Norm violations chill year-end science recollections

College of William and Mary president Taylor Reveley chose compelling news from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) to introduce an email announcement applauding campuswide 2016 accomplishments. He wrote: “An undergraduate and two graduate students joined a faculty researcher as co-authors on a paper describing the groundbreaking discovery of gravitational waves.” Never mind that those four scientists had more than a thousand co-authors. Universally, and at probably historic levels for science appreciation, year-end retrospectives renewed wonderment about that billion-year-old chirp of colliding black holes.

Blogger Maria Popova, for example, extolled the chirp in the New York Times‘s “Year in reading ” recollections:

But even though the chirp—Science magazine’s breakthrough of the year —inspired wide acclaim, it couldn’t dominate all year-end media stock-taking involving science. It had too much competition from a media and political phenomenon that has become formidably perplexing, even though its main identifying terms have already become clichés: post-truth and fake news. That perplexity appears to create wider concerns as well, about science’s place in the public realm generally.

In that Times year-end books article, Moneyball author Michael Lewis recommended Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder, about the Enlightenment. Novelist John Green recommended Anthony Gottlieb’s The Dream of Enlightenment. Samantha Power, US ambassador to the United Nations, called Lewis’s “long-awaited and hugely important” The Undoing Project “an affirmation of science and reason.” But at the close of 2016 and the start of 2017, at least as reflected in the media, Enlightenment norms seemed embattled.

At the international science weekly Nature, concern about offenses against those norms appeared often in December. It started with the commentary “Post-truth: A guide for the perplexed.” The subhead asked, “If politicians can lie without condemnation, what are scientists to do?” The magazine also reported on the organization 500 Women Scientists, which warns that “the anti-knowledge and anti-science sentiments expressed repeatedly during the US presidential election threaten the very foundations of our society.” The organization is calling for participation—in white lab coats—in the 21 January Women’s March on Washington. On 1 December, Nature reported that more than 10 500 people had signed the group’s open letter.

The front cover on Nature‘s year-end issue called 2016 “one darn thing after another.” Inside appeared a trio of commentaries on “resisting the mood of antiscience ” in a time of “post-truth politics ” when evidence seems “devalued or dismissed .” Eleven writers framed a collaborative year-in-review piece in terms of political turbulence. A news article reported on researchers planning an “uncertain future” and taking steps “to defend their fields” under new US cabinet officers.

The online version of a letter to Nature‘s editor carried the headline “Post-truth: Study epidemiology of fake news.” The letter proposed that the “propagation of such information through social networks bears many similarities to the evolution and transmission of infectious diseases” and that “analysis of transmission dynamics could therefore provide insight into how misinformation spreads and competes online.”

The headline “Fake news invades science and science journalism as well as politics” topped a recent online posting by Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus. They cofounded Retraction Watch —a website dedicated, in a sense, to combating fake academic news. At the Los Angeles Times, their piece inspired a column headlined “It’s not just politics: 2016 was an epidemic year for fake news in science, too.” Author Michael Hiltzik holds a Pulitzer Prize.

At the Wall Street Journal, the weekend Review section marked the year’s end with a set of six short commentaries under the headline “Terms of Enlightenment,” starting on the section’s front page (but apparently not posted online). The commentaries engaged scientific terms or concepts that “should be more widely known in the year ahead.”

For the first commentary, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker chose the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He framed it with the nonscientific phrase things fall apart. Though he cautioned against overapplying a physics law as a social or political principle, he offered a civic message derived from physics. He declared that the second law “defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind and striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.”

“Fight back the tide of entropy”? “Carve out refuges of beneficial order”? In one of those December Nature articles, that’s what ocean-acidification researcher Phil Williamson tried to do. His efforts placed him face to face with one of the perplexities in the widely perceived descent from Enlightenment norms: the fact-vs.-opinion conundrum.

Combating “fake news”

Williamson’s commentary addressed “online falsehoods and inaccuracies.” He singled out Breitbart News, calling it “infamous” for its former senior executive Stephen Bannon’s appointment as President-elect Trump’s chief strategist. Breitbart’s James Delingpole had presented inaccuracies, Williamson charged, in the Spectator article “Ocean acidification: Yet another wobbly pillar of climate alarmism.” So Williamson complained to the UK’s Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO). But later, IPSO rejected the complaint, judging that Delingpole’s “matters of comment” were “clearly presented as the author’s opinion” and stating that the investigators “did not establish that the article failed to clearly distinguish between comment and fact.”

