1 week Ago By Post Editorial Board
Scientific American chief editor Laura Helmuth apologized Friday for her utterly classless Election Night rants against Donald Trump and his voters. It’s a start, but a lot of self-examination needs to follow. And not just by her.
Her expletive-filled posts were plain embarrassing, e.g.: “Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because f–k them to the moon and back.
” She’s in her 50s and she’s still obsessed with high school? Helmuth vented at least three times on Bluesky (one of those X alternatives for libs who can’t bear disagreement), blaring her unprofessional lack of scientific detachment. Then again, her mag endorsed Kamala Harris after breaking its 175-year streak of neutrality in 2020 to endorse Joe Biden — a clear sign it’s falling into the same extreme partisanship as most old-school media. Indeed, a host of actual science journals — Nature, the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine — endorsed Biden in 2020.
Which brought an ugly blowback, surveys indicated: making Trump voters more suspicious of them on COVID. Yet SciAm and Nature did it again with Harris this year. All this virtue-signaling pleases the editors, but harms the institutions’ brands: If they can’t resist playing politics in public, what might they be doing behind the scenes when it comes to science? Nature went so far as to call Trump — who gave us Operation Warp Speed, and its life-saving COVID vaccines — “anti-science.
” Fact is, the ideological insistence on calling science “settled” on everything from climate change (and what to do about it) to the wisdom of transing minors, is itself profoundly anti -scientific. At this point, all these “science” journalists now need to prove that they have any real clue what science is actually about..
