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Animal Ethics Biosafety Human Research Ethics Research Integrity

Journalism, Preprint Servers, and the Truth: Allocating Accountability – Scholarly Kitchen (Rick Anderson | December 2020)

Posted by Dr Gary Allen in Research Integrity on December 15, 2020
Keywords: Institutional responsibilities, Journal, Publication ethics, Research integrity, Research results, Researcher responsibilities

The Linked Original Item was Posted On December 14, 2020

Heading reads "ABUSE OF POWER" with stop sign in the background

The four years of the Trump administration have been painful — indeed, traumatic — for a great many people, for a great many reasons. One source of distress has been the administration’s unprecedented assault not only on the truth itself, but also on the idea that truth matters more than political expediency. This has created an unusual challenge for journalists, who have always had to deal with politicians whose relationship with factuality is, shall we say, complicated, but who have never encountered an administration that misrepresents facts and actively advances falsehoods so constantly, so brazenly, and so reflexively.

Despite its early discussion about the galling behaviour of Agent Orange, his surrogates and the emergent trend of reputable journalists calling out their blatant falsehoods, this very good Scholarly Kitchen piece sets out the responsibility of preprint servers to do the same with wacky claims and dangerous lies.

We have to acknowledge, of course, that undermining the authority of “facts” and “objective truth” isn’t a phenomenon that originated with the Trump administration. The propositions that “reality” is whatever we all agree it is, that there is no such thing as historical fact, that “objectivity” is merely a pretense used by the powerful to defend their interests, and that the putative search for “truth” is really just a tool of oppressionhave been significant currents of postmodern and critical academic discourse and teaching for several decades. (Go back a bit further, of course, and you have Foucault asserting that “reason is the ultimate language of madness”; earlier than that, there’s Nietzche: “The real truth about ‘objective truth’ is that objective truth is a myth”.) As President Trump has constantly attempted to twist or reverse the truth to fit his agenda, it’s been interesting to hear voices from quarters that once characterized objective fact as a myth and reality as a social construct now calling us urgently to stand up against Trumpism’s offenses against objective fact and reality. (To be very clear, none of this is to say that, as some have argued, postmodernism itself is to blame for Trumpism — though the mental image of the President consulting a volume of Derrida or Irigaray while composing his counterfactual tweets is kind of fun.)

Be all that as it may, for the purposes of this post let’s take it as given that there is such a thing as objective truth, and that it matters what the truth is. Furthermore, let’s stipulate that factual claims can generally be confirmed or debunked by appeal to empirical evidence, and that it therefore matters whether evidence supports the claim that America’s voting machines were infected with algorithms created at the behest of the late Hugo Chavez, or the assertion that Republican observers were barred from vote-tallying facilities, or the claim that Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager ran a child sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor. If we can all agree, for the sake of argument, that there is such a thing as objective truth, that it matters, and that it can generally be established by appeals to evidence, then we can proceed with the questions I’d like to address in this post.

Read the rest of this discussion piece

Related Reading

(US) How claims of voter fraud were supercharged by bad science – MIT Technology Review (Spenser Mestel | November 2020)

(US) Study of Pepcid as virus remedy stalls after $21M – Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette (Richard Lardner and Jason Dearen | July 2020)

(US) Fauci says White House told NIH to cancel funding for bat virus study – Politico (David Lim & Brianna Ehley | June 2020)

The epic battle against coronavirus misinformation and conspiracy theories – Nature (Philip Ball & Amy Maxmen | May 2020)

(US) FDA revokes emergency use ruling for hydroxychloroquine, the drug touted by Trump as a Covid-19 therapy – STAT (Lev Facher | June 2020)

(France) He Was a Science Star. Then He Promoted a Questionable Cure for Covid-19 – New York Times Magazine (Scott Sayare | May 2020)

(US) Science groups, senator warn Trump administration not to change publishing rules – Science (Jeffrey Brainard & David Malakoff | December 2019)

Strong caveats are lacking as news stories trumpet preliminary COVID-19 research – HealthNewsReview (Mary Chris Jaklevic | April 2020)

The Science of This Pandemic Is Moving at Dangerous Speeds – WIRED (Adam Marcus & Ivan Oransky | March 2020)

Trump’s science adviser on research ethics, immigration and presidential tweets – Science (Sara Reardon | April 2019)

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