Martin Robbins really is a very interesting blogger. I'm sure we disagree on lots of things and he's very rude about sceptics as well, but to see his thought process set out is absolutely fascinating.
His latest post is about the shortlist for the annual awards of the Association of British Science Writers and it is a case in point. He is complaining about the fact that most of the people on the shortlist are either with New Scientist or the BBC and the fact that science writers don't get the time to do proper investigative journalism these days. He moves from there to the closeness of science writers to scientists, a situation he compares to the problems with the Westminster political village:
[ABSW president Connie St. Louis] cites Paul Nurse's recent Horizon documentary "Science Under Attack" as a good example of the blurring between journalism and science communication:
So for example you probably remember Paul Nurse's program about why we don't trust scientists, and I think, so what is this response by the BBC, why is there not a journalist presenting this, why have we got a lovely affable warm scientist publishing it, I don't see the investigation, what's going on, where's the revelation, where's the journalist who says this is completely hijacked by the climate skeptics, this is big business. [Instead it's] sort of, 'look at us, we're lovely warm scientists, and please love us and trust us', and actually I don't think scientists should be trusted just because they're scientists, I think they should be trusted because they've been interrogated and not found wanting.
I defended Nurse's documentary at the time, but I do take her point. I think Nurse's tone was refreshingly free of a lot of the heat and argument that plagues the pseudo-debate around climate change, but the flip side is that it didn't really subject either side to the piercing beam of scrutiny. That's a shame, because while climate science has survived near obsessive attention, even the most casual inspection of skeptics like Christopher Monckton, for all their brabble, leaves them looking really rather hopeless and disingenuous.
Are scientists and journalists simply too close?
I've been to Christmas parties like the big one at the Royal Soc where there's packs of journalists and packs of scientists and we all mix and we're all very happy, and it's because it's such a relatively small world.
Which all sounds rather nice, but this sort of cosiness has severely and spectacularly undermined journalists on other beats, as happened with one recent, famous example...
...the MPs expenses - the political journalists didn't see that story, because they're busy wining and dining with them and making sure their kids get, you know, research places with them, and there's this incredible intimacy in parliament, and my friends who are political journalists they live and breathe these guys that go to their country houses with their friends their families.
There's a sort of almost an incestuousness about that whole political field, and the biggest story that breaks was not broken by a political journalist. I think we're in the same danger of that happening in science journalism, that the people outside will be able to see the stories better because we haven't got the right kind of focus. [...] I'm not saying that we shouldn't be sociable or kind, but there needs to be a professional distance.
I wonder if Martin has noticed that one of the stories up for the investigative journalism prize at the ABSW concerns the work of a bunch of "hopeless and disingenuous" sceptics doing some, you know, questioning of what scientists say?