Science journalists supposedly circle the wagon around Laura Helmuth, defending her work at Scientific American

November 27, 2024 • 11:15 am

We all know about Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, who left the journal (most likely under duress) after she published a rant on Bluesky on the night Trump was elected (see here here, and and here if you haven’t follow this kerfuffle).  And of course I’ve spent several years calling out the magazine’s missteps, attributable largely to the Helmuth’s “progressive ideology” (see here, for example).

In general, I think Helmuth’s departure will be good for the magazine so long as the owners find a decent replacement—one not infused with an ideology that will bleed into the magazine. As for Helmuth, I feel bad for her but see the rupture of her own making. Still, I hope she finds a job where her talents at science writing, sans polemics, will be useful.

The article below by investigative journalist Paul Thacker on his site The DisInformation Chronicle (click headline to read) is a bit harsh and even a tad mean, but still makes many of the points that Michael Shermer and I have been making about the magazine for a long time—points that others also noted independently. I won’t review them, because I want to concentrate on one part of the article: the part where Thacker says that science writers “circled the wagons” around Helmuth after she left, arguing that she did a very good job at the magazine. I’ve posted one example of this: John Horgan’s blog piece defending Helmuth: “Scientific American loses its bold leader.” It turns out that Horgan wasn’t alone.  Thacker gives several examples, and says that this wagon-circling is bad for science journalism as well as bad for science.

Click to read:

Some excerpts giving Thackar’s view that the journalistic praise harmful.  First, the conclusions:

Helmuth tweets on Bluesky have long served as a political water cooler for members of the scicomm community and when she announced that she was leaving Scientific American, several prominent voices in the science writers rushed to praise Helmuth, not condemn her for awful behavior and her grim tenure as editor-in-chief.

It’s important for science writers that no lessons be learned.

. . .As you can see, nothing is likely to change because the science writers in Laura Helmuth’s world fail to understand that she did anything wrong. Science writers report for, not on science, as I explained in an extensive critique of the profession.

Helmuth will be fine and will likely announce her latest gig in the coming months. She may have betrayed the journalism profession, but her actions certify her work as an inspiration to science writers.

And Thacker’s examples, with his comments indented:

Adam Rogers is a senior tech correspondent at Business Insider, covering science and technology.

Maryn McKenna is a contributing editor at Scientific American who teaches science writing at Emory University.

Tanya Lewis and Clara Moskowitz both work at Scientific American and reported to Laura Helmuth, before she was shoved out the door last week.

Maggie Fox is health and science writer and formerly at CNN. Two years back, I reported how Maggie Fox broke the news at CNN that Pfizer’s COVID vaccine was 95% effective, a story she wrote by copy/pasting Pfizer’s press release into her CNN story.

I’m not sure what are the “coming battles” to which Fox refers, but presumably they involve fights between Trump and his minions on one hand and science on the other.

More:

Dan Fagan teaches science writing at NYU and Deborah Blum is the Director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. Like Helmuth, Blum is a former president of the National Association of Science Writers.

According to her bio on X, Amy Cooter is a sociologist and expert in contemporary US militias. If you have any clue why Helmuth had this type of person write an article on citizen militias for a science magazine, please explain in the comments.

Lila Guterman and Jake Yeston both work at Science Magazine and are colleagues of Jon “Crooked Cohen”.

Brendan Maher and Alexandre Witze both work for Nature Magazine, which has been exposed for financial ties to China and formerly employed Amy Maxmen.

This sounds like simple smearing, for surely not everybody who works for Nature can be tarred for having financial ties with China.

Note first that at least four of these journalists wrote for Scientific American and their praise thus can’t be counted as coming from someone outside Helmuth’s ambit.

Further, perhaps science journalists who are critics of the magazine or of Helmuth’s work didn’t call attention her departure because it wouldn’t help your reputation to denigrate a colleague in public. Thus counting tweets of praise doesn’t give an idea of the tenor of the science-writer community.

I asked one well-known science writer/journalist about the DisInformation piece, and got thius reply, reproduced with permission.

I’d say many science writers are staying out of it because there’s no possible way to know whether she quit, was fired. and if fired, whether she violated company policy in any way. Of course some of her colleagues rushed to her defense but there are hundreds of people in the profession. It’s remotely possible I’m the only one among those hundreds busy working on articles and ignoring her plight but I wouldn’t bet on it. 

And so the saga of Scientific American and its now departed editor-in-chief comes to an end in these pages, at least for the time being.  We’ll see if the magazine is able to recover its reputation. I’m not betting on it, as the many readers who canceled their subscriptions are unlikely to give the venue another look.

45 thoughts on “Science journalists supposedly circle the wagon around Laura Helmuth, defending her work at Scientific American”

  1. There’s something you can’t get any other way than in a printed form like a magazine. It’s great to have on hand – vs. “virtual”. Looking forward to something to develop from this.

  2. Also, consider that when someone dies or retires (or otherwise leaves) a job, people often say only nice things about someone, rather than highlighting the bad. Obituaries are rarely lists of gripes and personal complaints about the person.

