Politics vs. Reality revisited

There are many that fail to appreciate how their lack of knowledge leads them to feel they are experts, this infliction has unfortunately been diagnosed among politicians.

As you undoubtedly remember this has led me to suggest limiting the politicians ability to view their job description to be ideology-driven as opposed to reality-based. 

Recent events appear to justify that. Several news items show how today we have unfortunate situations that might have not occurred had politicians adhered to Evidence-Based Policy. However, considering the total failure of the media one does have to admit the problem is not just politicians. We lack incentives to adopt an approach that puts the best for society at the top of the politicians to-do list.

The events in Flint illustrate the tension between responsible governance and opportunism:

As (Governor) Snyder was testing the presidential waters, however, his government was being shamefully unaccountable to constituents who were concerned about their water supply. The city of Flint switched its primary water source from Lake Huron, through Detroit’s system, to the Flint River in April 2014. Approved by an emergency manager appointed by the governor, the move was supposed to save the beleaguered city millions of dollars. But residents soon began reporting tap water that appeared discolored, smelled rotten, and caused kids to break out in rashes. Today, Flint has become a nightmarish example of how misguided austerity policies can literally poison the public.

The article continues to explain this by mentioning the moronic "let's get rid of the government"-zealots:

Unfortunately, the biggest obstacles to desperately needed public investments are politicians like Snyder who conflate “accountability” with austerity. For Republican technocrats in particular, more accountability almost always means less spending on government programs that help ensure the public good.

But of course, we are not allowed to know the details of the decision making process. Unlike scientists who are unrelentingly harassed in the name of transparancy by agents of Big Industry, otherwise known as politicians. Take the case of using politics to sabotage science in order to serve Global Warming denialism:

If you don’t like a particular scientific study, attack the scientists who produced it. It’s a tried and true method of manufacturing controversy around inconvenient scientific analysis. And now, Lamar Smith, Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, is using the sledgehammer of a congressional subpoena to bully National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists for their research on climate change.

I cannot help but think of the following article:

Coal subsidies are costing US and Australian taxpayers billions of dollars a year, according to a new report.

It continues by citing Tim Buckley, who worked on the report:

“Any discussion of cost competitiveness of renewable energy and energy efficiency needs to take into account the decades of extensive subsidies evident for the coal industry and that, in many cases, remain in place today.”

Another example of reality-challenged action is Michigan no longer requiring the use of helmets for motorists:

In the three years after Michigan repealed a mandatory motorcycle helmet law, deaths and head injuries among bikers rose sharply, according to a recent study.

Deaths at the scene of the crash more than quadrupled, while deaths in the hospital tripled for motorcyclists. Head injuries have increased overall, and more of them are severe, the researchers report in the American Journal of Surgery

Then we have the odious example of white terrorists in Oregon. A situation hinted at in a report deemed unacceptable by ideologues:

Daryl Johnson, a former analyst for the Department of Homeland Security, wasn’t surprised when Ammon Bundy and his group of right-wing gunmen took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. His office was responsible for the famous 2009 report, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” which suggested right-wing groups would be an emerging domestic terror threat if left unchecked.

However, the report, which was published in the fraught political climate shortly after the first inauguration of Barack Obama, created outrage amongst Republicans and right-wing media outlets, and the political pushback resulted in the burying of the report, an apology from DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, and the eventual closure of Johnson’s office.

Then we have the blooming Big Brother industry attemting to mandate the software industry to grant automatic (without the need for any court of law), and unrestricted access through so-called backdoors to our information. Again, against the advise of those more knowledgable:

The Dutch government has released a statement in which it says that "it is currently not desirable to take restricting legal measures concerning the development, availability and use of encryption within the Netherlands." It also notes that forcing companies to add backdoors to their products and services would have "undesirable consequences for the security of communicated and stored information," since "digital systems can become vulnerable to criminals, terrorists and foreign intelligence services."

President Obama, increasingly annøyed with repeated gunmassacres in the US announced he intends to unilaterally implement some restriction on the spread of killing machines among people needing to assert their manhood. The obligatory gun fetishists are increasingly seperated from reason, to the point of them opposing even saint Ron:

... in 1991, former president Ronald Reagan wrote an op-ed endorsing federal gun control legislation; in 2016, Obama’s proposed to do less on gun control than even Reagan wanted is seen by Reagan-worshipping Republicans as unconscionable tyranny. 

Maybe Richard Feynman can help us interpret politicalese more reliable and reality-based.

Update 1:
Regarding the dubious handling of water poisoned with lead in Flint:

Water authorities across the US are systematically distorting water tests to downplay the amount of lead in samples, risking a dangerous spread of the toxic water crisis that has gripped Flint, documents seen by the Guardian show.

        ........................................................................................................

..................  the issue of misleading test results was widespread. “There is no way that Flint is a one-off,” [Lambrinidou] (a senior environmental scientist at the department of health) said.“There are many ways to game the system. In Flint, they went to test neighbourhoods where they knew didn’t have a problem. You can also flush the water to get rid of the lead. If you flush it before sampling, the problem will go away.

“The EPA has completely turned its gaze away from this. There is no robust oversight here, the only oversight is from the people getting hurt. Families who get hurt, such as in Flint, are the overseers. It’s an horrendous situation. The system is absolutely failing.”

The Centers for Disease Control is very clear about lead’s impacts on children. The agency emphasises that lead has no biological function in humans, and even the smallest exposure can developmentally impair children.

Not entirely safeguarding the publics health.

Update 2:
David Gorski has a good analysis of the unfortunate choices made resulting in the poisoning of Flint:

For those of you who haven’t heard of it yet, the Flint water crisis refers to the ongoing contamination of the tap water in Flint, MI with unacceptably high levels of lead that resulted from change in its water supply nearly two years ago to Flint River water.

 His conclusion hints at the root cause:

Now we will now be forced to use science-based medicine to treat potentially thousands of children for lead poisoning and science to try to fix the problems caused by this colossal failure of science-based public policy. Worse, it’s still going on, as The Guardian just reported on Friday that water authorities across the US are systematically distorting water tests to downplay the amount of lead in samples.

As I think about that, seeing the Governor throwing mid-level bureaucrats under the bus and other politicians saying that the Flint water crisis is a hoax does not give me confidence in how this crisis will ultimately turn out or that the aging infrastructure that allows such a catastrophe to occur will be fixed any time soon.

There is more out there for those interested in the Flint disaster. ProPublica has a podcast about what caused the problem, who dropped the ball, and what happens next. Or, try Mother Jones, which uses the deteriorating health of LeeAnne Walters and her family to tell the underlying story. And, then there is Dah Wiki.

BMJ: Wakefield is a fraud

In a stunning article in the British Medical Journal we are told that Andrew Wakefield, possibly the principal cause of the recent vaccines-are-evil-hype, is even less trustworthy than we discovered before.

Of course, who but Orac is on the prowl:

The discrepancies between the case reports as described in Wakefield's Lancet paper and the actual medical records are anything but random; all are in the direction of suggesting a link between the MMR and Wakefield's as yet unverified syndrome of regressive autism and enterocolitis. The cases that were selected appear not to have been random, sequential patients but were rather recruited specifically through anti-vaccine activists and trial lawyers.

