An example of difference between scientific and media reports

There is a difference between bad science and bad reporting. Sometimes good science is badly reported, leading newspaper readers to draw conclusions that the scientists responsible for the reported research did not themselves draw. Of course, sometimes bad science is reported well, helping the reader of the report understand the problems with the science itself.

I would suggest that there are two levels of literacy involved here.

• I have sometimes been involved in peer review of science and for that purpose one wants a very high degree of scientific literacy. The reviewer should know the field well enough to evaluate hypotheses, methods, data, and conclusions.
• Like everyone (I hope everyone) I read about scientific results in the media for which I do not have more than normal lay literacy. Still, it is useful to consider the credibility of reports in the media before accepting them as "truth". Even then, it is one thing for the reporter to truthfully report what has been told to him, and another for the reporter to report the truth of a scientific assertion. 

As I have mentioned in previous posts, a lot of scientific results are of interest because they indicate that something which seemed very improbable may not be as unlikely as it seemed. Such results may be, and I suppose often are proven to be incorrect. 

Why Do We Want an Eloquent President

Michael Kazin has an op-ed piece in The Washington Post today suggesting from historical evidence that Barack Obama's eloquence is indeed an important asset not only for the Obama candidacy, but also for an Obama presidency. He notes that presidents like Roosevelt and Reagan who were great speakers were able to use their ability to change the accepted wisdom of the American polity.

I feel he is right in his conclusion, but that it might be worth thinking through the idea a little more. Certainly, if I had to choose between a president who sounded good and didn't do good, and a president who didn't sound good but did good, I would choose the former. But Kazin is focusing on president's who faced great challenges, and who saw the country emerge successful from those challenges. (I think Obama will, assuming he is elected, face great challenges, and that the country will emerge from its current troubles in good shape.)

As the chief executive, it falls upon the president to head a huge team of political officials who together manage the bureaucracy to accomplish the program approved and budgeted by the Congress. There are thousands of people involved, not to mention the career government employees. It is critically important that these people understand the policies of the administration and that they are motivated to carry them out. Eloquence in the CEO helps communicate and motivate.

A president needs the people of the nation to be behind him if he is to succeed in his programs. There needs to be a social construction of knowledge of the problems faced by the country, the program needed to overcome those problems, and indeed on the appropriateness of the current administration to carry out that program. The president has the "bully pulpit" to catalyze the process by which the public construes the situation and its resolution, and thus eloquence counts here too.

The president needs the support of the Congress, at least to the degree necessary to pass into law the legislation needed for his program and to appropriate the resources it requires. Having the eloquence to help his party's candidates gain and keep Congressional offices helps. So do does it help to have the eloquence to encourage the public to call on the Congress to support his program,

Unless you have seen the impact of the West Wing of the White House on otherwise obstreperous people, you can not fully appreciate the degree to which the ability of the person holding the office to utilize its prestige counts. (That is one of the most indelible impressions I hold from my year as a special assistant to a special assistant in the WH.) Here too, even in the wrestling with individuals and small groups of Congressmen and other influentials, eloquence counts.

Perhaps "charisma" is a better term for the useful facility in a president than "eloquence". Both charisma and eloquence take different forms, and both are more easily recognized where they occur than defined. Reagan played the common man role with quiet expertise, quite different than Roosevelt or Kennedy played their roles of American aristocrats with a common touch. But the Democrats were also extremely effective. In any case, Obama seems to have both charisma and eloquence in abundance!

How did things change so fast (in the White House)?

Bill Moyers' show last night reminded me how the an "Iraq team" in the White House created a false impression in the minds of the American public that Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi government were developing weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, and were closely linked with Al Qaeda; indeed, as a result of their campaign to convince the public many Americans believed that Iraq was implicated in 9/11, and that Iraq might supply Al Qaeda with nuclear weapons. If they did not know that much of the data that they were using in that campaign was erroneous, they should have.

I worked on two initiatives in the White House in 1976, one on international health and one on world hunger (which is itself illustrative of the difference between the Carter and the "W" Bush administrations). I also was a member of the interdepartmental team supporting a White House team that created an international science and technology initiative in 1976. Those teams were made up of people who understood the data that they were using very well, and worked very hard to create a fair and accurate presentation of that data. The key working teams were experts in the fields involved, reporting up the line to political appointees (who in turn reported to the president), We knew that the initiatives would have to be sold to the Congress and the public, but there was never any effort to shade the findings. I was involved in writing up the speech announcing one of those initiatives, and in developing a speech for President Carter on the other.

So in 30 years how did the White House staff go from trying to tell the truth to the public and the legislature to whatever it was that the Bush administration did?

What you think depends on who you are!

Read "The think-tanks that miss the target," Charlemagne, The Economist, June 7, 2007.

