Golf As Solidarity -- Final Blow
The court of public opinion can seem like a sand trap. In 2002 Thomas Friedman watched George W. Bush talk on CNN about the need to bring democracy to an Iraq called threatening by the US. Then in his column he chastised Bush about playing golf:
"I had no problem with what the president was saying. What bothered me, though, was that he was saying it in a golf shirt, standing on the tee with his golf clubs....[H]e shows real contempt for the world, and a real lack of seriousness, when he says from the golf tee, as he did on another occasion: 'I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive.'"
Flash forward six years to May, 2008, when George Bush told Politico that he'd quit playing golf. "I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."
2008 is not 2002 and Bush's gesture of solidarity raised hackles. Satirist Steve Young called it an occasion for "satirical nirvana" and in "solidarity" gave up satire for a week. The web mob ripped into Bush's out-dated gesture but the anger wasn't contained to the internet. Keith Olbermann raged on Countdown, MSNBC, that Bush delivered a "final blow to our solar plexus". From his 10 minute rant:
"...Mr. Bush, I hate to break it to you six and a half years after you yoked this nation and your place in history to the wrong war, in the wrong place, against the wrong people, but the war in Iraq is not about you. . . It is not, Mr. Bush, about your golf game! "
Olbermann finally counseled Bush to "shut the hell up" on future golf questions. As the New Yorker describes the episode, when challenged ahead of the broadcast by the show's producers about the divisiveness of "shut the hell up", Olbermann responded that he favored "shut the f_ck up" but had censored his ending.
The president was out of sync with the nation's mood on golf vis-a-vis Iraq. In 2008, the public, once reticent about invading Iraq and putty in the Bush's hands, expresses moral outrage about the US state of affairs. 4000 deaths? How dare Bush think about golf!
Manhattan's Tasteless, Meanspirited, Malignant Rag
Moral outrage of a milder sort arose over the New Yorker cover showing Barack Obama in "what many [Americans] see as 'Muslim clothing'", as Al Jazeera put it, standing with his wife in front of a fireplace with a burning flag. Only a couple of years earlier the country expressed bewilderment when European Muslims protested Danish cartoons featuring Muhammad. In response, the US shh-shhed so as not to inflame, while parading its tolerant, liberal sensibilities to the world. Yet last week the US population became apoplectic, in its own little way, over the cartoon of Obama.
The New Yorker maybe didn't predict the ire. The magazine enjoys a coveted position in print publishing, with rising subscriptions, a slew of journalism awards, and a positive balance sheet. Just four days earlier, the Financial Times "Lunch with FT" section featured an interview [accessed July 23, 2008] with editor David Remnick, who on that occasion had "much to celebrate after 10 years". Remnick had turned around a "desperate" situation at the New Yorker, the FT wrote, and over lavish lunch Remnick commented appreciatively (or hopefully in jest?), "We can't live without the goose prosciutto".
Then abruptly he found himself plunked unceremoniously in a distant place, explaining defensively to his now disenchanted "18-to-24 readership [that] grew by 24 per cent and 25-to-34 readership [that] rose 52 per cent", how the New Yorker publishes pages and pages non-offensive journalism about Obama too. His audience called the cover a despicable and not-at-all-amusing attempt at satire, a "angry, hateful, violent and unpatriotic", "most malignant, vicious", "tasteless", and "mean spirited" cartoon. One befuddled commenter mistook the magazine for the New York Post.
The audience predicted that the likes of Rush Limbaugh would use the cartoon to promote malevolent myths about Obama and doom his campaign. But nobody died and nobody lost a campaign, so what gives? Maybe the outraged wanted to guard the naive against exposure to incorrect images? Protect Obama, the fragile flower? Did they read the article?
In the flurry of discontent, few said anything about the 14,600 word essay on Barack Obama inside the cover. The profile detailed Obama's deliberate navigation through rough and tumble world of Chicago and Illinois politics. It firmly dispelled the message everyone thought everyone else would get from the cover with an extensive reporting on Obama's history, concluding: "Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions..." The article (and the cover's roiling aftermath) brought the spot-on satire into sharp relief.
If Comments Could Kill
I sometimes find these adrenaline frenzied episodes enthralling compared to the drama under the much dimmer science limelight, where for better or worse, humor and satire are dished out in miserly portions. Like politics, the biggest breaches in real science can get only sporadic fleeting attention. But oh how the small science tiffs inspire big (embarrassing) headlines about itty-bitty squabbles where the stakes are squeamishly low.
Don't get me wrong. The science brand of satire gets so vicious on religious subjects that Danish cartoons and satirical New Yorker covers seem positively warm and fuzzy, like crib toys. But the consequences tell the sorry tale. One misstep of political satire and the New Yorker loses access to the front-running U.S. presidential candidates (one it's loyal to) and might be barred from Obama's campaign plane. Sure, not the end of the world, but disconcerting.