And:

There is no innocent explanation possible for the systematic and numerous discrepancies between the medical record and Wakefield's paper, as the editors of the BMJ point out in their accompanying editorial:

The Office of Research Integrity in the United States defines fraud as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism. Deer unearthed clear evidence of falsification. He found that not one of the 12 cases reported in the 1998 Lancet paper was free of misrepresentation or undisclosed alteration, and that in no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, diagnoses, or histories published in the journal. 

Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt that it was Wakefield. Is it possible that he was wrong, but not dishonest: that he was so incompetent that he was unable to fairly describe the project, or to report even one of the 12 children's cases accurately? No. A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was gross.

Nevertheless:

Wakefield continues to deny that he has done anything at all wrong and blames the criticisms leveled against him on conspiracies. In reality, given the way the anti-vaccine movement has begun to circle the wagons to defend Wakefield yet again, it's tempting to claim that this is a conspiracy.

In his analysis Brian Deer likens this fraud in scope to Piltdown Man. The next commentator is Phil Plait who writes:

Brian Deer, an investigative journalist, has written a multi-part series on the BMJ site which slams Wakefield. Fiona Godlee, BMJ’s editor-in-chief, also writes about this… and just to be clear, she uses the word "fraud" nine times in her editorial. Not surprisingly, it’s been picked up by several news outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and ABC.

His conclusion:

Andrew Wakefield may not have started the antivax movement, but he certainly egged it on very strongly, along with such mouthpieces as Jenny McCarthy, and Meryl Dorey and the AVN in Australia. If the charges of fraud can be made to stick, then we might be able to make some progress toward reality once again, and lower the rate of outbreaks of measles, pertussis, and polio… and save a lot of lives in the process.

This is exactly why I am not opposed to accountability for willfully endangering other people by invoking free speech. More on the BMJ story by both Pharyngula, Deltoid, and Jeffrey H. Toney.

In the past I have wondered why people adhere to a worldview that has been thoroughly discredited. My unscientific opinion was that it must be some form of delusional disorder. Later, I noted the cognitive dissonance which has been shown to explain such behaviour. In light of what the BMJ has just made public one would hope the infectious-disease-promotion-movement will lose members. Unfortunately, being a cynic, I doubt that will happen.

Update: Be sure to read this too.

Update II: A roundup of responses to the BMJ article is provided by Liz Ditz. The Autism Blog discusses the alleged replication of Wakefield's results: it does not exist. In Scientific American David Ropeik explains that there is a discrepancy between the perceived and factual risk:

Sometimes we’re more afraid than the facts say we need to be (vaccines). With many of the bigger threats, we’re not afraid enough (infectious disease). The gap between our fears and the facts can be dangerous all by itself. Just ask the parents of the thousands of kids worldwide now getting, or dying of diseases that vaccines had pretty much controlled.

And:

The harm he [Wakefield] and others have done will persist for a long time…and will continue to serve as a reminder of the risk we face if we don’t recognize that the way we perceive risk can be a huge risk in and of itself.

The danger of the infectious-disease-promotion-movement is shown by Maryn McKenna who contracted whooping cough in India and wrote an article in Wired about the rise in cases. Take home message:

The worst news in this upsetting trend is this: We’re doing it to ourselves. As far as anyone can tell, the rise in pertussis is not due to any change in the organism, or to any mysterious error among the manufacturers who make pertussis vaccines. It’s due to vaccine refusal, to parents turning away from vaccines because they think the vaccines are more harmful than the diseases they prevent — or, more selfishly, because they think the wall of immunity created by other vaccinated children will protect their unimmunized ones.

Grant Jacobs, for Code for Life, made an overview, and Skepacabra did the same. Nice review of communication pitfalls by The Thoughtful Animal:

Giving us incidence and death rates and other such statistics doesn't really get the job done. It doesn't communicate what they want it to. Nor will glossy pamphlets (like the one they gave me) featuring Mia Hamm telling us to get vaccinated. What will get the job done is story-telling, appealing to emotion, and utilizing accessible analogies. Instead of telling us how many gazillions died last year, tell us how many airplanes full of people, or how many football stadiums full of people died last year.

Update III: Luckily Jenny McCarthy comes to our recsue and rehashes long ago refuted non-arguments. Apparently, true or false is determined by the number of times you make a claim.

The Lehrer effect

Ever since Jonah Lehrer identified the supposed flawed nature of the scientific method, and named it the decline effect, the Intertoobz has responded by either advancing the notion this proves science is just as unreliable as other manufactroversies, or by pointing out that what Lehrer sees as problematic actually is why science is reliable: it eventually filters out human bias.

Eventhough I was somewhat late in noticing the current kerfuffle others are slightly faster to comment on the notion that science does not work. Some observations I initially missed are by Kent Anderson, responding to "a study that scientists thought proved that female barn swallows preferred mating with males who had long, symmetrical feathers:"

In this case, the raw observations about feathers are generalized first to one species, then attempts are made to generalize them to other species, and soon the attempts start to fail. This isn’t an erosion of truth. It’s a failure of theorizing. The theory was derived after the fact, and to no useful end other than to publish more papers. It wasn’t a hypothesis that was tested, but a data set shoehorned into a post hoc theory.

The scientific method itself is revealing the limitations of initial findings. It’s working. But we’re so geared to create “headline science,” and so wrapped up in ego and pride that we’ve forgotten the humility we need to exhibit before the facts. But most importantly, we may have forgotten that something is even more important than facts — and that is theory.

Writing for Big Think Matthew C. Nisbet notes that:

the reaction that the article has stirred in some cases does not match the nuance of Lehrer's arguments. The article has been unfairly critiqued by some for giving ammunition to those already committed to extreme doubt about subjects such as climate change or evolution.  As Lehrer notes at his blog, he's also been accused of being a post-modernist, arguing that there is no such thing as truth or reality.

Criticism he does not share. In his view the article, and the ensuing debate, are an opportunity to bolster science education. The added benefit is that they:

are wonderful teaching tools for science students.

A column by John Allen Paulos, for ABC News, reviews the article and elaborates on the explanations for why the "decline effect" might occur:

A greater realization of these effects by journalists, scientists, and everyone else will lead to more caution in reporting results, more realistic expectations, and, I would guess, a decline in the decline affect (more accurately, the stat-psych effect).

The criticism his article generated has led Lehrer to write a response. Nonetheless, it appears he did not grasp what was said, or as Orac puts it:

Actually, what Lehrer's critics have been doing is anything but reassuring ourselves with platitudes about the rigors of replication. Indeed, all of us who bothered to write about Lehrer's article spent considerable time pointing out how regression to the mean, publication bias, and a variety of other factors that could explain much of the decline effect. We spent a lot of effort trying to explain how it is unsurprising that initial promising results often appear less so as more and more scientists investigate a question, developing along the way better techniques and approaches to investigating the question and approaching it from different angles. We spent a lot of verbiage describing how it is not at all unsurprising that new drugs, which seem to work so well in early clinical trials, appear to lose efficacy as their indication is broadened beyond the homogeneous initial small groups of subjects to more patients whose characteristics are less tightly controlled. Indeed, one of the letter writers pointed this very fact out to Lehrer, but he chose not to address this point directly.

