A tremulous liberal, who defends a Middle Eastern neighbor from vigilantism, is killed when the neighbor turns out to be a terrorist. In another episode, a human-rights lawyer from a fictional organization called Amnesty Global tells Bauer, who wants to rough up an uncharged terror suspect, that he will violate the Constitution.
Several copies of the C. When you get a camera moving fast, and someone screaming, it really works. Nobody wants to be the handmaid to a relaxed policy that accepts torture as a legitimate means of interrogation. It takes an unusual situation and turns it into the meat and potatoes of the show. This past November, U. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers.
The meeting, which lasted a couple of hours, had been arranged by David Danzig, the Human Rights First official. Another participant in the conference call attended the meeting. Before the meeting, Stuart Herrington, one of the three veteran interrogators, had prepared a list of seventeen effective techniques, none of which were abusive.
He and the others described various tactics, such as giving suspects a postcard to send home, thereby learning the name and address of their next of kin. At other moments, the discussion was more strained. Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a course on the laws of war to West Point seniors—cadets who would soon be commanders in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He always tries, he said, to get his students to sort out not just what is legal but what is right.
However, it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not. Gary Solis, a retired law professor who designed and taught the Law of War for Commanders curriculum at West Point, told me that he had similar arguments with his students.
He said that, under both U. In real life, he would be prosecuted. In less than ten seconds, the suspect reveals that his associates plan to assassinate the Secretary of Defense. Joe Navarro, one of the F. They are untrustworthy, and tend to have grotesque other problems. At the meeting, Cochran demanded to know what the interrogators would do if they faced the imminent threat of a nuclear blast in New York City, and had custody of a suspect who knew how to stop it.
One interrogator said that he would apply physical coercion only if he received a personal directive from the President. But Navarro, who estimates that he has conducted some twelve thousand interrogations, replied that torture was not an effective response.
And Finnegan argued that torturing fanatical Islamist terrorists is particularly pointless. They want to be martyred. The notion that physical coercion in interrogations is unreliable, although widespread among military intelligence officers and F. Last September, President Bush defended the C. Although reports of abuses by U. The third expert at the meeting was Tony Lagouranis, a former Army interrogator in the war in Iraq. Lagouranis intervened: such scenarios constitute psychological torture.
Nothing happened. But they just told us what we already knew. It never opened up a stream of new information. Prime-time television increasingly offers up plot lines involving the incineration of metropolitan Los Angeles by an atomic weapon or its depopulation by an aerosol nerve toxin. The public thinks the same way.
There are also nonviolent ruses, he explained, and ways to take suspects by surprise. But they have a format that works. They have won a lot of awards. Why would they want to play with a No.
And while Americans prize community connection from their local news providers, they are largely unaware of the financial challenges they face. The politically aware, digitally savvy and those more trusting of the news media fare better in differentiating factual statements from opinions.
Thirty years ago, a wave of optimism swept across Europe as walls and regimes fell, and long-oppressed publics embraced open societies, open markets and a more united Europe. Many Americans turned to Google to learn about the Flint water crisis. About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world.
It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Newsletters Donate My Account. Research Topics. Active interference by institutions, deliberate attempts to influence and tailor science to meet a particular agenda, and how science can come second to political motivations.
Scientists like to construct an identity of themselves, which I think is often very positive, and helps them do scientific work as standing outside of what they might dub a political realm.
I think it's a useful ideal. I think it can get damaging when people kid themselves into thinking that they've done it when they haven't. And people go, no, you're being massively racist, because you're not seeing racism, or you're not seeing sexism that is already embedded in your working culture.
The ways in which political issues in society are translated into science has become a really hot button topic, especially in recent years. And as the extent of structural inequity in society becomes more visible, it is inevitable that people start to turn that lens to science. Why is it that we tend to answer questions, for example, using genetics and molecular biology techniques, for example? Well, that has to do with the trends in particular fields. And it has to do with the kinds of questions that get asked by people who are leaders in that field and the leaders in the field are sort of setting the terrain for, for what are the important questions and what are the important issues.