This is an interesting comment on the relationship between the sources of financing and the quality of thinking in Think Tanks:

Too many Brussels think-tanks accept large chunks of their funding from EU institutions and national governments. Others depend on big corporate sponsors, so that the lines between research and lobbying become queasily blurred. Both forms of dependence are worsened by competition for the same pool of what Brussels considers star speakers: European commissioners, top officials and a few senior members of the European Parliament. Nobody seems able to change the default formula for Brussels policy seminars: good coffee and croissants, dull speeches and a brief exchange of conventional wisdom. The painful comparison is with Washington, DC, where the best think-tanks refuse public money, compete to set the agenda with provocative ideas, and enjoy extraordinary access to administration and Congress alike.

Science Under Attack: An interview with NRDC's science watchdog Jennifer Sass

Read the full interview of Jennifer Sass.

Natural Resource Defense Council senior scientist Jennifer Sass has been investigating corporate influence over government environmental regulations and enforcement.

Question: "What have you found in your research into corporate influence over the regulatory process?"

Answer: "There have been two very significant themes. First, corporations have far too much influence on the policymaking and enforcement process affecting their own products. They're able to wield vast influence over the process by which their own pollution is or is not regulated, and over whether regulations are enforced. And they've become exceedingly thorough at how they do it -- by pressuring regulators, infiltrating the scientific advisory panels that make key recommendations to agencies, attacking studies that demonstrate the harms their products cause, and even creating their own distorted scientific studies to compete with independent ones.

"The second thing that is hard to miss is that while this has been an ongoing problem for many years, the Bush administration has made it much worse, by creating more opportunities for corporate mischief, and by highlighting fabricated, pseudo-science from corporate sources when it dovetails with their policy agenda."

Comment: Right on! JAD

Shaping the Message, Distorting the Science: Media Strategies to Influence Public Policy

A hearing was held by the House Committee on Science and Technology on March 28 on this topic. Excerpts from the testimony are shown below.

Opening Statement By Chairman Brad Miller

Ronald Reagan said that facts were stubborn things. The topic of today’s hearing is a concerted effort by opponents of measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to bully scientific facts into submission. And under intense pressure, the facts about global warming caved in, and proved much more elastic than Ronald Reagan had us believe.

Testimony By Dr. James J. McCarthy

It is now clear that for a number of years, both Bush administration political appointees and a network of organizations funded by the world’s largest private energy company, ExxonMobil, have sought to distort, manipulate and suppress climate science, so as to confuse the American public about the reality and urgency of the global warming problem, and thus forestall a strong policy response.

Testimony By Sheldon Rampton

A converse strategy aims at suppressing independent scientific views, discoveries and evidence that are inconvenient to the industry or its lobbying interests. For example, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform recently released documents showing "hundreds of instances" where a former and current oil industry lobbyist had edited government reports to downplay the impact of human activities on global warming. The edits were by Philip A. Cooney, the former chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Cooney himself has no scientific credentials. He worked for the American Petroleum Institute prior to being appointed to his position within the Bush administration. He now works for Exxon Mobil.

Testimony By Tarek Maassarani

In February 2006, prompted by the well-publicized concerns of Dr. James Hansen and Rick Piltz, (The Government Accountability Project) GAP initiated an in-depth investigation to determine the extent of political interference with federal climate research and the dissemination of scientific information. The investigation found no incidents of direct interference with climate change research. Instead, unduly restrictive policies and practices were found to occur largely in the communication of “sensitive” scientific information to the media, the public, and Congress. The effect of these restrictive communications policies and practices has been to misrepresent and under-represent the taxpayer-funded scientific knowledge generated by federal climate science agencies and programs. The bottom line is, we need the government to be stimulating, not undermining, an informed public debate on important scientific subjects, including climate change.

Testimony By Jeff Kueter

In today’s highly charged environment of climate change policy, it is claimed that the political interference with climate scientists is unique. It is alleged that federal scientists are not free to speak their minds and are subject to oversight by political appointees. The situation is neither unique nor exclusive to one political party. Our book, Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policy Making, documents numerous past examples of where science and politics intersected with damaging impacts on science and negative public policy outcomes.8 Further, those who believe the current situation is unique should make themselves familiar with the story of Dr. Will Happer. As told by Happer in Politicizing Science and widely reported at the time of its occurrence, in the early months of the Clinton-Gore Administration, Dr. Happer, then head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, questioned the Vice President’s views on climate change and ozone depletion. Despite his scientific credentials, he was summarily dismissed at Gore’s direction.

Katie Couric's Plagerized Essay

Read the full article from the Associated Press via Editor and Publisher. (April 10, 2007)

A CBS News producer, who apparently ghost authored the essay, was fired and the network apologized after a Katie Couric video essay on libraries was found to be plagiarized. The original text that was copied in part was from The Wall Street Journal.

Couric essays are carried regularly on "Couric & Co.," a blog on the CBS News Web site. Couric and producers are described as meeting once a week to decide on topics and the producers write them for Couric to read on camera.

The item was apparently passed off as a personal notebook item, in which Couric reflected on her memories of getting her first library card.

Comment: As my son points out, it is fortunate for Couric that she is not engaged in a profession such as journalism in which personal credibility is important. JAD