The decline effect is something any physician who does clinical research knows from experience (although he may not call it that) because he sees it so often. To Lehrer it seemed to be some sort of shocking revelation in clinical research. The expectation that randomized clinical trials can overestimate the efficacy of new drugs is the very reason why, after drugs are released, physicians sometimes carry out what are known as "pragmatic trials," which are designed to find out how effective a treatment is in everyday, real-world practice, where the conditions are not nearly as controlled and the patient populations not nearly as homogeneous as they are in randomized clinical trials. Efficacy results determined in pragmatic trials are virtually always less robust than what was measured in the original randomized clinical trials. Not that any of this stops Lehrer from simply repeating the same stuff about big pharma having incentives to shape the results of its science and clinical trials. We get it; we get it. Science is done by humans, and sometimes human biases and motivations other than scientific discovery influence thee humans who do science.

He continues with:

More importantly, after discussing the decline effect and impugning the reliability of science, Lehrer still can't seem to give a coherent explanation as to why AGW and evolution are such reliable, well-founded scientific theories compared to what he seems to perceive as the unreliability of the rest of science. Worse, he hasn't addressed many of the more cogent criticisms of his work, in particular the numerous attempts to explain to him why it is not at all remarkable that second generation antipsychotics have not proven to be as effective as initial results suggested or why it is not particularly surprising or disturbing that fluctuating asymmetry never panned out. Lehrer had a great opportunity to explain why making scientific conclusions is so difficult and why all scientific knowledge is provisional. Those points are in his articles on the decline effect, but they're buried in the surrounding implication that the decline effect is mysterious. Then in the last paragraph of his response to critics Lehrer has the chutzpah to declare that "there is nothing inherently mysterious about why the scientific process occasionally fails or the decline effect occurs."

Someone else not overly impressed by Lehrer is David Weisman who strongly opines:

the 'decline effect' is bullshit. Science also ignores things for long periods of time, then recognizes their importance, at which point the theory grows, strengthens, branches off into new fields, and improves. Germ theory is hardly in decline, it grows stronger with every pneumonia. DNA as genetic instruction is also a theory, one that is hardly in decline. Ditto evolution. Ditto greenhouse gas. Ditto cells, tectonic plates, gravity, sodium channels, and atoms. None seem in danger of decline.

Lehrer wrote a faulty article. It got published. Initially it must have seemed almost reasonable. But on second look, it has fatal flaws. In fact, it appears to me that he cherry picked examples to support his own pet theory, a classic fallacy of the highly biased. Now it doesn't look very reasonable at all. It looks like small minded pseudoscience.

Another take on the phenomenon is given by Mike the Mad Biologist by referring to Andrew Gelman:

Gelman (and he has some good slides over at his post) is claiming, correctly, that if the effect is weak and you don't have enough samples (e.g., subjects enrolled in the study), any statistically significant result will be so much greater than what the biology would provide that it's probably spurious. You might get lucky and have a spurious result that points in the same direction as the real phenomenon, but that's just luck.

Then he points out:

So what someone will do is report the statistically significant result (since we tend to not report the insignificant ones). But further experiments, which often aren't well designed either, fail to pick up an effect. The ones that are well designed and have a large sample size will either identify a very weak real effect, leading to a consensus in the field of "Meh", or correctly fail to find a non-existent effect.
Sounds like the Decline Effect to me.

By claiming science is unable to provide any definite answers, i.e. The Truth, Lehrer apperently agrees with the anti-science movement which claims science is merely another opinion. Once everything is opinion how could any reasonable person (you know, the "fair and balanced"-type) object to dissenting views such as: evolution is not true, global warming does not exist, vaccines are evil, HIV is harmless, et cetera? This inadvertent support of denialism, through the law of unintended consequences, I propose we call the Lehrer effect. In other words, the Lehrer effect stands for the proposition that the orchestrated efforts of misinformation-central, in time inevitably will contaminate and debilitate even the protectors of reason, i.e. they too eventually come to believe that the scientific method is no more reliable than pseudoscience and denialism.

Update: Amended definition last sentence.

Why the "decline effect" shows the scientific method works

Part of the struggle between science and ideology is the recurring theme that science too can be wrong. Note the number of times we have seen scientists retreating from their initial position to a more nuanced one. This transition to less pronounced statements causes the anti-science crowd to claim this proves science is not as reliable as we think. This phenomenon is discussed by David Gorski while responding to:

an article in The New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer entitled The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong With the Scientific Method?

The above concept is called the "decline effect" which, according to Gorski, stands for:

a phenomenon in which initial results from experiments or studies of a scientific question are highly impressive, but, over time, become less so as the same investigators and other investigators try to replicate the results, usually as a means of building on them. In fact, Googling “the decline effect” brought up an entry from The Skeptic’s Dictionary, in which the decline effect is described thusly:

The decline effect is the notion that psychics lose their powers under continued investigation. This idea is based on the observation that subjects who do significantly better than chance in early trials tend to do worse in later trials.

To him this observation is is neither shocking nor new:

In medicine, in particular, early reports tend to be smaller trials and experiments that, because of their size, tend to be more prone to false positive results. Such false positive results (or, perhaps, exaggerated results that appear more positive than they really are) generate enthusiasm, and more investigators pile on. There’s often a tendency to want to publish confirmatory papers early on (the “bandwagon effect”), which might further skew the literature too far towards the positive. Ultimately, larger, more rigorous studies are done, and these studies result in a “regression to the mean” of sorts, in which the newer studies fail to replicate the large effects seen in earlier results. This is nothing more than what we’ve been writing right here on SBM ever since its inception, namely that the normal course of clinical research is to start out with observations from smaller studies, which are inherently less reliable because they are small and thus more prone to false positives or exaggerated effect sizes

His conclusion:

Although Lehrer makes some good points, where he stumbles, from my perspective, is when he appears to conflate “truth” with science or, more properly, accept the idea that there are scientific “truths,” even going so far as to use the word in the title of his article. That is a profound misrepresentation of the nature of science, in which all “truths” are provisional and all “truths” are subject to revision based on evidence and experimentation. The decline effect–or, as Lehrer describes it the title of his article, the “truth wearing off”–is nothing more than science doing what science does: Correcting itself.

Commenting on this article Steven Novella writes that the term "decline effect:"

was first applied to the parapsychological literature, and was in fact proposed as a real phenomena of ESP – that ESP effects literally decline over time. Skeptics have criticized this view as magical thinking and hopelessly naive – Occam’s razor favors the conclusion that it is the flawed measurement of ESP, not ESP itself, that is declining over time.  Lehrer, however, applies this idea to all of science, not just parapsychology.

