Articles

The Puppetmasters of Academia (or What the NY Times Left out)

by Jonathan Latham, PhD

Synopsis: Although hailed as great investigative reporting in many quarters, a new front page article (NY Times Sept 5th) by reporter Eric Lipton left out the most important elements of the story. Some were left out from the main article, others from the email trails linked to in the article. Some of these facts Lipton could not reasonably be expected to have known (though it seems he didnt investigate far). But others he should have, including that the "Nina Fedoroff", who played a prominent role in the emails he examined, was the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and that senior administrators at Cornell were in on the PR activities of their academics. Yet both these important facts were omitted entirely. Numerous others were buried as the article focussed instead on little academic fish. This article is the story Lipton should have written.