-science consumer advocacy non-profit: Corporations do not give people money to do something they are already doing for free. 

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a physician was charged with manslaughter for administering morphine and a sedative to patients who couldn't leave the hospital during the disaster. Was she alleviating their pain and anxiety or trying to kill them? Meanwhile, many news outlets are paid to slant their science coverage. How did that happen, and what do we do about it?

Time Magazine's Alice Park wrote a bizarre "letter' in JAMA, which apparently hoped to scare us about a group that found more glyphosate in urine samples than they expected. Her primary source: A guy with a "Ph.D" from an unaccredited institution who writes about yogic flying and ghosts.

How did the honeybee go, in one year, from poster insect for environmental concerns to invasive species? It's because environmental groups change the story as they are debunked.

Can we trust Bloomberg on science when their journalists are copying and pasting industry talking points from Organic Consumers Association?

Publishing propaganda as news is dishonest and lets readers down. Dr. Henry Miller (pictured), the founding director of the FDA's Office of Biotechnology, explains.

Peter Fairley, an environmental journalist and contributing editor for MIT Technology Review, cited an anti-vaccine website, DeSmogBlog, in a smear directed at our organization. Simultaneously, he spread misinformation about influenza and COVID-19 and endorses advice that contradicts that of the CDC and World Health Organization.

Grist writer Nathaniel Johnson, who is as close to an impartial journalist as Grist has, still knows that he has to cater to their crowd, and that means anyone who accepts that a pesticide is safe - the EPA, American Council on Science and Health, all of science - must have been paid off.

It's been said that truth is the first casualty in war. It could also be said that truth is the first casualty in a decadent and declining society ... and journalists are leading the way.