Just like Gorski he notes:

Lehrer is ultimately referring to aspects of science that skeptics have been pointing out for years (as a way of discerning science from pseudoscience), but Lehrer takes it to the nihilistic conclusion that it is difficult to prove anything, and that ultimately “we still have to choose what to believe.” Bollocks!

His explanation for this phenomenon is the same as Gorski's. The article was also noticed by Pharyngula who stated:

I read it. I was unimpressed with the overselling of the flaws in the science, but actually quite impressed with the article as an example of psychological manipulation.

And he then remarked:

Early in any scientific career, one should learn a couple of general rules: science is never about absolute certainty, and the absence of black & white binary results is not evidence against it; you don't get to choose what you want to believe, but instead only accept provisionally a result; and when you've got a positive result, the proper response is not to claim that you've proved something, but instead to focus more tightly, scrutinize more strictly, and test, test, test ever more deeply. It's unfortunate that Lehrer has tainted his story with all that unwarranted breast-beating, because as a summary of why science can be hard to do, and of the institutional flaws in doing science, it's quite good.

In short, the article erroneously points out the inherent characteristics of the scientific method as "proof" of why science is just another opinion. While provocative it identifies weakness but fails to recognise this actually is science's strongpoint.

As an side, this flowchart on how to debate the anti-science brigade (creationists actually) is brilliant:

(h/t Pharyngula)

Update: Following the "decline effect" there now is the Lehrer effect.

Thou shalt be "Fair and Balanced"

One of the reasons I am utterly unimpressed by journalists is their strict adherence to the "present-both-sides-equally"-doctrine. They have convinced themselves that to be neutral, objective or whatever a "good reporter" is supposed to do, one should always give equal time to opposing voices. Especially, when there is no serious debate among experts. In short, if science says HIV causes AIDS your duty as a journalist is to include somebody asserting this is not true. Not only that, but to give both views equal weight. The same principle holds true for Holocaust denialists, Flat earthers, the infectious-disease-promotion-movement, et cetera.

Then, an article appeared in the Chicago Tribune that dismissed the validity of claims there is such a thing as Chronic Lyme Disease (CLD) by presenting the current scientific consensus which refutes that notion, and as such evades the "mislead-your-audience-at-all-costs"-doctrine. Because of the quality of their reporting PalMD notes:

It starts with a piece in the Chicago Tribune by Patricia Callahan and Trine Tsouderos.  The award winning pair have been among the few reporters to consistently “get it right” about alternative medicine. Tsouderos is well-respected among critics of quackery for her willingness to look at the science and report the truth, without resorting to false balance*.  Callahan and Tsouderos’ investigation into the dangerous and deceptive practices of alternative autism doctors, practices that include chemical castration, won cheers from those  screaming out against this unethical mistreatment of children.  These reporters have got the bona fides amongst both journalists and scientists.

Observing the article not using this doctrine, Orac writes:

One exception to this profoundly annoying pattern (if you're a skeptic) has been the journalism of Trine Tsouderos, who with Pat Callahan, has produced over the last year or two a number of excellent, science-based stories on the anti-vaccine and its associated "autism biomed" movements, including an expose of Boyd Haley's "rebranding" of an industrial chelator as an autism treatment. She's even taken on "America's doctor," Dr. Oz. As a result, she's been demonized by cranks, up to and including having her face crudely Photoshopped into a picture of a Thanksgiving feast in which she and various others whom the merry band of anti-vaccine loons at Age of Autism view as enemies were portrayed as sitting down to a meal of dead baby.

Astonishingly, this article is than attacked by Paul Raeburn, former senior editor for science at Business Week, former science editor at the Associated Press, author of three science books, and director of a university science journalism program, for ..... not adhering to the "Fair-and-Balanced"-principle. Quoth Orac:

Boiled down to its essence, Raeburn's complaint is the opposite of what we skeptics, scientists, and supporters of science-based medicine complain about all the time about journalists, namely that Callahan and Tsouderos did not fall into the trap of false balance, did not give undue credence to pseudoscience, and did not "tell both sides" as though they had equal or roughly equal credence.

An identical observation regarding the “lack of balance” can be found in PalMD's response:

When it comes to truth, it doesn’t matter how Paul Raeburn perceives the process.  A medical fact is a medical fact, and while he may not like the way they came to their conclusion, the truth remains. 

It does not matter which "controversy" you prefer, there will always be experts, and many more non-experts, that disagree with the consensus. However, a few lone wolves do not a scientific debate make! This is what any competent journalist should convey to his/her audience. As long as those journalists are insufficiently capable of drowning out the noise the general public can't help but be misinformed. At present it has become annoyingly clear that without this massive failure of journalism we would not have an organisation like Wikileaks.

Update: Corrected grammar in last sentence.

Update II: To prove my point Javier Moreno, for El Pais, observed:

As Simon Jenkins of The Guardian wrote earlier this month, power hates to see the truth exposed. I would add that above all, power fears the truth when the truth doesn't fit its needs. I knew immediately after I received the first call from Assange that Friday in late November that EL PAÍS had a great story on its hands, and that it was our duty to publish it.

But despite our concerns, there was something that all of us involved in the process never doubted for an instant: we had a responsibility to the democracies that we live in to publish the story. Revealing the truth is the touchstone of true journalism, and the reason we get out of bed in the morning.

And, as if he had read this blog, he denounces the meme I described before:

It is the prerogative of governments, not the press, to bury secrets for as long as they can, and I will not argue with this as long as it does not cover up deceitful acts against citizens. But a newspaper's main task is to publish news, and to seek out news where it can find it. As I said in a recent online chat with EL PAÍS readers, newspapers have many obligations in a democratic society: responsibility, truthfulness, balance and a commitment to citizens. Our obligations definitely do not, however, include protecting governments and the powerful in general from embarrassing revelations.

Update III: New post on our trustworthy media here.

Pay no attention to the man behind the screen

One of the most frustrating things to me is the absolute inability, or is it unwillingness, of journalists to recognise what the story they report is about. This is the theme of this blog: I try to encourage people to seek out information and always question what is being told, i.e. "what basis is there for these claims?" Unfortunately people are easily misled, and information presented by journalists is inherently unreliable. The most recent example of what is wrong with our ability to ascertain the facts is the publication by Wikileaks of documents that are embarrasing to the US. As usual the incompetent and obfuscating characteristics of the media, that are supposed to adequately inform us, engage in their typical method of protecting those in power.

As always, the intrepid reporter notices those juicy bits about Julian Assange's life. Which, regardless of the topic, generate more stories than the initial disclosure of fraudulent, criminal or misleading behaviour by the powerful. Commenting on the media's interest in diverting attention with ad hominems Greenwald remarked:

... what I do know -- as John Cole notes -- is this:  as soon as Scott Ritter began telling the truth about Iraqi WMDs, he was publicly smeared with allegations of sexual improprieties.  As soon as Eliot Spitzer began posing a real threat to Wall Street criminals, a massive and strange federal investigation was launched over nothing more than routine acts of consensual adult prostitution, ending his career (and the threat he posed to oligarchs).  And now, the day after Julian Assange is responsible for one of the largest leaks in history, an arrest warrant issues that sharply curtails his movement and makes his detention highly likely.

