Scientific American Magazine Honors Obama For ‘Welcoming Back’ Science Into White House

Photo of Kyle Drennen.

Scientific American Cover, June issue | NewsBusters.orgWhile sitting in the dentist office Wednesday afternoon I could not escape liberal media bias as I picked up the June edition of Scientific American Magazine and found that President Obama was honored as being one of ten people "who have recently demonstrated outstanding commitment to assuring that the benefits of new technologies and knowledge will accrue to humanity."

The ‘Scientific American 10' list that featured the President included an article by Sally Lehrman, who praised Obama’s commitment to science: "After eight long years in exile, scientists have been enthusiastically welcomed back into the White House. In the first few months of his administration, President Barack Obama acted with remarkable speed to place science at the center of policymaking on climate change, energy, health care and research funding. He wiped away science-averse policies."

Lehrman later explained the consideration that went into placing Obama on the list:

Story Continues Below Ad ↓

When making the choice to award the president, we searched among less obvious candidates who were deserving of broader public recognition. But President Obama’s accomplishments in a matter of weeks of taking office were so extraordinary that he could not be denied. The new president’s actions have proved almost startling after the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, which was criticized for routine suppression of scientific knowledge for political purposes. But the impact of the Obama White House will likely reach far beyond such a facile comparison. The president’s unprecedented emphasis on science and technology should propel basic research, innovation, and U.S. scientific and technological competitiveness for generations to come.

The introduction of the piece declared: "This year’s Scientific American 10 pays tribute to the exceptional foresight and accomplishment of a select group whose achievements, particularly during the past year, stand out from those of their peers...This combination of leadership and inventiveness exhibited among the Scientific American winners for 2009 serves as a template for how we might consider tackling the most seemingly intractable problems of resource depletion, inadequate health care and desperate educational need."

—Kyle Drennen is a news analyst at the Media Research Center.


Comments Policy

All comments are owned by whoever posted them and are subject to our terms of use. They should not be assumed to represent the views of NewsBusters.

Viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Funding #1

I am sure funding is the top priority, what a joke.  

Copernicus would Shudder

What a disgraceful canard.  Science is no longer divorced from poltics. We  have goverment funded scientists issuing alarmist "global warming" reports.  Medical Journals publishing faux statistics on Iraq casualties.

A new crop of "Vatican Scientists"  that would make Copernicus shudder.

"winners for 2009"?

Geez, these poindexters are awful impatient types - according to my calendar, we're only just halfway into 2009.

I'm going to wait til 2010 to announce I've solved that anti-matter thing. 

clinton kept scientists busy

doing DNA tests on dresses.

I can't see obama had accomplished a scientific endeavor.  I guess if he had, they would have mentioned it.   

Actually "green jobs" in "Green industries" are laying off a lot of people.  See he is incentivizeing some jobs but not giving tax cuts and incentives for research.  They are laying off because the subsidies aren't coming

yup

They have analyzed the Kool Aid with a mass spectrometer, and have found the ingredients to be mostly harmless... and quite tasty.

Who wants to bet there's a Nobel Prize in the field of  "_______" right around the corner for Zero? 

'Obama’s commitment to science'

Global warming... 

JDW

DAILY WAVE

When people fear their government there is tyranny.

When government fears the people there is liberty.

Yep...this figures doesn't

Yep...this figures doesn't it....just so precious.

You ever wonder why the dentist/doctor/hospital offices/waiting areas never have The National Review....The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard etc.

I asked a few times....they just shrug...say they don't know...blah blah blah...of course I add my two cents, politely about how biased this is etc....usually have some pretty good, engaging conversations too...in my area anyway, you'd be surprised how many agree.

Doubling down on stupid is not a particularly good idea. ~Andrew Breitbart

Mag should be renamed "Unscientific American"...

Sigh!

Urgent (MSNBC)

You need to watch this
http://www.youtube.c...

You need to HEAR this

freedom for aliens speaks

And you need to watch this

Reagan VS Carter and 0bama

 

ucw... Priceless! Nail

ucw...

Priceless!

Nail on head.

Doubling down on stupid is not a particularly good idea. ~Andrew Breitbart

Including and especially: pseudo-science.

Those who believe in nothing will believe anything.

This is a reason why republicans are hurting in popularity

 Since the neo cons have taken over the party an emphasis on religion in the white house and a back seat to science has been the order. 

real conservatives embrace science and don't wear religion on their sleeves or flaunt it for votes like GB did.

just because some one is a science advocate doesn't make them members of the crazy left. stop throwing labels around against anything you don't like.  

You claim Bush rejected

You claim Bush rejected science?  Based on what?  His resistance to this AGW hoax?

There isn't any real science connected with these alarmist predictions.  The real scientific measurements do not support these scenarios.  They do not even support this "document" recently published by the Government detailing all these catastrophic effects attributable to anthropogenic global warming.   Bush was quite right to reject this junk science. 

