It’s bad enough trusting the information you see on the internet, but when the last bastions of integrity begin to fall, where do you turn? The answer apparently is: Nowhere! Scientific peer-reviewed journals are [were] one such place, but it seems that even these have become corrupted. From The Scientist, an article about the sudden shift in editorial policy at one prestigious cardiology journal:
The Canadian scientific journal Experimental & Clinical Cardiology used to publish well-founded studies in the field and was widely read within the cardiology community. But since being sold and moved offshore in 2013, the journal is now publishing anything submitted along with a fee of $1,200, packaging spurious studies as serious scientific papers.
I wrote this in response to the question, why do people do this stuff?
A friend of mine is a journalist. He worked for many years for some major newspapers. He also worked early in his career for one of rags that post outrageous “news”, e.g., alien babies, man trapped in abandoned department store revolving door for 7 years, etc. He told me that the smartest people he ever met were at this phoney news outlet. In his words: “They got a real kick out of seeing how far they could bend the truth and still have people believe it”. I think that’s a good chunk of it today, plus the crazies and the worst of all, the true believers, i.e., those who are so clear-headed in their self-evident truth that they feel the end justifies the means.
Probably most important is: Money and influence. I realized this reading a FaceBook post on the purported benefits of Himalayan sea salt. At first it seemed a joke, but the passion of the believers in this stuff made me curious so I did a search, only to uncover hundreds of web sites selling the stuff, backed up by loads of spurious claims and “science” to back them up. It turns out there’s big money in stupid!