Journalism, science, politics, and choosing sides.

In a post last week, I was trying to work out whether science journalism can do something more for us than just delivering press releases from the scientists. Specifically, I suggested that journalists with a reasonable understanding of scientific methodology could do some work to assess the credibility of the research described in the press releases, as well as the credibility of the scientists issuing those press releases.

Although the post was concerned with the general question of whether science journalism can do this bit of evaluative work for a lay audience that, by and large, is both rusty on the basics of scientific methodology and at least a little scared of thinking hard about technical issues, it was prompted by the particular strategy Chris Mooney set forth for his reporting in The Republican War on Science, and by Steve Fuller's critique of that in his essay for the Crooked Timber seminar on Chris's book. And, in a comment on my post, Steve Fuller brings us back to the question of the particular strategy Chris was using, and of the sorts of standards to which journalistic work guided by this strategy ought to be held. I think this is a fair question, but it brings us into the turbulent waters at the confluence of science and politics, where journalism may go beyond presenting an objective picture of the terrain and may exhort us to choose a side.

So you might want to grab a life-jacket before we begin.

From Steve Fuller's comment:

First, I read The Republican War on Science as just as much an attempt to make as to report news - very much like George W. Bush's declaration of a 'War on Terror'. In both cases, one can see a wide range of evidence for the conflict indicated in the corresponding phrase but now collected together and focused for ideological effect. There also a self-fulfilling air to both phrases: Both Mooney and Bush want people to realize there is a war - and to takes sides. As a journalistic invention, it is potentially very illuminating because it seems to offer a distinct perspective from which lots of things at once in the public eye start to make sense. But given that promise, it becomes imperative that the journalist has staked out an independent point-of-view. 'Independent' here simply means using standards of judgement that are his/her own, and not entirely parasitic on that his/her informants.

'Trust' is a really bad word to use in this context because it suggests an either-or choice the journalist needs to make with regard to (in this case) the political and scientific informants: A journalist who aspires to the panoramic sweep suggested by The Republican War on Science should be engaged in more of a wheat-and-chaff exercise with regard to informants. Maybe Chris did do this, but it's not evident from the book. He sometimes - but rarely - faults the guys on his side. Indeed, Chris pretty much did a George Bush and painted the situation as the Forces of Light (Democrats and Real Scientists) against the Forces of Darkness (Republicans and Pseudo-Scientists), which ends up only preaching to the choir - which, admittedly, nowadays is pretty large. ...

(By the way, it's possible to adopt an 'independent' viewpoint in my sense without being a 'centrist', just like a judge can weigh the merits of a case and still come down on one side.)

One thing that troubles me about the discussion so far is that you guys seem to be portraying the Chris' journalistic task as simply a matter of evaluating the merits of rival scientific sources, and then looking to the philosophy of science to solve your problem. Chris claims to be doing something more creative here - and so deserves to be held to a different standard, one that takes science journalism out of the realm of 'Methodology for the Masses'. In the end, the independence of Chris' standpoint should be judged by how he disentangles and analyses the relationship between scientific claims and political motives. In that spirit, I suggested in my review that he should have asked both sides of this 'war' to troubleshoot each other's claims and motives, and then formally evaluate them, as a judge might do in a case.

Fuller is right that my post was concerned with the general problem of whether a non-scientist can evaluate the credibility of scientific sources (and the comments that followed it) -- I was responding to a comment that seemed to raise the general question. He may also be right that Chris is aiming to do more than to use his "judgment to evaluate the credibility of different sides and to discern where scientists think the weight of evidence lies", although I take it that Chris would judge this evaluation of credibility as a crucial first step to the larger task. (Indeed, even if Chris were engaged in the more modest project of discerning where the community of science thinks the weight of the evidence lies, it might be informative for a science journalist to see how scientists on different sides of a scientific controversy respond to each other's evidence and claims.)

So how does the journalistic task change if we're not just interested in what the scientists know and how they know it? If we're evaluating scientific knowledge in a political environment, how does this shift the standard to which we should hold the journalist making the evaluation?

Fuller suggests, for one thing, that the journalist needs to develop standards of judgment that are not entirely parasitic on those of his or her informants. Does this mean that the science journalist who is not a scientist ought to establish his or her own standards for evaluating sound science -- whether or not working scientists would agree with these evaluations? I take it this is a move Chris explicitly rejects. Perhaps, though, the independent standards Fuller has in mind pertain to judging how the scientist's political interests might be entangled in his or her scientific work or scientific judgments -- in the questions asked, the ways data are interpreted, the course of action the results suggest, etc.

The task for the journalist, then, would be to sniff out whether political factors might be acting to bias scientists' views of what counts as good science. If scientists with more Democratic leanings see the science produced by scientists with more Republican leanings as wanting, is this due to actual methodological problems, or due instead to a political disagreement that manifests itself in the kinds of scientific knowledge produced by the two camps? Is it possible to take a piece of scientific knowledge and discern from it the political biases of the scientists who produced it? Is there any independent point of view a journalist could stake out from which he or she could come to the conclusion that one political side tends to produce better science than the other, or does a Forces of Light/Forces of Darkness conclusion indicate that the journalist's own biases are driving the story?

