The article below from MedpageToday (click headline below to read, or find it archived here) reports that the government has begun policing at least three scientific journals, asking them if they enforce viewpoint diversity and how their vet their manuscripts, especially those with “competing viewpoints.” In other words, the Trump administration is now doing to scientific journals (well, at least a few) what it’s doing to American colleges and universities. The only difference is that the letter to the journals doesn’t have an explicit threat, though there’s an implicit one since the letter is from a U.S. Attorney and requests a response.
An excerpt from MedpageToday:
A federal prosecutor sent a letter to a medical journal editor, probing whether the publication is “partisan” when it comes to “various scientific debates.”
Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a list of questions to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, asking how the journal handles “misinformation” and “competing viewpoints,” among other things.
MedPage Today has learned that at least two other journals have received similar letters.
“It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” the letter stated.
Martin’s letter asks five questions, including how the journal assesses its “responsibilities to protect the public from misinformation,” and how it “clearly articulate[s] to the public when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others.”
It also asks whether the journal accepts manuscripts from “competing viewpoints” as well as how it assesses the role of “funding organizations like the National Institutes of Health in the development of submitted articles.”
Finally, it asks how the journal handles allegations that authors “may have misled their readers.”
“I am also interested to know if publishers, journals, and organizations with which you work are adjusting their method of acceptance of competing viewpoints,” Martin wrote. “Are there new norms being developed and offered?”
Martin requested a response by May 2.
The letter to CHEST was dated April 14 and was originally posted on Xopens in a new tab or window by Eric Reinhart, MD, of Chicago.
These of course are not only unethical but probably illegal attempts at censorship—trying to chill science, and for reasons I can’t quite discern.
The article has a few responses, including one from FIRE:
Adam Gaffney, MD, MPH, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts, said the letter “should send a chill down the spine of scientists and physicians.”
“It is yet another example of the Trump administration’s effort to control academic inquiry and stifle scientific discourse — an administration, it warrants mentioning, that has embraced medical misinformation and pseudoscience to reckless effect,” Gaffney said in an email to MedPage Today. “Journal editors should join together and publicly renounce this as yet more thinly guised anti-science political blackmail.”
JT Morris, a senior supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, noted that in a First Amendment case such as this, the law is clear: “A publication’s editorial decisions are none of the government’s business, whether it’s a newspaper or a medical journal.”
“When a United States Attorney wields the power of his office to target medical journals because of their content and editorial processes, he isn’t doing his job, let alone upholding his constitutional oath,” Morris said in an email to MedPage Today. “He’s abusing his authority to try to chill protected speech.”
But of course the government doesn’t care about that. It’s more concerned with bullying and chilling science. I hope this doesn’t go to every journal, because you’d see an outcry bigger than the one accompanying the administration’s threat to universities. In the case of journals, which I don’t believe get federal funding, it’s a case of attempted censorship, pure and simple, and although the government may have some rationale for trying to control the behavior of universities, there is none for censorship of scientific publications. The only censors of such publications are scientists or the journals themselves.
h/t: Edwin
This was initiated by RFK jr. and his band of wackos. They’re upset because they don’t have any scientific evidence against vaccines and claim that journals censored “studies” that support Ivermectin and various other dubious substances. It’s a setup to pressure them into publishing fringe research. And an excuse for why they can’t prove their assertions.
The RFK Jr. angle might be part of it, but I suspect a bigger issue is journals rejecting papers by established scientists challenging COVID-19 lockdowns, school closures, early estimates of infection fatality rates, and the efficacy of masks. While some dissenting voices broke through, it was very difficult to find venues to challenge the 2020-2022 “conventional” wisdom, which was not conventional at all when compared to pre-2020 pandemic plans and protocols. Consequently, misinformation was a bipartisan affair–each side embracing narratives that alternately scared and comforted them.
While I’m uneasy about the government pressuring journals or universities, the Administration has a point–if I read it right: many scientific and academic institutions are mired in groupthink that stifles open debate and can hinder progress. Does the institutional gatekeeping and enforcement of progressive orthodoxy that has long afflicted funding and publication on an array of social issues now extend beyond them? Liberals within institutions they once dominated have struggled to roll back the politicization driven by more activist and ideological peers. Many of us have long warned that those who could not regulate their own excesses would find themselves policed by others. The attempted policing has begun. It will, no doubt, find its own excesses.
The primary bias during Covid was a focus on public health and minimizing deaths rather than on individual rights. The primary criticism in the aftermath is that some of the measures were unhelpful and unnecessary intrusions on personal liberty. The politicalization was between those who supported public health efforts, even if overdone, and those who wanted to protect the Trump administration from criticism and minimize the public health emergency.
On balance, I prefer the emphasis on public health over the concern that some measures turned out not to have scientific support. At least I’m alive to criticize.
I agree!
Thanks, my first impulse is to regard as unprovoked censorship, so thanks for the background re: COVID.
I’m inclined to still call this as an example of Woke Right, similar to how the Woke Left required (more tacitly) the need to list pronouns and other group identification.
I think the difference now is that this directive is coming from the DOJ rather than the woke publisher boards; I strongly object to the government infringing or endorsing any type of mindset or agenda. I also think that those same journals should stay out of politics.
Re groupthink, I find it well beyond acceptable hypocrisy for the the current administration to criticise such a thing. Pot, kettle, black.
