No, it doesn’t, Bob. The NS article merely says that the JWST “is planned to be an exoplanet hunter,” but that followed the article observing that the telescope “will be able to peer deeper into the early universe and capture data on the formation of the first stars and galaxies.” For someone who hilariously expends so much effort arguing over the meaning of the word, “successor,” it seems like you’d learn to read more carefully. And since that was the very first example you gave of “fake news” regarding the various accounts of JWST, I’m just going to assume that the rest of your article is similarly tendentious, if not just feeble. I guess this is what happens when you have ideologues write about science.

;)

wodun: No. As long as Hubble functions it will remain funded and operating. In fact, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, created to run Hubble, now has the job of running Webb also (once it is launched).

“In the 1990s, when JWST was conceived as the successor to the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the notion that the atmospheres of alien worlds could be studied seemed faintly ludicrous.”

The article goes on to hype the use of the James Webb Space Telescope to explore “Earth-like” [i.e., “sizes between that of Earth and Neptune,” which is 3.9X larger] exoplanets and analyze for “Earth-like” atmospheres after its “scheduled launch in October of 2018.”

Buried in the middle of the article are such revealing statements as:

“Our chances of extracting statistical trends from the atmospheres of these super Earths and mini-Neptunes with JWST are quite bleak.”

“Studying Earth-like exoplanets with JWST will be even more elusive.”

“The prohibitive amount of telescope time needed to measure the light spectrum of an Earth-like exoplanet would restrict the exoplanet community to only a handful of targets… Such a target currently does not exist in the catalogs of astronomers.”

But why would you except people who are not space nerds and are writing on an unfamiliar topic to be experts? While your analysis is correct, many people in journalism are generalists and write about a wide array of topics rather than specializing. I always expect journalists to get large parts of a story wrong, no matter the topic, as that has always been the case in the industry.

What this says to me, is that there is a market for someone like Mr Zimmerman to approach these large media companies with an offer of writing the occasional article about space related issues. People who created niche publications have spotted the market demand but they often just preach to the niche.

That intellectual dishonesty has poisoned all of their reporting, so that they often to get some obvious facts wrong, not merely in their science reporting but in all their reporting.

This is the important part. Very few people are interested in NASA’s satellites aside from the pretty pictures. But there are many topics of greater interest where expertise is easier to gain and the media constantly gets their facts wrong, twists a narrative, or intentionally hides what is actually going on. This has been going on as long as there was journalism but is getting much worse as the trends in national media have been adopted by local media.

** As an aside, the google captcha has me identifying crosswalks. It looks like that Uber accident in Arizona has the autonomous car people worried enough to enlist humans on the internet in their machine learning effort to spot pedestrians.