Doing objective science is hard. There are lots of ways political leanings could affect the way a scientist approaches a problem -- perhaps in the sorts of background assumptions one holds, how one frames the scientific question, or what kinds of outcome one is expecting to observe. I suspect something like politics may play a role in what scientists see as the "moving parts" of the systems they study (e.g., genes or environment in studies of diseases or of intelligence), and that this may play a significant role not only in what is manipulated in the research, but also in the kind of accounts scientists give of the potential for practical applications arising from their work. To the extent that politics might bias individual scientists in their scientific research, however, I take it that these scientists rely on the community of science as a whole to weed out these biases as much as possible. The hope is that the objective facts of the system under study are those that a diverse community of scientists can agree upon.

Put another way, scientists aspire to build knowledge that is so well supported by the facts that even scientists with wildly different background assumptions and biases will accept it as knowledge. Convincing those who are already inclined to see the world as you see it is not enough.

So, my inclination is to say that good science strives to be free from political biases -- at least insofar as "good science" is a matter of the methodology a scientific community uses to produce scientific knowledge. How that scientific knowledge ought to be used once it has been produced is a separate matter. Ought we to use our knowledge of nuclear reactions to build power plants or bombs (or both, or neither)? Ought we to use our knowledge about how intelligence develops to change the distribution of societal goods, or to offer gene-level interventions? Answering questions like these relies on other commitments scientists have -- on values that, strictly speaking, need not play a role in their labors producing scientific knowledge. Even if the scientists themselves sometimes forget that questions of how to use science are separable from what science lets us know, a careful science journalist ought to be able to draw that distinction for us.

But I take it the disagreement Chris looks at in his book is not a simple quarrel about how to use what, thanks to science, we know. Rather, it seems to be a battle about what even counts as good science, a battle that is driven by political forces from outside of science. In other words, it's not a situation where Democratic scientists come to conclusion X and Republican scientists come to conclusion Y (because of how their political commitments shape the knowledge they build). Instead, Chris seems to be describing a situation where, within the community of scientists actively engaged in research, the majority agree that the evidence points to conclusion X, but forces from without (driven by political aims that are potentially threatened by conclusion X) actively boost the dissenting voices that argue for conclusion Y -- indeed, boosting these dissenting voices in ways that misrepresent the soundness of conclusion Y as judged by the methodological commitments shared by the community of scientists.

What makes the Forces of Darkness evil, in this scenario, is not that they would prefer it if the scientific consensus were behind conclusion Y, nor even that they would prefer to ignore the scientific consensus behind conclusion X (because conclusion X is inconvenient for the policy objectives the Forces of Darkness would like to pursue). Rather, the evil lies in trying to distort the public's picture of what the scientists think they know -- to make conclusion X look less well supported than it actually is, or to make conclusion Y look better supported. The evil lies, as well, in misrepresenting to the public the process by which scientists try to achieve consensus. (It is striking how many minority-view advocates in the debate have claimed the mantle of Galileo rather than working to find the evidence or the arguments that might convince their scientific peers.) And, there is a perverse kind of evil in at once claiming scientific support for one's political and policy aims (by acting as a booster for minority scientific views that seem harmonious with those aims) and simultaneously ignoring (or, in the case of scientists in one's employ, silencing) the voices of those in the community of science whose conclusions are not to your liking, despite the fact that the scientists themselves judge the methodology used in reaching those conclusions to be sound.

While I don't think doing good, objective science (or working from the knowledge produced by that science) forces a particular political view upon anyone, it does seem that there are particular political strategies that may be incompatible with one's commitment to the methodology of science. A political strategy that required annointing as "knowledge" whatever view best advanced the policy agenda would be at odds with scientific commitments about how best to build knowledge of the world. If one side in the political discourse really did make a decision that inconvenient scientific facts were getting in the way of winning the hearts and minds of voters, and if that side decided that it would be political expedient therefore to cast the scientific facts themselves into confusion and to make it difficult for members of the public to get an accurate view of what the scientists thought, I don't think it would be unfair to cast that side as against science. Indeed, a political faction could be anti-science from the point of view of casting into confusion certain bits of scientific knowledge while still being quite enthusiastic about potential applications from other branches of science.

If this were the scenario playing out, what kind of standards of independence ought we to demand of the journalist trying to report on it? Must he or she maintain agnosticism about whether suppressing or misrepresenting scientific knowledge for political ends (whatever they may be) is a good thing? That might be an awful lot to ask (and I think it's more than Fuller is asking). Must he or she locate political operatives who are willing to state openly that this is the strategy they are pursuing? If they're good operatives, and the strategy relies on a certain kind of dishonesty, this just might not be possible. Must he or she find evidence that scientists who agree with the (inconvenient) scientific consensus are being silenced? That scientist who hold the (more harmonious) alternative view nonethless have qualms about how their scientific dissent is "spun" for the public, because it subverts proper scientific channels for adjudicating the dispute? It may be possible to find some such voices, but there is also the possibility of finding political operatives in scientists' clothing -- at which point, an assessment of their methodology and degree of engagement in the debate within the scientific community might be useful in distinguishing serious scientists who disagree with the majority position from hacks.

For the record, I'd be perfectly happy to live in a world where being in favor of good science is compatible with any political position, where we can start with reasonable agreement about what the facts are and work from their on our competing programs as to how to act on those facts. But when claims of how the world ought to be depend on certain claims about how the world is, you run the risk that science will undermine your premises. Finding different ways to support your oughts from the facts is one way to respond. Arguing that scientific knowledge is not the only kind of knowledge that matters to support your oughts is another. But acting to distort the picture of the scientific facts in order to claim scientific support for your oughts smacks of an intellectual dishonesty that's hard to reconcile with the reality-based epistemological project of science. Those entitled to "trust" are not the actors with whose politics you most agree, but those unwilling to sacrifice honesty to support even their dearest political goal.