Washington Post commentary defends science that no one attacked

The Washington Post‘s diminished science seriousness was made plain over the weekend by an article that attempted to respond to a Republican senator’s criticism of NSF.

That diminished seriousness, often discussed by those who remember the Post‘s superb science emphasis in years gone by, comes into view most Tuesdays. That’s when a special section inaccurately called Health and Science appears. It’s actually dominated by personal health and medical news, though it must be said that the 8 November edition — six pages long — does at least offer three brief physical-science-related pieces among articles on back pain, nutrition, health costs, and migraines:

* A short interview , flagged by a front-page photo, with University of Maryland theoretical physicist S. James Gates Jr, who’s a participant in this month’s four-part NOVA series The Fabric of the Cosmos.

* A wire-service blurb — apparently not available online — about the battery-powered cars of a century ago.

* A blurb made of excerpts from Joel Achenbach’s blog posting about physicist Freeman Dyson and the prospects for detecting alien civilizations elsewhere in the universe.

The Post makes no pretense that this weekly section involves very much science outside medicine. But the paper’s 6 November Sunday Outlook article “Who needs research on cow stomachs? We all do ” sets itself up to engage some criticism of NSF. It opens by citing — and challenging — the report “ The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope ":

Indeed the senator’s report charges that “pervasive problems” plague NSF, that the organization lacks “adequate oversight of its grant funding” and suffers from “mismanagement, fraud, and abuse and lack of knowledge regarding research outcomes,” and that “NSF is prone to extensive duplication within the agency and across the federal government” and “wastes millions of dollars on low-priority projects.” Much of the report itemizes, and mildly but plainly lampoons, some of those alleged low-priority projects.

In reply, the Post commentary piece does present some quite respectable examples of arcane but important government-funded research in genomics. It’s nicely done and it’s well worth reading. However, Coburn’s report not only doesn’t contest the existence of such examples, it outright lauds them. A report section called “Transformative research funded by NSF” opens by noting that although much of the report “focuses on questionable NSF expenditures,” the “agency as a whole ... funds many scientific proposals that provide real benefits to American society.”

One of Coburn’s recommendations calls for eliminating NSF’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. The report asks whether “any of these social studies represent obvious national priorities that deserve a cut of the same pie as astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth science, physics, and oceanography.”

It’s not a report than Jon Stewart and Comedy Central could lampoon. In fact, it adopts Jon Stewart’s methods. Rather than telling the reader what to think about the objects of its criticisms, the report lets those objects show themselves. From many pages of anecdotes about allegedly questionable NSF-funded research projects, here’s one example — the final paragraphs of one of many project summaries:

Blue crabs on treadmills. Just like the shrimp and lobster.

Coburn makes his main point when he writes, “A dollar lost to mismanagement, fraud, inefficiency, or a dumb project is a dollar that could have advanced scientific discovery.” His report declares:

The Post commentary does a nice job of showing the importance of serious basic research in the hard sciences. But here’s what I think happened: I think the Post editors selected the piece based on “master story bias,” the inadvertent tendency to assume that specific circumstances (the Republican senator’s critical report) must automatically conform to well-known patterns (Republican dimness about science — as judged at the Post). I think it was, “Senator Coburn is knocking NSF? Must be more of that Republican anti-science!”

But it’s not. Now, maybe Coburn blatantly cherry-picked the NSF projects that he tars as inane, unnecessary, and financially wasteful. Maybe his allegedly “dumb projects” actually involve worthwhile research. And maybe the majority of NSF-funded research can’t be lampooned with the tools of the satirist, as in the cases of the crustaceans on those treadmills.

Nevertheless, his report makes a case — a case that’s framed with clear acknowledgment of the importance of serious science, and that’s constructed with genuine concern for financial responsibility.

Yet the Post knocked it without even bothering to discern what it actually says.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.