The direction of research is influenced by powerful people, but not all people have access to power. Many studies demonstrate that on many levels societies exhibits systemic inequity. And in science, the result of this is that the people leading the way are by and large a pretty homogenous group — old white dudes. And that can influence the output of research. Take technology for example.
Or often people go beyond that and say that technology by and large, is good, it's beneficial. And the problem with that is that because society, because power, because politics shapes the technology, then the technology actually reflects that the society and the power and the politics and because we know societies are structurally unequal, they have biases embedded in them, then it's not surprising that we see lots of technologies that reflect those biases and reflect those inequalities.
An example that I often give is the spirometer. So, the spirometer is used to measure lung function, and when it was built, it was built with the assumption that black people were weaker.
And so they're actually embedded in the technology is race correction software. So you flip a switch, and it sort of corrects for, you know, if you're non-white. And the assumption is that, you know, as I said, non-white people have weaker lungs. And not only is that incorrect, it's still in use today.
Inequity like this is born out all over science. A later study suggested this might in part be due to the topics that Black researchers choose to research, in essence the type of questions that Black researchers wanted to ask were not as valued by the predominantly white decision makers. And similar trends can be seen for other researchers of colour.
Whatever the reason, this variation exists across the world, and it has been widely documented that this impacts research. Most clinical trial participants are white, most study animals tend to be male.
These may not be deliberate discrimination — often they are pragmatic decisions made out of convenience, but they serve as a reflection of those carrying out the research.
And a biased sample biases the experiment. Host: Nick Howe There may be a tendency for scientists to see themselves in a professional capacity as separate from mainstream society.
To see their reasoning immune to systemic problems — to regard their analyses as apolitical. After all science is about objective empiricism — and society, and the inequity, politics and power that comes with it, is anything but.
But what if by separating science from society, researchers are excluding key variables. What if they are not, in fact, protecting themselves, or science after all? And if we can think about that more carefully, and also, as scientists be a little bit more reflective about it, then we can actually start to think about the systems that shape this kind of these kinds of decisions, and then do a better job, I think, of actually addressing the things that most of us do want to address these kinds of biases and structural inequalities.
But if we assume that they're not there, then we tend to locate the politics in the individual or the bias in the individual, but by and large, the folks that might be producing technologies that we find problematic or saying things that we see as problematic.
They're actually part of systems. And we don't understand that enough. Thank you for listening and see you next time. After all, anything can get twisted in the rumour mill. So how should we talk about science? Science journalists act as one of the most direct links between researchers and the rest of society. And after reporting on science for over 30 years, Deborah is under no illusions that science and politics are separate. So I don't believe that science exists in a vacuum, separate from the rest of humanity or human endeavours, which include political issues, right, or politics and I don't think that's ever been true.
So part of that part of the reason for arguing that science and politics are distinct is so that you can define things you don't like as being politics, and define things that you do like as science. The decisions that I've made are pure science. Yes, I know, they're not the same ones that are used in the legislative system.
Instead of acknowledging the political context that might have gone into setting those standards. The tricky thing is that sometimes when a line is blurry, there is no hard and fast rule to point to. It's always situational ethics, right? And that's not fair. But it is true that a lot of times, we're going to make a decision in a case-by-case basis.
And that can confuse matters. The difficult thing is that, from the perspective of those outside the scientific community, and sometimes within, it can be easy to dismiss certain evidence as political when it conflicts with our core values. When people like what they're seeing, then they support it, and when they don't like what they're seeing, they don't support it, if it conflicts with other values, then science is only one set of values.
Science likes to claim its value free, but it's not. It values knowledge over loyalty, over personal commitment, it values knowledge over faith. And for many people, emotion and faith are key drivers. It is as human for us to be emotional as it is for us to be rational. Value systems are not constant. And so, a scientific result presented by someone with one system can be interpreted very differently by someone with a different set of values. The same data, the same words, can be warped based on how they are perceived.
