Fake News & Royal Society Evo Meeting

"Lies, Fake News, and the Main Stream Media," the cover story of the latest issue of ColdType, unfortunately also applies to the state of science reporting as evidenced by main stream coverage of the recent Royal Society public evolution conference. I spent much of the last two years investigating and reporting on an evolution paradigm shift that has happened in science -- whether the science establishment and main stream media acknowledge that shift or not. And having just published an authentic report of the Royal Society "new trends" meeting, I cringed as I read Carl Zimmer's distorted coverage that followed of that same event in Quanta and TheAtlantic.com. Carl Zimmer is not a scientist. He's a Yalie with a degree in English, best known as a science writer for the New York Times ("all the news that's fit to print"), although his business card presents him as a national correspondent for STAT. Quanta's Editor, Thomas Lin, is a former NYT online national news and science editor. I had been feeding Thomas Lin and Quanta my HuffPost reports in the lead-up to the November 7-9 Royal Society/British Academy-sponsored meeting. And, prior to the London meeting, I sent a copy of my book, Royal Society: The Public Evolution Summit to James Simons, whose Simons Foundation funds Quanta. I interviewed Jim Simons at length two years ago for my book on origin of life. So far, curiously, Zimmer seems to be the sole representative of the main stream media to have reported on the...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news