After my diary from last Friday, criticizing Obama on not rescinding a Bush tradition whereby he at least gives the impression of giving his ear to activist leaders of the Christian Right, I wanted to point out that many of the young President's moves have been praiseworthy. Not coincidently, my example today comes from a Bush administration order that Obama did rescind. I'm talking about Pres. Obama's decisions relating to Embryonic Stem Cell Research and integrity in science.
The executive orders, signed in early March, were well-received by the American public, which has strongly been in favor of permitting federal funding on research with embryonic stem cells. But it's the other part of the bill that I think is more important in the long run. Calling it a "scientific housecleaning", Chris Mooney explains how scientific integrity and transparency are good for America:
Yesterday, President Obama overturned his predecessor’s very unpopular embryonic stem cell research restrictions, a move drawing widespread media attention. But it wasn’t the only action on the science policy front. In a step that demonstrated just how closely the stem cell issue now fits into the broader "war on science" argument, the president simultaneously issued a memorandum aimed to set in motion the restoration of scientific integrity across the breadth of the federal government.
This is an idea that I and others-especially the Union of Concerned Scientists, or UCS-have explicitly pushed for in the past. The basic notion is to be able to conduct an intellectually sound version of what Bush science adviser John Marburger himself purported to do back in 2004, after leading scientists, organized by UCS, brought scathing charges against the administration on scientific integrity grounds. The UCS claimed that scientific information had been undermined across the government, at agencies ranging from the National Cancer Institute to the Environmental Protection Agency to the Fish and Wildlife Service. It was among the earliest-and by far the most prominent-airings of what would become the Bush "war on science" allegation.
Of Marburger's response, "One supposes he was ordered to produce a rebuttal, but they could have produced a more nuanced rebuttal than that crass, heavy-handed, and grossly wrong one that they issued." But what more could Marburger do? The attitude in politics and in the media towards science, since the "Gingrich takeover" of Congress in 1994, has been one of "equal time to all sides", meaning that anything passing through the White House gave equal time to political ideology even when that ideology was scientifically false.
Now we have a President willing and prepared to call factually unsound policies what they are. In a time when the media (and certain states, like Texas) still finds it fashionable to restrict the innovative potentials and bedrock theories of science to "mere opinions," this approach of discarding pseudoscientific ideas that are without merit are refreshing. And it doesn't hurt that he appears to be doing the same sort of thing in economics, foreign affairs, medicine and health, and education.
I hope he keeps it up. And, I hope that the media begins to wake up and implement this strategy as well - not as a "Fairness Doctrine" -like strategy, but as a commitment to common sense reporting. Because I'm sick and tired of hearing cranks and their ideologies legitimized by giving them equal time on our airwaves.