"neo cons have taken over

"neo cons have taken over the party an emphasis on religion in the white house and a back seat to science has been the order"

" embrace science and don't wear religion on their sleeves or flaunt it for votes like GB did"

"stop throwing labels around against anything you don't like"

Too funny.

Limited Disclosure:  I used to belong to the Sierra Club untill they went crazier. Worse of all, I was bribed by Exxon with free New Orleans Saints glasses with fill ups in the 70's.

Hey, if we'd had a proper

Hey, if we'd had a proper conservative in office for the past 8, we wouldn't have Obama and the science journal liberalism now. so don't get mad at me. 

the country isn't moving left it's just moving away from the republican party, and there's a reason for this.  

Bush was lib lite. Bubba

Bush was lib lite. Bubba and Gore only wanted the scientist who said what they wanted them to say, ask William Happer. Ditto Obama.

I'm not mad.

Unless it was tongue in cheek. The hypocracy is still funny.

Limited Disclosure:  I used to belong to the Sierra Club untill they went crazier. Worse of all, I was bribed by Exxon with free New Orleans Saints glasses with fill ups in the 70's.

As I recall. Scientific

As I recall. Scientific American was one of those places I read about the coming ice age in the 70's. 

I see they haven't gotten any better at science in all these years.

Limited Disclosure:  I used to belong to the Sierra Club untill they went crazier. Worse of all, I was bribed by Exxon with free New Orleans Saints glasses with fill ups in the 70's.

Sciam is Liberal

Scientific American has been infiltrated by the far-left for many years, along with most of the medical and scientific journals, Wired Magazine, etc. Just another reason I will no longer pay for any of them. I'll read them for free on the internet occasionally if someone recommends an article.

"After eight long years in

"After eight long years in exile, scientists have been enthusiastically welcomed back into the White House."

Well since Al Gore has stated that "The science is settled" why can't we just fire the lot of them?

Since the neo cons have

Since the neo cons have taken over the party an emphasis on religionin the white house and a back seat to science has been the order. 
real conservatives embrace science and don't wear religion on their sleeves or flaunt it for votes like GB did.

just because some one is a science advocate doesn't make themmembers of the crazy left. stop throwing labels around against anythingyou don't like. 

 Wow, that is likely the most ignorant rant I have ever seen posted in the comments. According to you if someone is a Christain they are unable to believe in science? The notion is ridiculous. Any emphasis on religion I see in the party happens to take the form of accepting and adhering to moral standards. Is this a bad thing? Social conservatism is the center of conservatism. 

If GWB wore his faith on his sleeve it is becuase that is who he is. He never made any attempt to hide behind some false facade like the current president. 

Simply put the publication didn't like Bush for being a man of faith and didn't buy into global warming stupidity.

Irony here: Abortion is scientifically unexcusable yet Obama made sure that goverment funding was restored for them before just about everything. 

Sciences embraced by the Obama Administration-

While any hard scientific data that conflicts with Obama's statist agenda is routinely rubbished as being nothing more than propaganda from flat-earthers or technophobic  religious zealots, the Obama administration does fully embrace some fields of science.

For example, the fields of junk science and popular science seem to have great appeal to Obama and his advisers. Popular and junk science can be very useful as a political tool, especially for the intellectually feeble, mentally lazy and scientifically illiterate leftists.  Adopting the herd's mentality, and doing what sounds and feels good, are much less stressful than the rigors of objective scientific analysis.

While the established scientific principles of free market economics and basic mathematics seem to be far beyond the grasp of both Obama and Geithner, they do seem to be fond of the widely discredited economic theories of J.M. Keynes.

Strangely though, Obama does seem capable of performing some feats that would seem to violate all known scientific principles.  For example, he took over $1 trillion of taxpayer money and made it disappear in the blink of an eye with his TARP program. This obviously violates the Law of Conservation of Matter.

Only an omnipotent god can overcome the basic laws of physics that govern our universe.  So who knows, maybe Evan Thomas was right.

"Fascism is rightly seen as the merger of the Corporation and Government." -B. Mussolini

The left loves...

...using science to discredit religion and specifically Christianity. Thye know that they are not the party of Christians, so they try to hijack science to their own ends and then ultimately have to doctor the science to fit their purposes. Neither is on their side. 

Liberalism is a lie unto itself.

The way to tell a scientist

The way to tell a scientist from a scientist-poseur is that a scientist would not promote the *science-is-settled* canard as it related to their articles on GW. The editors at and some of the contributors to SA have been doing this for years. 

Unscientific American

I used to love Scientific American, when it actually was a magazine about science. I stopped my subscription when they began to write about evrything but science and math about 20 years ago.

 Edit:

wnaegele---sorry, I didn't mean to plagiarize. I posted my comment before I read the previous comments.