A pair of contrasting responses to that judgment say a lot about the year-end outlook for science. The Guardian quoted Howard Browman of Norway’s Institute of Marine Research: “During these times of fake news in a post-fact world, it is essential that organisations such as Ipso are able to differentiate between a scholarly exposition that is based upon the best available information and an opinion piece.” Delingpole crowed victory in a Breitbart commentary headlined “How I totally crushed the ocean acidification alarmist loons.”

But Delingpole also observed that if IPSO had found against him, Breitbart and the Spectator “would have been made to look like sloppy purveyors” of fake news. Would have been? Recently at Breitbart, as reported in this venue, Delingpole purveyed fake news about “global cooling.”

Delingpole and other purveyors are perplexing not just scientists.

At the New York Times, media observer Jim Rutenberg’s recent “Lessons from 2016 for the news media, as the ground shifts” began , “Starting a weekly column about the nexus between media, technology, culture and politics in the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign was like parachuting into a hail of machine-gun crossfire.”

The online version of Rutenberg’s front-page 8 August piece —often condemned, sometimes bitterly, by critics charging bias at the Times and in the media generally—carried the headline “Trump is testing the norms of objectivity in journalism.” No doubt anticipating those condemnations, Rutenberg expressed frustration that the circumstances he felt forced onto him, and onto journalists generally, could unfairly advantage candidate Hillary Clinton by reducing attention to her own falsehoods. Rutenberg wondered if the perplexing new circumstances somehow required new journalistic standards. But he concluded that “journalism shouldn’t measure itself against any one campaign’s definition of fairness” and that it’s “journalism’s job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment. To do anything less would be untenable.”

Nearly 2400 online Times commenters showed an enormous degree of approval. More than 2200 ticked “recommend” on the comment of Stephen Streifferf of Oak Park, Illinois, who wrote in part:

Despite Rutenberg’s resolve, his piece contained and conveyed some anguish. He felt trapped, trying to apply journalistic norms in a situation that sidetracks or foils them. About these vexing new circumstances, the Times‘s David Streitfeld recently quoted Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of the fact-checkers at Snopes.com: “Rationality seems to have fallen out of vogue.”

Streitfeld proposed, as others have done, that recent increases in attacks on Snopes and other fact-checkers stem from a widespread belief that the checkers’ real goal is censorship that must be resisted fiercely. He also joined others in pointing out that false news now circulates faster and provides more payoffs. He quoted Snopes writer Kim LaCapria: “It used to be that if you got too far from the mainstream, you were shunned for being a little nutty. Now there is so much nutty going around that it’s socially acceptable to embrace wild accusations. No one is embarrassed by anything anymore.” She and Binkowski prescribe a remedy: traditional journalism.

The Times‘s Jeremy W. Peters recently spotlighted the problem of a new kind of impediment to that remedy. Citing Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh, he noted that bogus “appropriation of the ‘fake news’ label is an effort to further erode the mainstream media’s claim to be a reliable and accurate source.” In early December, Limbaugh had posted a lengthy radio talk-show transcript headlined “Mainstream media IS fake news.” His website put that verb in all caps.

Such profligate and—there’s no avoiding the irony—liberal flinging-about of the “fake news” label has helped cause Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan to balk. She used to be public editor at the New York Times. Sullivan recently declared the label “tainted.” It “has a real meaning,” she stipulated, of “deliberately constructed lies, in the form of news articles, meant to mislead the public.” But it’s becoming useless. She called for new thinking about how to talk about such lies.

Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker recently engaged the word lie itself. In an op-ed he emphasized that President-elect Trump “has a record of saying things that are, as far as the available evidence tells us, untruthful.” Baker sees, though, a “widespread reluctance to label him a liar.” He explained his view that if “we are to use the term lie in our reporting, then we have to be confident about the subject’s state of knowledge and his moral intent.” He added, “I can see circumstances where we might. I’m reluctant to use the term, not implacably against it.”

Scientific American was for it the other day, accusing anti-vaccine crusader Robert F. Kennedy Jr of being “brazen in publicizing outright lies.” On the other hand—shifting from the word lie to the term fake news, but applying Baker’s principle—maybe a Physics Today Online commenter was right to criticize the headline “PBS reports, then deletes, fake energy news.” True, PBS blundered badly by spreading nonsense about conjuring energy from water. But there was no evidence of malign intent.

You can find bad intent, though, in a fad addressed in the climate-change portion of the New York Times‘s retrospective on 2016 science. In serious science discussions in the past, did a Vannevar Bush or a Richard Feynman ever have to contemplate anything remotely like this? The Times reported, and illustrated in a 30-second online video , the practice of rigging trucks to discharge, as a gesture of contempt, huge billows of black smoke onto joggers, cyclists, and hybrid cars.

It’s called “rolling coal.” Welcome to 2017.

Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.