And so when something like climate change, which means that in order to control it, there is going to have to be more government control and more limitations on what you can do in business or with your land, or something like that people say you're attacking my independence. So that's just politics. And, herein lies a danger. If people pick and choosing what they support, what they believe based on value systems and not a reasoned analysis of the evidence that opens the door for a bit of a buzzword.
Politicization is really, really interesting because when you tend to hear it, you tend to think about it as a sort of epithet. The problem with that is that anytime science is involved in politics, it is politicized, inherently politicized, because you are drawing statements of facts into arguments about values and preferences about how the world should be.
Deliberately distorting scientific evidence to support an agenda — politicisation at its worst by those nasty politicians. But it can work both ways, and scientists do it too. We sometimes take political issues that are about values and make them seem as if they're issues of facts and who is asserting facts most correctly. So, I'll use simple example that right now is flaring up in the pages of the magazine I edit, having to do with the issue of fish pain, and animal welfare — can fish feel pain?
And it turns out that there are scientists who are very skeptical of the idea that fish can feel pain, because of their understanding of what pain means as a neurological phenomenon. And there's scientists who feel that fish can clearly feel pain because of a different understanding of neurological phenomenon. And those scientists accuse one another of politicizing the science because of their concerns for different issues.
Some of the scientists are more concerned with the importance of preserving freedom to for anglers, which they see as not only an important social activity, but one that's environmentally important too. Others who are concerned with animal welfare feel like that animals shouldn't be subjected to any suffering.
And yet, if you ask scientists about this all say, well, ultimately, it's subjective. We can never know, because we can never be in the brain of a fish. And that mess, depending on your values of course, can get an awful lot more damaging than a spats over sprats.
There have been similar protests across the world. In the UK…. They can save lives. So why the backlash? Trump and his supporters are Corona deniers, and are especially against masks, for example, or other preventive measures. And he regularly attacked science and scientific advisors who try to convince him of the necessity and importance of preventive measures. So I think the most current example is his use of a quote of Mr.
Fauci in an election commercial to create impression that Mr. Fauci praises the efforts of Trump and the fight against corona.
And he took the quote out of the context. And Mr. Fauci stated that he never said this that way. So I think this is a very typical example of politicization because a politician picked a quote of a scientist to support his standpoints and just merits in the fight against the pandemic. Sometime simply the context in which evidence is viewed can cause radically different outcomes. Just look at the difference between Norway and Sweden, for example, right?
They pursued radically different approaches, based on consultation with their experts in the context of their political and social cultures. And those have led to different sets of actions and different outcomes. So yeah, if you really want to get a sense of why a kind of simplistic view of why the experts must inform politics and policy is sort of not very helpful. COVID is a fabulous example of how politics, uncertainty and science interact, and claims of expertise can be made on behalf of all sorts of different and contrary actions.
And when science is politicized that is what happens. Sure there is a lot of disagreement in science, and if you go looking you can likely find experts to disagree with others, but equal and opposite…? More, coming up.
And throughout her career she has witnessed first-hand how scientific issues were talked about in the media.
Take climate change for example. At that time, science journalism really followed what I think of is, you know, it was the political model of reporting, right? There's always two sides. But for a story about climate change — that can cause problems. And, you know, there was not all scientists didn't believe in it. And there was much debate and a lot of stuff that turned out to be mostly not reliable information. Host: Nick Howe. And it got to the point where Deborah realised that the whole industry of scientific journalism was making a mistake.
At some point, we started having discussion in the National Association of Science Writers, and I was president of that group, right in the early aughts of the 21st century. And we sort of say, well, we screwed this up, right? We're giving people the inaccurate impression, that there's this huge debate when in fact there's this growing consensus, and we've just hung the readers out to dry. And we've done that, in part because we're covering this like politics, right?
You start to see science writers just write about climate change as if it's a fact. And that, to me, represents a profound shift. If we're good as journalists, we try to cover reality, and we owe our readers or listeners or viewers, we owe them reality, right? We owe them an accurate reflection of what's going on.
