Academic publisher Springer Nature to divest itself of woke Scientific American
About to go the way of the dodo.
As the saying goes, “Go woke, go broke.” The academic publisher Springer Nature has now announced it is selling off its two consumer magazines, Scientific American and the German Spektrum der Wissenschaft, stating that it wishes “to focus on its core global publishing activities across research, health and education.”
I don’t know about the German magazine, but I do know that Scientific American has become a junk and very woke publication in recent years, unreliable for good reporting as its editorial policy has been instead to push a variety of leftists tropes, from queer sex theories to Covid falsehoods. As the article at the link notes,
The low-lights from the magazine’s stack of articles include:
- Scientific American colluding with other media to normalize “climate emergency” terminology, despite vast swaths of scientific evidence showing the Earth’s climate has continuously changed over 4 billion years.
- The magazine pushing “birth parent” terminology, which is utter nonsense in the face of real biology.
- The magazine offering a ridiculous take on football injuries…tying them to racism.
- Endorsing Kamala Harris for President.
Other examples of the magazine pushing junk science can be seen here and here.
The article above also notes the interesting timing of this announcement, just before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was to approve the union its writer staff has recently overwhelming voted for. The unionization was supposedly about “compensation, workload, job security,” but it also included the demand for “editorial independence”, the typical code words used by the leftist journalists to demand the ability to write whatever they want, even if the magazine’s owners protest.
Well, rather than protest, this magazine’s owners decided to fire the magazine entirely.
Hat tip to reader Gary.
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I first started reading Scientific American on a regular basis when I started subscribing during my undergrad days more than 50 years ago. I kept renewing, but, after a while, I didn’t have enough “round tuits” to read it, so the magazines piled up.
After I moved into my current apartment, I created some extra room by donating the issues after SA became politically correct. It appears that I was fortunate to not have had time to read them.
I recall reading Philip Morrison’s book reviews and Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games columns. I found The Amateur Scientist feature quite interesting when “Red” Stong and, later, Jearl Walker wrote it. (Think of it as Hackaday decades before Hackaday was created.)
I also remember that SA published an excellent set of books on building amateur telescopes, including how to grind and finish mirrors. (That was another “round tuit” project for me, but those items became rather scarce.)
To quote a title of song by the rock band Queen, another one bites the dust.
They were VERY ugly to Bjorn Lomborg
I liked “21st Century Science & Technology” even if it was a Lyndon Larouche rag.
They were VERY ugly to Bjorn Lomborg
I liked “21st Century Science & Technology” even if it was a Lyndon Larouche rag.
This seems to be the typical endgame for institutions taken over by the left. First, they gut and skin the thing and wear it as a skinsuit to trade on said institution’s former reputation for as long as that can be plausibly done, then to just continue brazening it out as the uncured hide they are wearing begins to smell, then visibly decay. At that point either the entire institution dies and the parasites within the corpse disperse to do whatever additional mischief they can still find to do elsewhere, or the institutional husk is taken back over by people with sense and integrity, the parasites are fired and some effort is made to restore former credibility. We see this latter scenario being at least attempted in the case of CBS, CNN and certain other former media handmaidens of the screechy left. I have my doubts about how ultimately successful such efforts will prove. The time for certain forms of media – especially newspapers and magazines – seems to have pretty decisively passed. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The really heavy lift for this process is going to be the public schools and academe and that project has barely started.
I kept my subscription from 1980-ish until October of 2008. That’s when SCIAM ran an article about a Columbia journalism study that showed that statistically, presidential candidate McCain had gotten much more favorable press coverage than candidate Obama, a preposterous proposition!
If you bothered to read to the very end and parse the dates, you learned that the hundreds of news articles reviewed by the dozens of grad students came not from the time of the current Presidential campaign, but from the primary season of the prior year. You know, when McCain was the media’s Republican darling (stalking-horse) and upstart Obama was ruining the coronation of Her Inevitableness, Hillary!
What a crock of misdirection! I cancelled immediately.