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A three-front assault.

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

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. 

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.

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? 

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Anti-science activists continue to scramble to shore up their clients, who have become increasingly unnerved that we're pushing them back to the fringes where they belong. And then legitimate media linked to us as well.

Since the start of 2021, the media has regularly urged Americans to get their COVID shots as soon as possible. But this effort won't be very effective unless reporters begin changing how they frame their coverage. 

Not only is science journalism susceptible to the same sorts of biases that afflict regular journalism, but it's uniquely vulnerable to outrageous sensationalism – this or that will either cure cancer or kill us all. So to promote good outlets while castigating the bad, we partnered with RealClearScience to create a handy chart. 

A dose of science weirdness involving falling mice, a dishonest eatery that foolishly mocks chemistry ... and a truly stimulating coffee – if you get our drift.

To the Editor
The New England Journal of Medicine's apology for violating its own strict conflict-of-interest rules for reviews and editorials (news article, Feb. 24) prompts me to challenge the conventional wisdom of "the stricter the better."
Strict conflict-of-interest policies are themselves biased, since they suggest that researchers who work for drug companies are susceptible to introducing bias into a study, while government- and foundation-financed scientists never have an ax to grind.

Bad behavior has consequences, except when you're a social media platform. But the number of peer-reviewed articles subsequently retracted raises the question of whether medical journals believe that they, too, are "platforms" without responsibility for what they publish and disseminate.