The Nation never misses an opportunity to rage against the big, bad Mainstream Media, and in cases like this it saps the core argument in the piece. The authors criticize the Boston Globe, CNN and others for cutting their science operations, but in the same breath cite that at most only a million people read NYT's Tuesday science section -- the country's top science page. In their effort to be populist (if only the MSM would give The People science news!) they seem to forget that the ... More »

Mooney and Kirshenbaum look at a subject that is important. Corporate media cuts science reporting to save costs. Science on the internet is flaky and not peer reviewed. Journalists are so technically ignorant that they try to cover themselves by presenting "balanced" science versus nonsense. Mooney and Kirshenbaum advocate training scientists to communicate, but that requires a medium and an audience that understands.

This is an excellent story about the decline of science story. This is an example of why I take time to read and review NewsTrust articles. I would like to see more good articles and less ant-intellectual stories.

I expected a more insightful examination than this piece provided. It stuck to largely known explanations about the decline of objective press, but didn't dig deep into particularities of science coverage. For example, do science reporters play any kind of watchdog role? Did people who don't seek out science news today read it in the papers, or was it always a niche situation?