While all this titellating stuff is unfolding The New York Times is still unable to call torture torture. As Greenwald reports that:

the NYT in its article on brutal detainee abuse steadfastly avoids using the word "torture" to describe what was done, consistent with its U.S.-Government-serving formal policy of refusing to use that word where U.S. policy is involved.  By stark contrast, virtually every other media account uses that term to describe the heinous abuse of detainees chronicled by this leak, the only term that accurately applies:  see The Guardian ("American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes"); BBC (US "ignored Iraq torture"); Politico ("a devastating portrait of apparent U.S. indifference to a pattern of murder and torture by the Iraqi army").  BoingBoing appropriately mocks the NYT's increasingly humiliating no-"torture" policy by creating a euphemism-generator.

The role of the media as defender of the powerful is evidenced by the reaction to these documents. Greenwald compares it to the response by Nixon to the Pentagon Papers and notes:

Predictably, just as happened with Ellsberg, there is now a major, coordinated effort underway to smear WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, and to malign his mental health -- all as a means of distracting attention away from these highly disturbing revelations and to impede the ability of WikiLeaks to further expose government secrets and wrongdoing with its leaks.  But now, the smear campaign is led not by Executive Branch officials, but by members of the establishment media.  As the intelligence community reporter Tim Shorrock wrote today on Twitter:  "When Dan Ellsberg leaked [the] Pentagon Papers, Nixon's henchmen tried to destroy his reputation. Today w/Wikileaks & Assange, media does the job."

And commenting on statements by Howard Kurtz maligning Assange:

You will never, ever hear people like Kurtz, or John Burns, using these kinds of disparaging insults for any American political or military official with actual power -- not even (especially not) the ones whose "delusions" about Saddam's nuclear clouds and team of mad chemical scientists and alliances with Al Qaeda caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings, the displacement of millions more, and human suffering and misery on an unimaginable scale.  As Burns explained, with those people:  "You build up a kind of trust. It's not explicit, it's just there. And my feeling is that it’s the responsibility of the reporter to judge in those circumstances what is fairly reportable, and what is not, and to go beyond that, what it is necessary to report."

In what I consider a surreal reaction The Guardian reports that:

A Fox News contributor and former state department adviser has accused WikiLeaks of conducting "political warfare against the US" and called for those behind the whistleblowing website to be declared "enemy combatants" so they can be subjected to "non-judicial actions".

Apparently free speech applies only to those in power. Then there is the article The Washington Post and WikiLeaks, by Scott Horton, which details some significant revelations such as:

... the disclosure of a Fragmentary Order (“Frago”) authorizing soldiers not to investigate cases of torture that do not involve coalition forces is extremely important. It counts as evidence of high-level policy to countenance war crimes and violations of the prohibition on torture, which requires not only investigation but also intervention. Recall this astonishing exchange that occurred between Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace at a DOD press conference in November 2005. Pace stated “it is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene to stop it…” Rumsfeld interrupted and contradicted him, but Pace stood his ground. He was reciting well anchored military doctrine. He was also overruled by Rumsfeld.

Responding to the "blood on his hands"-meme, Horton said:

When pressed by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Secretary Gates was forced to admit that these claims were hyperbole—“the leak… did not disclose any sensitive intelligence sources or methods.” Gates went on to acknowledge that there was no evidence of any informant being killed or threatened or even requesting protection as a result of the WikiLeaks publications. Why then has the Post editorial page decided to ape agitprop that the Pentagon itself has all but retracted? Maybe they don’t read their own paper.

He continues:

After looking through the latest WikiLeaks document dump, she writes that she is now persuaded that “top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world.” Tellingly, her piece appears not in the Post but in the Daily Beast, and she’s supplemented it with a detailed review of the documents involved at Foreign Policy.

The possible benefits of what we have learned so far are summarised by Kevin Jon Heller, while Johann Hari stresses its importance. In light of that consider the response to evidence of possible war crimes, or the destruction of evidence regarding the torture regime. For some very important reason investigating, let alone prosecuting, those involved did not generate the amount of zeal we now experience towards Assange whose alleged crime constitutes of fascilitation of publishing information detrimental to those used to being beyond (judicial) scrutiny. Wikileaks has brought the ever present propaganda into the sunlight. That, of course, cannot stand. Hence the hysterical legal and rhetorical response. Interestingly, those opposing Wikileaks face the Gordian knot of how to prosecute Assange without criminalising journalism alltogether.

The game of politics, as evidenced above, is comparable to, and dependent on, the anti-science movement. For both accurate and factual information is anathema to their ideological and egocentric position. Once the spread of misinformation, if not lies, is exposed like magicians they lose their lure. It should therefore come as no surprise that both groups abhor transparancy and reject accountability. Since the main stream media no longer adhere to what Lord Northcliffe said:

"News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising."

any organisation exposing those that take advantage of us, by insisting we should stay uninformed and vehemently try to convince us we should ignore the man behind the curtain, has my support.

Freedom of speech: clarification

A few days ago I suggested accountability for those that intentionally spread lies that cause harm to others. In comments marko makes several good points. Nonetheless, they do not apply to what I wanted to say. To avoid any misunderstanding let me clarify. Freedom of speech has nasty side-effects. In an attempt to protect us against them I offered two solutions:

First, limit what people can say. marko offers good arguments as to why this is a problematic approach. That is why I concluded this should not be done. So far, we agree.

Second, make people accountable for the consequences of their right to say whatever they want. Again, some convincing arguments appear to make this route untenable. That is, if you would make this about any influence (film, book, painting) causing others to interpret that as a call to arms.

This is not what I intended, nor said. Just to be sure, I am talking about the willful spread of misinformation, lies, and propaganda with the intention to advance ones ideology while explicitly rejecting contrary evidence. Not infrequently do we see explicit advise to do, or not do, certain things. This ,of course, should be allowed, but if people act on those lies, and this causes harm, the abuse of freedom of speech should result in accountability.

Unsurprisingly the anti-science brigade is mostly inspired by religion. To cite Holy books as origin for unsupported beliefs -refusing to vaccinate, rejecting global warming, opposing evolution, et cetera- is one thing. To go out and tell people not to use condoms because some imaginary friend tells you to is quite another. Aside from the fact that I have not found the exact part where it says "being gay is a sin," "vaccination is evil," "the earth is 6000 years old," "Darwin is wrong," "Galileo is wrong," .......... (you get my drift) once you start evangelising the gospel "science is bad, ideology is good" you are responsible. Especially when you are shown the error of that proposition on numerous occasions: i.e. condoms do protect against STD's, vaccines save lifes, the earth is not flat.