Both of these seem relevant. And yet the letter is so vague one cannot easily tell if there is anything specifically being asked. It could be about sex-is-a-spectrum stuff for all I know. Or all of the above.
Chilling stuff. I suppose that I would ignore the letter until I got a subpoena. Another option would be an anodyne response that directs the attorney to their Guidelines for Contributors or to the About Us section of their web site.
It’s hard to say what the government is up to. Even if they can’t force a journal to change its editorial policies, the government can certainly cause major hassles, one of which is to spread their own disinformation about the journal.
Reminds me of the creationists attempt to have their point of view taught in school as view point diversity. In medical journals this would mean publishing articles on vaccines as the cause of autism or fluoridation as a communist plot.
Steven Pinker:
Journalists & psychologists take note: Nature Human Behavior is no longer a peer-reviewed scientific journal but an enforcer of a political creed. I won’t referee, publish, or cite (how do we know articles have been vetted for truth rather than political correctness)?
https://x.com/sapinker/status/1563179979667476482
Let’s at least admit there is a problem. The question is what to do about it.
Precisely—except that the DOJ letter was not sent to Nature Human Behavior, but rather to an unrelated clinical journal. The vague questions of the letter seem to flutter around the matter of “viewpoint diversity”, which was also mentioned in the Trump administration’s challenge to Harvard. Since worship of DIVERSITY has been orthodox dogma in academe for decades, maybe some Trump officials are amusing themselves by hoisting assorted parts of the academic establishment on a version of its own petard/dogma.
This article reminds me of one that came out a few weeks ago in science.org, about a new journal. Here’s a link: https://www.science.org/content/article/new-journal-co-founded-nih-nominee-raises-eyebrows-misinformation-fears
Third paragraph: “The journal, which has already published eight articles on topics including COVID-19 vaccine trials and mask mandates, eschews several aspects of traditional publishing. It lacks a subscription paywall, posts peer reviews alongside published articles, and pays reviewers for their work. But other researchers have criticized the journal’s exclusivity and lack of quality control. Only members of a newly formed body, the Academy of Public Health, can submit articles, and all submitted articles are published. Skeptics worry the publication will be used to sow doubt about scientific consensus on matters such as vaccine efficacy and safety.”
Second-to-last paragraph:
“Mallory Harris, a postdoc at the University of Maryland who studies links between disease outbreaks and human behavior, echoed the idea that the journal appears to be a “parallel structure” to existing research publications. It could be unclear to readers that JAPH is using the term “peer reviewed” differently from how most other journals use it, she adds. She and Bergstrom say they worry the journal could be used to try to prop up minority views. “That would be my fear—[people] trying to create confusion about the existence of a scientific consensus,” Bergstrom says.”
It looks like there is an effort to re-create/distort the entire scientific process, going all the way back to research and journals and experts.
Is this a variation on Lysenkoism?
If there is a difference of scientific opinion, will the dispute be settled on the basis of correct political point of view rather than on the basis of the scientific method?
I just finished reading two books: !) The Forbidden Garden by Simon Parkin, and 2) The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov. Plus, a 1947 article by Theodosius Dobzhansky written after the world learned the fate of Vavilov.
During the Stalin era in the USSR, scientific opinion that deviated from the “the party line” was prosecuted as criminal activity. Robert Conquest wrote:
“The triumph of Lysenkoism was the most extraordinary of all the indications of intellectual degeneracy of the Party mind which followed on Stalin’s replacement of the intellectual section of the apparatus by his own creatures…in the early 1930s.”
This is beginning to feel like déjà vu all over again.
“Intellectual degeneracy of the [partisan] mind” indeed. On all sides, BTW.
“But of course the government doesn’t care about that. It’s more concerned with bullying and chilling science.”
Please help me understand what the government interest might be in “bullying and chilling science”. Is it to steer science toward an objective and fearlessly honest course or to steer it to a different path but one still controlled by political ideology, just a different ideology? Despite help from the posters above, I’m stumped but very interested in any perspectives that would help me get it.
As a non-scientist (engineer) I wonder the same thing.
Was there some push on journals during COVID to limit discussion of any endorsement of the lab leak theory, objections to masking, vax effectiveness / harm, social distancing, etc.? It does seem clear that the government pushed to limit this type of talk on social media, so did they also do the same for these types of journals? If so, the past administration did bullying then, and maybe this is a much-needed correction.
The other aspect is this: if the Biden admin went to SciAm and told L. Helmuth that she needed to limit articles saying that sex is binary and to publish more TWAW-type articles, she would have quietly acquiesced rather than complain about government intrusion. So we might not know if there was coercion in the past if it matched the views of the publishers; it’s only going to be an issue when it doesn’t.
I’m still opposed to gov’t intrusion regardless.
Me too.
It has been reported that a significant fraction of researchers are moving out of the US. It still may not be too late to take one’s sought-after skills elsewhere. Adjusting to a foreign culture is harder than you might think, with many non-obvious fishhooks. But for some people in some circumstances it’s well worth considering, IMO.
What you don’t want to do is dither about it until it really is too late.
How are these questions the business of the DOJ?
IEEE is also distributing a similar notification to its various publications.
For the journal I have direct information about, some non-US lead reviewers are resigning amidst signs in email discussions that (at least outward) compliance will be the path taken.