On Tuesday, the venerable magazine Scientific American announced it was endorsing a presidential candidate for the first time in its 175-year history, choosing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, saying they were “compelled to do so.”
The editors of Scientific American wrote that President Trump “has badly damaged the U.S. and its people — because he rejects evidence and science,” citing his “dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic” and snapping, “He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges.”
“Trump and his vice president flouted local mask rules, making it a point not to wear masks themselves in public appearances,” Scientific American continued, suggesting that he was responsible for the “rebound” in cases of COVID-19 around the nation.
“Trump repeatedly lied to the public about the deadly threat of the disease, saying it was not a serious concern and ‘this is like a flu’ when he knew it was more lethal and highly transmissible, according to his taped statements to journalist Bob Woodward,” the editors charged.
Scientific American bemoaned Trump suggesting the cutting of funding for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as withdrawing from the World Health Organization.
“In his ongoing denial of reality, Trump has hobbled U.S. preparations for climate change, falsely claiming that it does not exist and pulling out of international agreements to mitigate it,” the editors wrote.
Scientific American cited Biden’s advisors as a reason to vote for him; they included David Kessler, Rebecca Katz, and Ezekiel Emanuel, the architect of ObamaCare. Scientific American celebrated Bien’s commitment “to spend $2 trillion on an emissions-free power sector by 2035, build energy-efficient structures and vehicles, push solar and wind power, establish research agencies to develop safe nuclear power and carbon capture technologies, and more … Historically disadvantaged communities in the U.S. will receive 40 percent of these energy and infrastructure benefits.”
“It’s time to move Trump out and elect Biden, who has a record of following the data and being guided by science,” the editors concluded.
Scientific American is part of Springer Nature. “The merger of Macmillan Science and Education and Springer was announced on 15 January. The deal, negotiated by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which owns Macmillan, and BC Partners, the private equity group that owns Springer, will create a publishing group with 13,000 employees and an annual turnover of around €1.5 billion (£1.2 billion),” Times Higher Education reported in 2015.
Macmillan Publishers Ltd is a Holtzbrinck group company. Macmillan Publishers’ CEO, John Sargent, serves on the board of Ocean Conservancy.
In January 2018, Sargent wrote a memo to employees in which he responded to a cease-and-desist letter sent to Henry Holt & Company by President Trump’s personal attorneys about the book “Fire and Fury” by author Michael Wolff. Sargent wrote, “We will not allow any president to achieve by intimidation what our Constitution precludes him or her from achieving in court.”
Sargent wrote:
The president is free to call news “fake” and to blast the media. That goes against convention, but it is not unconstitutional. But a demand to cease and desist publication—a clear effort by the President of the United States to intimidate a publisher into halting publication of an important book on the workings of the government—is an attempt to achieve what is called prior restraint. That is something that no American court would order as it is flagrantly unconstitutional.
Business Insider noted in January 2018:
Michael Wolff, the author of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” included a note at the start that casts significant doubt on the reliability of the specifics contained in the rest of its pages. Several of his sources, he says, were definitely lying to him, while some offered accounts that flatly contradicted those of others. But some were nonetheless included in the vivid account of the West Wing’s workings, in a process Wolff describes as “allowing the reader to judge” whether the sources’ claims are true.