Compare this to brutishly spiteful science satire. One person says communion is but a biscuit (wafer, actually), the next threatens to kill them, then the first calls on a frothing pack to snap at the threatener's heels. The tragic outcome of this science satire gone awry is that somebody loses their job at 1-800-Flowers. That's about as funny as it gets. Yeah.
Science Publishing Kerfuffle
If science doesn't lend itself to well to satire, that's ok, it also moves slowly. People think "science", and they think "technology" -- change, change, change. Misconception. The media has politicians changing opinions on important policies day to day. The public watches every move, back and forth, as if at an epic tennis match, and their opinion pivots on the smallest indiscretion. In science, with its labs, agar plates, journals, and precision, every given moment can seem awfully uneventful.
But while science publishing with peer review has been the standard for decades, the internet presented a challenge. Everyone in media, from radio and TV to science publications rethought publishing. In 2003 PLoS broke the science publishing model by launching one of the first open access journals. PLoS caused a bit of a stir. The New Yorker may see its fortunes rise in a decade, but it's been in publication since 1925 with only five editors. Steadfast? Nature has been publishing since the 1860's under only seven editors. (Acronym Required covered some of the open access news here and here and here, and here.)
Scientists applauded the PLoS concept but no one knew how it would work, accustomed as we were to the way things were. The upstart journal promised to turn science publishing on its head and as if this were a great new experiment, we all gathered around the bench to see the result with our own eyes.
Its all Fun and Games Until You Lose an Eye
But when a Nature News article by Declan Butler pointed out that PLoS was dependent on outside funding ("Open-access journal hits rocky times", June, 2006), commenters got angry. People saw Butler's piece as a grave indiscretion, it made them "see red". But despite the moral outrage, the gist of the article was correct. Phillip E. Bourne, editor in Chief of PLoS Computational Biology acknowledged Butler's content in his comments, "Clearly financial realities that must be dealt with", he said, adding that the journal "may yet balance the books" with software tools and PLoS One a "high throughput publishing option".
Sure enough PLoS launched the new journal. Now, two years later PLoS One publishes about 50 papers a week at an author cost of $1250 per paper. When Declan Butler wrote about PLoS again last month, this time he focused on PLoS One ("PLoS stays afloat with bulk publishing", 22 June 2008). Along with some optimistic views, Butler quoted John Hawley, executive director of the free-access Journal of Clinical Investigation:
"There's so much in PLoS One that it is difficult to judge the overall quality and, simply because of this volume, it's going to be considered a dumping ground, justified or not... But nonetheless, it introduces a sub-standard journal to their mix."
PLoS supporters again lunged, calling the article an "attack piece", "nasty", and "mean in spirit". They labeled Nature authors "in-house rottweilers" and discussed whether science journal authors were stupider than bench scientists. Being scientists, some flooded the blogosphere with graphs and charts on impact factors they thought proved a point.
When the Public Judges
Although the PLoS business model has necessarily evolved over the past two years, PLoS's volatile base paired spiteful commentary with images of guns aimed at kittens, just like it was 2006. No one even laughed at this spectacle -- outrage on behalf of one esteemed science journal towards another esteemed science journal. PLoS is not-for-profit, they cried. (True, but some of the "volunteer" editors, are serial entrepreneurs in the for-profit world and that business organization doesn't necessarily reflect a particular social value.) We love PLoS. But helpless kitten? (And by the way, what is with all these kitten/gun images on science blogs -- Obsidian Wings copycat love?)?
Did no one think it ironic that PLoS loyalists were trying to smother open discussion -- "criticism" as they saw it? Here's how the PLoS management envisioned PLoS One back in 2006:
"Each article will generate a thread for comment and review. Great papers will be recognized by the discussion they generate, and bad ones will fade away."[accessed July, 2008]
What happened? PLoS is all about discussion right? Facebook? Community? You'd think anyone interested in open access, interested in science, or wanting to see PLoS thrive would appreciate Hawley's questions, even if channeled through Nature. He spoke of classic business dilemmas worth consideration.
For one, can company can brand for discount markets without cannibalizing their main brand? Hundreds of mergers in the past decade made corporations and consumers much more flexible in this regard. Less pertinent today, perhaps, but probably still important to PLoS. What is PLoS's brand? Is it Medicine and Biology? Or is it PLoS One? Argue you may, but PLoS One is not like it's other journals, and many people don't understand the differences between em>PLoS's different journals. Sure, as people point out, Nature also grapples with a diverse stable of publications, but its history is very different than PLoS's and it's reputation much more established. (And that's not to suggest the two journals are in competition.)
Secondly, will dependence on PLoS One income force the journal to accept papers using looser standards, as Hawley wondered? Again PLoS has company. At the open access physics ArXiv, readers pick through various quality papers to find the good ones. But will depending on readers assessments work for PLoS? How will journalists assess PLoS papers? If PLoS is out to change science publishing, what will the changes look like once they finish accommodating their business needs? Shall we turn judgment over to the public, the "science community"?
Good questions.
Leave a comment