A sad scene at National Geographic Magazine headquarters after the 2016 election …. Not! It could have been given the way these people write.
I’m not sure how much more I can stomach of the corruption of science in popular publications like National Geographic. The magazine is not about the furtherance of geographic knowledge. It’s opinion journalism. It’s newfound mission is the chaining of the subject to a political agenda. The agenda is one that could be found among the babblings of campus social justice warriors or The Resistance.
Time and again, issue after issue, the magazine never fails to disappoint. Pior issues led with cover stories like “Why We Lie”, “Gender Revolution”, and “Black and White”. “Why We Lie” came hot on the heels of the howling from the Left about Trump’s exaggerations and misstatements. Come on, when has hyperbole become unusual for politicians and activists? “Gender Revolution” pushed the “T” in LGBTQ. “Black and White” advanced Marxism with “people of color” replacing the oppressed and alienated proletariat. A favorite hobbyhorse is what I like to call “totalitarian environmentalism”.
What chaps my hide is the complete absence of peer review. Claims are made without any caution. The words “scientists” and “experts” are used without modifiers like “some” (I saw it only once in the cover story in “Black and White”). Opposing views are treated as if they don’t exist. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised since the articles are written by non-scientists with an all-too-often reliance on politicized scientists. Going back to the aforementioned cover story, the author – Elizabeth Kolbert – was a literature major at Yale. Surely she has great interest in the study of race, but she is no scientist and has a definite ideological bias. There’s no filter of the scientist as she writes.
If you sit on the left side of the political spectrum, by all means, subscribe. In this instance, you would be approaching National Geographic as you would Mother Jones. Indeed, there’s not much difference between the two.
RogerG