        1. Jerry is talking about the authors.
          For instance, when Jerry Falwell (American Baptist pastor, televangelist, and conservative activist) died in 2007, Christopher Hitchens went on tv (CNN and Fox News) and did not hold back, saying that Falwell was “a vulgar crook and fraud,” “an ugly little charlatan,” “a little toad,” “a horrible little person,” “a conscious charlatan, and bully, and fraud,” and saying “Falwell is not going to heaven and it’s a pity there is no hell for him to go to.”
          Hitchens channelled his inner Orwell: talk clearly. I think it was brilliant.
          You can find these clips on YouTube (5 and 10 minutes long).
          Here’s the gist of what Hitchens said on CNN (immediately after Falwell’s death in 2007):

          The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country, if you just get yourself called reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September 11 were the result of our sinfulness and were God’s punishment, if they hadn’t got some kind of clerical qualification? People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering, selling pencils from a cup. The whole consideration of this horrible little person is offensive to very very many of us, who have some regard for truth and for morality, and who think that ethics do not require that lies be told to children by evil old men.

          How dare he say, for example, that the antichrist is already present amongst us, and is an adult male Jew, while all the time fawning on the worst elements in Israel, with his other hand pumping antisemitic innuendo into American politics, along with his friends Robertson and Graham, and encouraging the most extreme theocratic fanatics and maniacs on the West Bank and in Gaza not to give an inch of what he thought of this Holy Land to the people who already live there, undercutting and ruining every democrat and secularist in the Jewish state in the name of God. He’s done us an enormous enormous disservice by this sort of demagogy.

          He was a conscious charlatan and bully and fraud. I think if he read the Bible at all, and I would doubt that he could actually read any long book at all, that he did so only in the most hucksterish, as we say, Bible-pounding way. I’m going to repeat what I said before about the Israeli question. It’s very important. Jerry Falwell kept saying to his own crowd “You got to like the Jews cuz they can make more money in 10 minutes than you can make in a lifetime.” He was always full, as his friends Robertson and Graham were, of antisemitic innuendo. Yet in the most base and hypocritical way he encouraged the worst elements among Jewry. He got Menachem Begin to give him the Jabotinsky Centennial Medal (1980) [for distinguished service to the state of Israel and the Jewish people], celebrating an alliance between Christian fundamentalism and Jewish fanaticism that has ruined the chances for peace in the Middle East. Lots of people are going to die and are already leading miserable lives because of the nonsense preached by this man, and because of the absurd way that we credit anyone who can say they’re person of faith. Look, the president [George W. Bush] endangers us this way. He meets a KGB thug like Vladimir Putin, and because he’s wearing a crucifix around his neck, says “I’m dealing with a man of faith, who’s a man of good will.” Look what Putin has done to American and European interests lately. What does the president say to take back this absurd remark?

          It’s time to stop saying that, because someone preaches credulity and credulousness and claims it as a matter of faith, that we should respect them. The whole life of Falwell shows this is an actual danger to democracy, to culture, to civilization. That’s what my book, God is not Great (2007), is all about.

      3. I would add to this way too short list Theodore Parker. Especially his funeral oration for Daniel Webster.

  3. The circled wagons seem like an acute instance of the broader effects of turning journalism from a working-class job investigating and writing about events to an elite-adjacent job that’s accessible only to the children of wealth who can afford Ivy League and J-school tuition and unpaid internships at NPR.

    “Journalism has become a profession of astonishing privilege over the past century, metamorphosing from a blue-collar trade into one of the occupations with the most highly educated workforces in the United States.”

    Naturally people like that support Helmuth and see nothing wrong with either her record as editor or her tweets on election night.

    https://www.thefp.com/p/how-journalism-abandoned-the-working

  4. The verbal support she’s getting doesn’t suggest that any lessons have been learned. I’m not expecting a return to sanity at SciAm.

    I’ll be happy if I’m wrong though.

  5. Note that all these Helmuth supporters are on Bluesky. Another object lesson that Bluesky is a monoculture.

  6. I’ve argued before that Science Journalism has gone down the path of writing about Science Gossip. It’s a lot easier than writing about actual science.

  7. Interesting that some of the wagon-circlers work at Science and Nature, which probably explains tendencies toward our
    contemporary Lysenkoism at these journals. How did this come about? Comment #3 points to the key factor: university training. I was struck by references to special university programs in “Science Writing”. Maybe this academic domain shares the counterfeit character of “Mathematics Teaching“, “Physics Teaching“, and related contrivances such as “Educational Leadership”, not to mention the numerous fiefdoms of “X Studies”.

  8. John Horgan is a name I know well. He is/was regarded as the ‘woke’ police of ScIam. At one point (in Sciam) he argued against scientific research that he did not agree with. My response, was that the publication should be renamed to ‘Religious American – Where Faith Smashes Facts and Doesn’t Apologize’.

Comments are closed.