To illustrate my view on accountability: randomly shooting your M16 is allowed. However, if a neighbour gets shot, because you are standing in the middle of the street while doing that, you will be criminally charged. Like bullets, words are dangerous and therefore require responsibility in its user. There can be no misunderstanding, my suggestion applies only to promoting unsupported, and discredited, opinions which are detrimental to our health. If this is still ambiguous to you, look at the following:

1. Infectious disease promotion movement: vaccines are evil, and germ theory denial, resulting in re-emerging of preventable diseases,
2. Alt-med works and is harmless: incorrect, since it both delays adequate treatment with therapies that do not work, and has serious side-effects,
3. HIV-denialists: obstructing prevention and adequate treatment,
4. Smoking does not cause cancer: after introducing a smoking ban a sharp decline of cancer and coronary-disease, 
5. Abstinence only prevents pregnancy and STD's: incorrect, it actually causes the opposite, it increases the risk,
6. Global warming is a hoax: discredited propaganda claiming we do not need to invest in better energypolicy, resulting in increased dangers to our planet, 
7. Killing in defence of The Truth: murder is always a reliable statement when you are incapable of explaining why ideology trumps reason,  
8. Shouting fire in a cinema: irresponsible behaviour in general,
9. War on Drugs: stressing the evils of drugs while ignoring the sociological drama and the risks of alcohol and tobacco,
10. Muslims want to kill us: as argument why the War of Terror is merely self-defence, and no, they help us, (compare: McCarthyism)
11. There were WMD's: ignoring evidence to the contrary this caused hundreds of thousands to die, and millions became a refugee, 
12. Torture is the only way we can win: an age old, and utterly nonsensical, argument which is dissected here,

The above examples are just that: examples. The list goes on and on. In all these cases, time and again, the ideological claim has been proven wrong. To cite an article in the European Journal of Public Health:

All of these examples have one feature in common. There is an overwhelming consensus on the evidence among scientists yet there are also vocal commentators who reject this consensus, convincing many of the public, and often the media too, that the consensus is not based on ‘sound science’ or denying that there is a consensus by exhibiting individual dissenting voices as the ultimate authorities on the topic in question. Their goal is to convince that there are sufficient grounds to reject the case for taking action to tackle threats to health.

This is referred to as denialism. The article identifies five characteristics:

1. The identification of conspiracies. When the overwhelming body of scientific opinion believes that something is true, it is argued that this is not because those scientists have independently studied the evidence and reached the same conclusion. It is because they have engaged in a complex and secretive conspiracy.
2. Fake experts. These are individuals who purport to be experts in a particular area but whose views are entirely inconsistent with established knowledge.
3. Selectivity, drawing on isolated papers that challenge the dominant consensus or highlighting the flaws in the weakest papers among those that support it as a means of discrediting the entire field.
4. Creation of impossible expectations of what research can deliver. For example, those denying the reality of climate change point to the absence of accurate temperature records from before the invention of the thermometer. 
5. Use of misrepresentation and logical fallacies.

That is what I object to. Nobody should be allowed to invoke freedom of speech and transform it into the right to disseminate lies. It is in these situations I propose accountability for irresponsible behaviour. The active promotion of (medical) disinformation leads to increased morbidity and mortality, which is evident to every reasonable person willing, and able, to understand the difference between fact and fiction. Claiming to be presenting factual information when it clearly involves refuting established science is not comparable to writing books or making cinema.

No, I am not advocating a witchhunt. It would still be required to present evidence that harm -i.e. HIV infections, epidemics of infectious diseases, hatecrimes, et cetera- is linked to what was said by denialists. However, if such a causal effect can be proven why should the anti-science movement not be liable in the legal sense?

Concluding, I am against prohibiting specific views, but would make those that irresponsibly -as in: choosing ideology over reason- promote dangerous behaviour accountable for the resulting harm. Freedom of speech comes at a price!

Update: The right to lie gives us this.

Update II: Regarding alternative medicine it is possible to take a more legalistic approach, Brennen McKenzie just started a series on the topic:

When I write or talk about the scientific evidence against particular alternative medical approaches, I am frequently asked the question, “So, if it doesn’t work, why is it legal?” Believers in CAM ask this to show that there must be something to what they are promoting or, presumably, the government wouldn’t let them sell it. And skeptics raise the question often out of sheer incredulity that anyone would be allowed to make money selling a medical therapy that doesn’t work. It turns out that the answer to this question is a complex, multilayered story involving science, history, politics, religion, and culture.

And:

What I hope to do in this series of essays is look at some of the major themes involved in the regulation of medical practice, particularly as they relate to alternative medicine. I will begin by touching on some of the general philosophical and legal issues that have defined the debate among the politicians and lawyers responsible for shaping the legal environment in which medicine is practiced.

Update III: Yet another example of the freedom of misinformation.

Update IV: Using Bush's card-trick here is the denialism deck of cards.

Update V: The right to mislead claims yet another victim.

Vaccine Unawareness Week

November has arrived and the infectious-disease-promotion-movement has its "Vaccine Awareness Week." Therefore they are being offered a less Halloween inspired week of science-based information regarding vaccines. Probably they are not interested in a rational debate because the willfully blind ignore information contradicting their ideology. This inoculates them against the current correcting "misinformation week"-week. So, this week supporters of critical thinking attempt to reach the worried and misguided adherents of the anti-science crowd. Articles promoting critical thinking can be suggested at Science-Based Medicine:

Many of our fellow science bloggers are on board as well. We will use this site at aggregate as many science-based posts about vaccines and public health as we find. If you have or know of any that are not listed, please let us know in the comments and we will add it.

The first posts are already on-line. Steven Novella deconstructs the propaganda surrounding flu vaccines while Orac revisits a previous post:

About seven months ago, I encountered a profoundly intellectually dishonest set of graphs done by Obomsawin that were designed to demonstrate that "vaccines didn't save us."

and:

I note that, not only have the graphs not been changed as far as I can tell, but Dr. Obomsawin is scheduled to give a webinar tomorrow evening (exactly 24 hours from now, actually) entitled Graphic Reality: The Charting of Truth in which he is apparently going to argue the same old nonsense that "vaccines didn't save us."

Orac notes that he:

intended for a while to go back and revisit Obomsawin's remaining nonsense. Somehow I just never got around to it. As you may recall, in my original post I didn't deconstruct all of his graphs and how deceptively he used them. Vaccine Awareness Week might be the perfect opportunity to rectify that oversight.

Please visit the above mentioned aggregate site frequently this week for more. You may also be interested in what immune response is, since this is what vaccines attempt to augment. Some background can be found here.

Update: Red flag? Mercola will help us fight those scientists. All you need to do is buy something from him.

Update II: Collecting articles trying to protect us against the infectious-disease-promotion-movement Liz Ditz makes it easy for us to follow these posts.

Update III: At Science-Based Medicine Harriet Hall adds:

Physicians, has a feature called AFP Journal Club, where physicians analyze a journal article that either involves a hot topic affecting family physicians or busts a commonly held medical myth. In the September 15, 2010 issue they discussed “Vaccines and autism: a tale of shifting hypotheses,” by Gerber and Offit, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases in 2009.  
The article presented convincing evidence to debunk 3 myths:

1. MMR causes autism.
2. Thimerosal (mercury) causes autism.
3. Simultaneous administration of multiple vaccines overwhelms and weakens the immune system, triggering autism in a susceptible host.

