A Bird from Ashes?
This is beginning to sound like a meeting of Media Dinosaurs Anonymous.
Hello, my name is Arthur Allen and I, too, am an old media critter. For 13 years I worked as an Associated Press reporter and editor, covering the war in El Salvador and the post-unification struggles of Germany, among other things. In 1995 I dumped the wire service and returned to my college fascination with the biomedical sciences. As a freelancer I’ve focused on the ways that medical innovation affects politics and culture and vice versa, writing for publications such as the Washington Post Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Linguafranca (R.I.P.), Redbook, Slateand Salon. Last January I published Vaccine: the Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver.
As one friend after another, weighted down by mortgages and college tuition, sloughs off of a dying newspaper and goes into public relations, I’m thrilled to have the chance to contribute to a new kind of outlet that’s founded on some old-school journalistic values. (Dang, we should have called it The Washington Phoenix). For the Independent, I will contribute reporting in a column called “Political Science,” examining the politics of scientific issues du jour. In particular, I will look at the politicization of the federal scientific bureaucracy under the Bush Administration. Our scientists and science policymakers have been under a lot of stress the past seven years. Whether it’s White House officials suppressing reports on greenhouse gases, anti-vaccine activists threatening CDC officers, or Bush appointees firing Texas education officials for upholding the theory of evolution, this administration and its cronies have sought to control or tinker with scientific decisions to an unprecedented degree. At the same time, I do believe that we live in an age of wonders. While casting a jaundiced eye on the corruption of science, I’ll be highlighting some of the exciting news coming out of labs and research institutions.
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