Not that science gets everything right, every step of the way. And so you have to acknowledge that too. But the consensus is squarely that this is real. And we try to reflect accurately where the weight of the evidence is. To Deborah, communicating not just the facts but also the certainty — the level of consensus — that is vital if you want to about science objectively and accurately. Smart journalists do their homework, they figure out where the weight of the evidence is.
And they report from that position of scientific strength, and that is actually contrary to what any Republican would tell you in the United States of America.
That's actually apolitical reporting. But in a world where science is intertwined with politics, where everybody has an agenda and where values frame every story — even attempts to be apolitical can be interpreted as something quite different.
It's muddied by the swirls of politics that you know continually spiral through society. And so it interferes, I think, quite often politics interferes far too often with people's ability to actually see the reality. It seems that at every stage, the authority of science, evidence and expertise is only one step away from being tarnished — being used and abused to push agendas.
And any attempt to solve this by crudely separate science and politics — well that is not much more helpful than it is realistic. So what do we do? Can there be such a thing as an evidence-based society? So it's through more democratization and greater openness that we're going to have more accountability for decision making. This is Beth Simone Noveck, a researcher who focuses on how to tackle societal problems, who has advised government herself.
Politicians should of course make political decisions, but they should be upfront about what their basing this on. It's perfectly fine to say I am making this decision based on values. But we need transparency and how we do that we need to actually have institutions that are set up in a way that allow us to tap into an evidence base, and then to have transparency in how the decision is made, whether it's with regard to or by ignoring the evidence base, that should be clear and accessible to people.
Why would politicians show what their basing their decisions on if it could be used against them? But in fact, in many places this is happening. And they have made now over two dozen pieces of national legislation with engagement of hundreds of thousands of citizens through a transparent process that works online. That term expertise often gets very distorted to mean a specific kind of credentialed knowhow of people with certain kinds of degrees, when expertise is really something that we have to understand very broadly, to include people's experience, to include experiential wisdom to include their situational awareness, we've typically thought about expertise and therefore about the role of science in political decision making much too narrowly, and conflated that with the with a set of professions or a set of professional degrees.
At a certain point, you just have to realize that science is part of the mix. It's not this magic thing. In governing, we're seeing lots of examples of when governments are doing it right, opening up how they work, listening and working with people who have expertise, not in the credential sense, but in the sense of lived experience.
So you take the federal government, which back in , started in the United States started a platform called challenge. And you've had over 1, of these prized-backed challenges that have been run in the United States. In these complex situations, scientists are often asked to do a political job. And so the thing we need to do is be clear about that. And to recognise that, that actually good politics is more important than good science. So there's an irony here that I think needs to be kind of unraveled.
And that unraveling is going to require more humility around what science can and can't do in the political realm, and more, putting politicians feet to the fire. So they actually have to say what it is that they're after, rather than saying, well, I'll just bring in my expert to say why my side is right. If you had to chose one place in which Nature has a clear political position - it is that we believe policy is stronger when it is supported by evidence.
But if we care about achieving that goal, the evidence suggests that we have to think holistically. To look beyond just the pure output of research. We have to look at how research is funded, who is carrying it out, the values they hold, the systems they operate within, the balance of the evidence, and prevalence of power.
To put it bluntly — the politics. I think the world would be a better place if more people had access to the kind of reliable knowledge that science produces. In order for that to happen, people have to have a much better understanding of what science is. And I do not mean a specific content of science, I do not mean an idealised hypothetico-deductive method of science.
I mean, the complex social reality of how science has produced. The fact that politics is deeply ingrained in how science gets funded. The fact that competition between research groups, is not particularly different than competition between football clubs. That human emotion drives many scientists, that scientists choose problems based on particular concerns.
If you talk to cancer researchers find out how many of them got into the field because someone in their family had cancer. They didn't choose this at random. They chose it because this is a field that matters to them. Science, society and politics — they are inseparable. Now this could be a good or it could be a bad thing — but either way it is a true thing — and it is something which has real consequences. News 12 NOV News 10 NOV News Feature 10 NOV Correspondence 09 NOV Career Column 12 NOV Career Feature 10 NOV Francis Crick Institute.
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