Next is Steven Novella who analyses the history of chicken pox and the fairy-tales from the anti-vaccine brigade, and Orac shows another example of crank magnetism.

Update IV: The current endeavour is noticed in New Zealand by Skeptics in the Pub. Information on Vaccination Safety and Quality is available at the WHO website and EBM-first offers us some valuable links. More on influenza, effectiveness of vaccination and its risks, are discussed by Science-Based Pharmacy. Also, I found an old, but sadly still relevant, article there which was a response to the misinformation spread by those who prefer the return of preventable infectious diseases. As an aside, in Canada there already was a National Immunization Awareness Week earlier this year. Striking is an article written by Dr. Jay L. Wile. In his own words:

He is best known for the "Exploring Creation with..." series of textbooks written for junior high and high school students who are being educated at home.

With this background I was pleasantly surprised to read:

Because people in California are refusing the whooping cough vaccine in large numbers, whooping cough is rearing its ugly head there. Children are needlessly becoming sick and dying, and we have the misinformation spread by anti-vaccine people to thank for it.

Pretty amazing. Then there is the nice overview "Not Dangerous, and Irresponsible to Opt-out of" by Todd W. Finally, for those wandering the intertubes, here is a guide to evaluate trustworthiness of websites.

Freedom of speech

Most countries in the West guarantee freedom of speech, because everybody should be able to express their opinion, however flawed. If we then counter the misleading and incorrect statements with facts people will be able to recognise ideology for what it is. At least, that is what I was thinking in the past. That principle I have come to doubt.

The past decade we have seen the rise of the anti-science movement, the decline of quality in journalism, and use of sophisticated techniques by those Merchants of Doubt. This means that public discourse (about science) is dominated by ideology, and monetary, driven arguments.

But there is also scientific evidence supporting my doubts. Research by Brendan Nyhan et al. which shows that people are not correcting their ideology based views when confronted with contradictory evidence. Their study shows something called "backfire effect," which stands for the observation that

corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.

NPR aired a discussion with Brendan Nyhan. While commenting on a more recent study in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology Ben Goldacre observes:

What do people do when confronted with scientific evidence that challenges their pre-existing view? Often they will try to ignore it, intimidate it, buy it off, sue it for libel or reason it away.

The classic paper on the last of those strategies is from Lord, Ross and Lepper in 1979: they took two groups of people, one in favour of the death penalty, the other against it, and then presented each with a piece of scientific evidence that supported their pre-existing view, and a piece that challenged it; murder rates went up or down, for example, after the abolition of capital punishment in a state.

The results were as you might imagine. Each group found extensive methodological holes in the evidence they disagreed with, but ignored the very same holes in the evidence that reinforced their views.

After discussing the study he concludes:

When presented with unwelcome scientific evidence, it seems, in a desperate attempt to retain some consistency in their world view, people would rather conclude that science in general is broken.

Jonathan M. Gitlin, for Ars Technica, reviews studies by John Bullock of Yale, and the above mentioned by political scientists, Brendan Nyhan of Duke and Jason Reifler of Georgia State. An explanation for refuting facts that contradicts ideology might be cognitive dissonance. This may hinder rational debate on so-called controversial topics.

It seems to suggest that this effect might lead to problems when it comes to efforts to educate people about controversial or politically charged topics; I'm thinking here of climate change or evolution skeptics, both groups that have been targeted by think tanks and interest groups with vested interests in challenging accepted facts. It also points to the rationale behind media outlets like Fox News or Air America, where ideologues can have facts that support their world view continually reinforced. Sadly, that's bad news for anyone who's interested in honest and open public debate.

Yet another study, by David Gal and Derek D. Rucker, When in Doubt, Shout!
Paradoxical Influences of Doubt on Proselytizing shows that:

people whose confidence in closely held beliefs was undermined engaged in more advocacy of their beliefs (as measured by both advocacy effort and intention to advocate) than did people whose confidence was not undermined.

Reviewing this article Tom Jacobs, for Miller-McCune, notes:

The notion that shaken beliefs leads to increased levels of advocacy can be traced back to Leon Festinger’s 1956 seminal book When Prophecy Fails. It examined a cult whose members believed in their leader all the more strongly and began actively advocating on his behalf even after his predictions of catastrophe failed to materialize.

Gal and Rucker set out to replicate Festinger’s findings and use more recent psychological research to determine precisely what drives this dynamic.

Their conclusion leads him to observe:

This helps explain why political rhetoric has ratcheted up during a time of rapid societal change. In a logic-driven world, the shattering of long-held assumptions such as “the U.S. will never be attacked on its home soil” or “the value of my house will never decrease” would lead to a thoughtful period of reflection and re-evaluation. In our world, it leads one to actively advocate one’s pre-existing beliefs all the more passionately.

So, in contrast with conventional wisdom, the Tea Partiers may not be true believers so much as they are people who have had their confidence in the system shaken. To overcome any distressing doubts, they have reaffirmed their convictions by loudly attempting to persuade others. As Gal and Rucker put it in the title of their paper: “When in Doubt, Shout!”

In short, as Tom Rees puts it:

Although it is natural to assume that a persistent and enthusiastic advocate of a belief is brimming with confidence, the advocacy might in fact signal that the individual is boiling over with doubt.

The same mechanisms appear to be present in the entire denialism-movement. Just look at the rhetoric used by the and-still-alternative-medicine-works-crowd, vaccines-are-dangerous-crowd, evolution-is-just-another-belief-crowd, HIV-does-not-cause-AIDS-crowd, earth-is-flat-crowd, global-warming-is-a-hoax-crowd, US-does-not-torture-crowd, without-abolishing-civil-liberties-the-terrorists-will-win-crowd, voter-fraud-threatens-democracy-in-the-US-crowd, et cetera. These studies show part of the psychology behind the vehement opposition to (scienctific) fact. This obsessive denial of science is why I call those that promote, and those that are susceptable to, the above the anti-science movement. Whatever the reason, if science is not compatable with ones personal beliefs the irrational discard science.

Recently, following years of denying the efficacy of vaccines, we have seen the return of many preventable infectious diseases. With horrible consequences.This is a result of the right people have to say whatever they want, however irresponsible. But, freedom of speech does not stand for the right to mislead and/or lie, i.e. perpetrate a scam. Today it is used to protect the salespitch of conmen and populists among us and not to promote reasonable public discourse.

More and more I am inclined to think that this willfull spread of misinformation, if not overt lies, should be corrected. In medicine prevention is becoming increasingly important. Why not apply that principle to public discourse? Two possibilities come to mind. One, we should disallow speech which is evidently at odds with science, i.e. the earth is flat, HIV does not cause AIDS, vaccinations are evil, et cetera. The second would be to hold the anti-science crowd accountable for the consequenses of their advocacy. We should prosecute the infectious-disease-promotion-movement for increased morbidity, if not mortality. Does the law not mention reckless endangerment? See the article by attorney Jann Bellamy for details:

Those who breach their duty to avoid the spread of communicable disease may be liable to those injured for damages.

