Scientific journals discriminate against industry scientists, unless, that is, they happen to work for the environmental or organic industries. Those scientists don't have to follow the same rules governing the disclosure of conflicts of interest that everybody else does.
science journalism
Air quality is very good pretty much everywhere in the United States. This fact stands in stark contrast to utterly absurd claims in the media, such as blaming air pollution for killing 155,000 Americans. Take a look at the maps provided by the World Health Organization.
The Guardian's health page is scaremongering about e-cigarettes and pushing bizarre solutions to obesity. This is what happens when political activists write about public health.
It's been said that truth is the first casualty in war. It could also be said that truth is the first casualty in a decadent and declining society ... and journalists are leading the way.
The online news arm of this journal s a solid source of information. However, it reprinted an article from E&E News that stated green energy is the way to go and the environment is full of scary chemicals. Associating itself with this outlet was a dubious decision, and one that may prove damaging to its reputation.
It was discovered that Ali Watkins, the newspaper's national security reporter, slept with a source who was an aide to the Senate Intelligence Committee. That source has now been arrested as part of an investigation into leaks of classified information. A breakdown in journalistic ethics, to say the least.
Race, age and other demographic factors are commonly controlled in epidemiology studies. It makes no sense to compare one group to another group if researchers do not bother to control for confounders – that is, factors like race or age that can cause researchers to draw the wrong conclusion.
A few weeks ago, a paper claimed that an extra glass of wine will shorten your life. The story circled the globe in minutes. A new paper, with better methodology, concluded what we all knew: Moderate alcohol consumption can be integrated into a healthy lifestyle. It, however, won't receive nearly as much attention as the sensationalist report. Such is the power of the academic PR hype machine combined with a gullible, sensationalist press.
Carey Gillam is a well-known anti-GMO activist who rejects the scientific consensus, regularly reports easily provable lies, and works for an organization that gets most of its money from 9/11 truthers.
A study published in The Lancet concludes that one additional drink per day increases a person's risk of stroke, coronary disease, heart failure, fatal hypertensive disease, and fatal aortic aneurysm. Alcohol may not be to blame, but we can't determine this because the authors didn't even bother to collect data on it.
The authors had a clear strategy in mind: (1) Do a study on a common household object; (2) Produce boring data that doesn't surprise any microbiologist; (3) Write a provocative, fear-mongering headline; (4) Market it to a gullible, clickbait-hungry press, exhibiting no critical thinking; and (5) Watch the grant dollars roll in.
A complete hoax was circulated among Russian state-controlled media as legitimate news, and then the Western media fell for it. Sure, some of them provided "caveats." But the point is that Russian propaganda has so infiltrated the public discourse that it appears regularly in mainstream Western media outlets. And that's shocking.