Every time I see someone talk about "the MSM" as a pejorative like this, I laugh, mostly at you, because the alternative is literally conspiracy theorists and, of course, the far right.
Why can't there be a human kind that doesn't "lie all day every day"?
(1) "lie" has intent. You can't prove intent on the scale you accuse.
(2) "The media" is amorphous. Ask any two people and they won't identify the exact same group. Ironically, this is the same problem with the concept of "race", "species", and a few other similar concepts of population.
(3) The suffix "establishment" in this context is ridiculously vague to the point of being a No True Scotsman fallacy.
IMHO people complaining about "the mainstream media" have no historical anchor. Things were an order of magnitude worse when Hearst was actively running his "yellow journalism" outlets and when governments had monopolies on media coverage.
Media literacy is hard now because there is more than one choice for news. I choose not to get my news from the impulse isle or from {TMZ, E! Television, Fox News, MSNBC, local television affiliates}. There are still thousands if not millions of media outlets that don't "lie all day every day", the only difference is now there is more onus on the reader to be able to distinguish journalism from opinion from sponsored stories from entertainment from outright fraudulent stories.
I think the point is that Kahn, as a regular contributor to explicitly racist websites, is not likely to be a good source from which to obtain an objective summary of the latest news in paleogenetics.
> For all of this, dismissing Khan as a crank would be a mistake. While his associations are extremist, his science is not, and very little of what he writes about human genetics falls outside the pale of ordinary scientific discourse.
> Most scientists will object to this application of their work, but the illiberal challenges to scientific scholarship, perhaps now more than ever, seem destined to come not just from creationists and neo-skinheads, but from self-styled hyper-rationalists, too — from people who adhere to what they consider a “science-first” worldview, who often ignore history and social context, and who are predisposed to drawing troubling, and sometimes patently racist conclusions based on otherwise dispassionate science.
> In other words, they’ll come from people who sound a lot like Razib Khan.
My critique is that there is only one demographic in the US that attacks with the term "MSM" and then leads right into referencing this guy. "Mainstream media" used like this is a fingers-in-your-ears right wing in-group catch phrase and has been for probably more than two decades. And when a person using that secret handshake references something like this, it leads the observant to wonder.
The question isn't whether a scientist should drop work if racists like it, but rather whether a scientist would work diligently to associate with racist publications without aligning motive.
> included a letter he had written in 2000 to VDare, a white-nationalist website, suggesting among other things that black people are innately less intelligent than white people. Later that week, a spokeswoman for The Times issued a statement saying “after reviewing the full body of Razib Khan’s work, we are no longer comfortable using him as a regular, periodic contributor.”
Do you think there's science backing up that "black people are innately less intelligent than white people"?
And, indeed, a quick search for Razib Khan brings up this: https://undark.org/article/race-science-razib-khan-racism/