Thomas Jefferson

Mike Ramsey (16:30:25) :
I have been wondering where all the scientist are hiding. I was taught that scientist should be skeptical. For example, triple check that you don’t have a systemic error in your own experimental setup. Don’t believe results until independently replicated by others.
When I look at published scientific papers on climate, I don’t see scientist as much as I see apparatchiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik).
Has the education of our scientist totally collapsed?
When I look at what the press (e.g. BBC) publishes on climate, I am reminded of what Thomas Jefferson wrote long ago.
“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.” –Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632
I wonder if the main stream press has been concentrated into too few hands and that those hands have lost their regard for “truth or to what should be like truth”.