In short, those advocating an absolute right to freedom of speech must acknowledge the consequence of that principle and allow accountability when this right damages other individuals.

Update: It appears I was not clear enough in outlining what qualifies as reckless, to accommodate here is a clarification.

Update II: Another detailing the difficulties in opposing the anti-science crowd is Amy Tuteur who reviewed an article on pseudoscience in relation to the internet and noted:

Minimizing cognitive dissonance requires selective exposure, seeking out information sources that confirm existing beliefs and avoiding sources that undermine those beliefs.

Her conclusion:

The authors and publishers of pseudoscience books and websites are quite upfront about their determination to minimize cognitive dissonance by restricting the free flow of information. Only information that supports a predetermined point of view is allowed. Anything else must be deleted. To the extent that any real scientific papers are discussed, they are limited only to those that can be easily refuted. The rest of the vast scientific literature is ignored.

Update III: Apparently this obstacle to rational discourse was also discussed by Watching The Deniers.

Journalism: if only ......

Knowledge precedes understanding. Therefore to be adequately informed, and protected against the denialism-virus, we need good reporting. The principal problem with journalists today is they feel that presenting a story objectively means you do not check the facts, you only have to tell both sides: i.e. be fair and balanced. What this means is shown by Glenn Greenwald in the latest incarnation of the neutrality-virus. Harvard published a study which:

examines how waterboarding has been discussed by America's four largest newspapers over the past 100 years, and finds that the technique, almost invariably, was unequivocally referred to as "torture" -- until the U.S. Government began openly using it and insisting that it was not torture, at which time these newspapers obediently ceased describing it that way

Just like any guilty person the accused advanced an utterly unconvincing defence to which Greenwald responds:

The New York Times issued a statement justifying this behavior on the ground that it did not want to take sides in the debate.  Andrew Sullivan, Greg Sargent and Adam Serwer all pointed out that "taking a side" is precisely what the NYT did:  by dutifully complying with the Bush script and ceasing to use the term (replacing it with cleansing euphemisms), it endorsed the demonstrably false proposition that waterboarding was something other than torture. 

 To continue with:

Worse, to justify his paper's conduct, Keller [the executive editor of The Times] adds "that defenders of the practice of water-boarding, 'including senior officials of the Bush administration,' insisted that it did not constitute torture."

Then there is:

Cameron Barr, National Security Editor of The Washington Post, which also ceased using "torture" on command:  "After the use of the term 'torture' became contentious, we decided that we wouldn’t use it in our voice to describe waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques authorized by the Bush administration." 

Greenwald rhetorically asks:

Could you imagine going into "journalism" with this cowardly attitude:  once an issue becomes "contentious" and one side begins contesting facts, I'm staying out of it, even if it means abandoning what we've recognized as fact for decades.  And note how even today, in an interview rather than an article, Barr continues to use the government-subservient euphemism:  "waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques authorized by the Bush administration."  Just contemplate what it means, as Keller and Barr openly admit, that our government officials have veto power over the language which our "independent media" uses to describe what they do.

Such subservient behaviour I find disturbing. Is a journalist not supposed to do the exact opposite? He predictably notes the prescient words of George Orwell. The same Bill Keller is mentioned by Marcy Wheeler, and she illustrates Keller's hypocrisy by citing his contradictory behaviour as a reporter:

NYT reporter Bill Keller has a long history of referring to torture as torture without bowing to the spin of the governments who use it.

Unfortunately this misleading way of informing the public is not limited to politics. Mike the Mad Biologist writes about science journalists that are convinced one should present "opposing views," and how Ivan Oranski observed -commenting on a tweet by Maggie Koerth-Baker, a freelance science journalist in Minneapolis:

I never tell my students to get "opposing viewpoint" but to get outside perspective -- one that may agree with the study or the main idea being put forward by a source.

Anyone interested in factually and accurately reporting a story, or is political correctness more important? When do we demand the return of actual journalism in stead of the current "it's not our job to comment on the veracity of a story, we only report"-doctrine?

Update: Following the above exchange Glenn notes an AP story which explicitly states that China is guilty of torture. He posits:

Given the standards of Good Journalism prevailing in the U.S. media, as taught to us just this weekend by high-level executives at the NYT and The Washington Post (and previously at NPR):  what right does AP have to "take sides" in this dispute by substituting its own judgment about "torture" for the Chinese Government's?  Beyond that, given that the U.S. Government has officially adopted a definition of "torture" that plainly does not include a few cigarette stubs on an arm, shouldn't that preclude any Good Journalist from using the term in this subjective and biased way?  I hope AP will be apologizing to the Chinese shortly for its act of journalistic irresponsibility.  It's not the role of journalists to take sides this way.

Not only the Chinese "torture:"

As lysias notes in comments, the North Vietnamese have emphatically denied that the techniques they used on John McCain constituted "torture."

His post ends with an odd update:

Strangely, at some point after I wrote this, the above-linked AP article was re-written so as to edit out the word "torture" in the two places that word appeared to describe what the Chinese did (though the original language can still be seen in this old version of the AP article).  Perhaps, as recommended here, AP took to heart the Bill-Keller/WashPost/ NPR standard -- if a Government denies it did X, then a Good Journalist does not say that it did X -- and edited its article accordingly.

What any really Serious and Unbiased Journalist understands is that if somebody says the earth is flat it is inherently unprofessional to point out that this is a fringe and refuted position. To illustrate the double standard in the MSM Greenwald wrote another post:

Journalists like to claim that they are devoted to transparency, but it's always striking how so many of them exempt themselves and their own media outlets from those "principles."

The sudden refusal to call torture torture leads Marcy Wheeler to speculate whether this enabled public support for the use of it by the US administration.

Update II: Come to think of it, whenever the press engage in doublespeak, in order to manipulate their audience into accepting the official government position, normal people call that propaganda. In my definition of journalism there is no mention of the use of propaganda. Heck, my idea of a journalist is an individual fighting to let the light in where government officials work 24/7 to keep those illegal activities in the dark.

Update III: As if the media want to illustrate the point we now have the highly hypocritical reaction to a tweet by Octavia Nasr. Both Glenn and Eric Martin give an extensive analysis of the incident to show us how Serious and Unbiased Journalists are supposed to work.  

Update IV: Another example by Glenn.

Update V: The inadequacy of science journalist Nicholas Wade is shown by Larry Moran. While Andrew Bolt is challenged by Watching the Deniers to retract his statements attacking scientists.

Update VI: Quite illustrative is this example of a Serious and Unbiassed reporter.

Update VII: Nice article on modern day "fact-checking" by The New York Times concludes:

In short, fact-checking has assumed radically new forms in the past 15 years. Only fact-checkers from legacy media probably miss the quaint old procedures. But if the Web has changed what qualifies as fact-checking, has it also changed what qualifies as a fact? I suspect that facts on the Web are now more rhetorical devices than identifiable objects. But I can’t verify that.

Update VIII: In case you missed the point I am making here is a brilliant parody by Martin Robbins.