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posted by on Thursday December 08 2016, @10:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the more-like-a-massacre dept.

According to our dear friends over at Wired, we are losing the war on science. This interview with Shawn Otto, author of The War on Science [no-script hostile] ranges from the American presidential election to Albert Einstein:

His new book The War on Science explores ways that citizens can fight back against a creeping tide of anti-science nonsense promulgated by everyone from postmodern academics to greedy oil companies to nature-loving hippies. An important step is to make journalists understand that science and opinion should not be given equal weight.

"The purpose of a free press in a democracy is to hold the powerful accountable to the evidence," Otto says. "Journalists have really lost sight of that purpose, of their entire reason for being."

Fair enough. But things have gotten worse?

He fears that the war on science will only intensify once Donald Trump takes office in January. "I'm very concerned, as is the rest of the global scientific community," Otto says.

As a personal aside, I find it unlikely that the public, those who executed Socrates, burned the Library of Alexandria, and imprisoned Antoinio Gramsci, could fall for such a diaphanous fraud as the Republican attack on science! People back then were truly and profoundly stupid. But people today have the internet, and facebook, and a total misunderstanding of science, politics, ethics, and math. So, this will not end well? Help me, Soylentils, give me hope.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @04:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @04:06AM (#439008)

    > I thought the purpose of a free press is to report news and let me decide what I want to think about it.

    That's like saying the job of a scientist is to report raw data and leave it up to you to come a conclusions.

    The job of the press is, like any other expert, to figure out what is important and interpret that for people who are too busy living their lives to be experts in every topic.

    At this point some dumbass always says "the press aren't experts" - right-o! But they do have a lot more expertise than the average reader. Reporters have beats where they learn the background and the people involved. They know who to go to for expert opinion and the report that opinion along with the facts. And it is all supposed to be done in the public interest.

    None of what I've written is controversial. That's the way the press has tried to operate, with varying degrees of success, for centuries.

    Back in the 1893 the famous line was coined: “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”