I’m not going to link to the execrable anti-vaccine screed published on The Daily Beast today. I’m not even going to link to the thoughtful, well-written counterpoint they published by a infectious disease specialist. To do either would reward a transparent attempt to gin up a pageview-inducing “controversy.” Moreover, it would treat the two pieces as if they were two sides of an argument, as opposed to medical fact and conspiratorial lunacy.

If you must read something on the topic, here‘s how many people die of influenza in the United States and here‘s an explanation of why vaccine panics aren’t worth taking seriously.

What’s particularly galling about The Daily Beast‘s vaccine “debate” is that it treats science criticism like punditry. Political writing is plagued by a consensus of bores, commentators who all have opinions within the same narrow band of “acceptable” views. The online journalism revolution opened this up a bit, but not nearly enough. Hence, as a matter of inclination, I’m reflectively skeptical about claims that editors should refuse to publish authors with certain political opinions simply because they’re “out of the mainstream.” More often than not, such arguments serve more to defend staid political views from challenge than anything else.

Science journalism has, if anything, the opposite problem. The basic task of a science journalist is to explain complicated scientific findings to people who don’t have the time or the expertise to learn it from primary sources. Increasingly, science journalists are acting as science critics as well as science expositors, but that doesn’t undermine the need to fully understand and embrace scientific methodology (if anything, it intensifies it). Science journalism, sadly, often fails in both of these roles. This generally happens when writers lack the time or background knowledge necessary to properly digest and explain the research in question.

That last problem is particularly pronounced because people have a tendency to accept science as fact. Setting aside (wrongly) politicized disciplines like climate science for the moment, people without scientific expertise reading write-ups of research findings are reasonably likely to accept them as fact. So science journalism needs to correct its flaws by more gatekeeping, not (as in politics) less. Editors should work to make sure that only people who are fair and knowledgeable observers of scientists’ work are in a position to explain easily-misinterpreted research to the public.

By setting up vaccination as an issue up for debate in the same way that political questions are, the Beast articles can leave a reader who isn’t aware of the overwhelming scientific consensus might simply throw up their hands (as happens in the climate debate) and say “who knows whose research is right?” But that’s not how it is. People who conclude that there’s a real case that the flu vaccine might do more harm than good are less likely to get flu vaccines, for them or their family. That makes people more likely to get sick and, possibly, die. There isn’t any real debate about this among epidemiologists. This should be settled.

Science journalism isn’t like political writing: it really could benefit from tighter editorial control on the sorts of views expressed. Judging by today, I wouldn’t look to The Daily Beast to point the way forward.

This morning, Newsweek editor Tina Brown and CEO Baba Shetty announced a change to the magazine that seemed both seismic and inevitable: the December 31 issue of the print edition will be Newsweek’s last, and the publication will continue as a tablet and web publication. “Newsweek Global, as the all-digital publication will be named, will be a single, worldwide edition targeted for a highly mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context,” they wrote. “Newsweek Global will be supported by paid subscription and will be available through e-readers for both tablet and the Web, with select content available on The Daily Beast.”

That language, and the task at hand, sounds strikingly similar to the way David Bradley, the owner of The Atlantic, talked about his vision when he and the editors who worked for him re-conceived the magazine when Bradley moved it from Boston to Washington, cutting fiction and devoting more space in the magazine to long-form reporting on policy. In 1999, Newsweek actually discussed the question of how The Atlantic could adapt itself to the internet age:

Every magazine has its ideal reader, and for the “thought-leader” category The Atlantic belongs to, that reader is the lay intellectual. Reflective lawyers, like federal Judge Richard A. Posner, are ideal readers. So are military intellectuals such as Col. Harry Summers, author of “On Strategy.” But the number of such people is small–no more than a million Americans, by the estimate of John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, The Atlantic’s chief rival. And with a number of magazines carving up this constituency–not only The Atlantic and Harper’s, but also publications like The New Republic, Commentary and The National Interest–the commercial prospects for any one of them don’t seem bright.

How often does a thought-leader magazine spark a controversy outside its core readership? It does happen: Francis Fukuyama’s much-debated proclamation of “The End of History” first appeared in the National Interest in 1989. And in 1993 Foreign Affairs printed Samuel Huntington’s argument that cultural fault lines–based on differences of religion, language and tradition–would be the battlegrounds of the future. The Atlantic itself found broader readership for a 1993 article supporting two-parent families, perhaps less for its content than for its title: “Dan Quayle Was Right.” These are, however, rare events…

Still, every problem is an opportunity. Michael Kelly, The Atlantic’s new editor and formerly editor of The New Republic, argues that “It’s the smog aspect that makes [publishing] work for magazines like us. We have a culture of a ratcheted-up bombardment of everyone, a great wash of talk, blather, chatter… and it’s all sending the same message: ‘You have to pay attention to this right now. The zeitgeist is changing from what it was two minutes ago, and you don’t want to miss it’.” The Atlantic, he says, should be an “antidote” to media overheat, “the absurd topicality of everything.”

The Atlantic ended up embracing “the absurd topicality of everything” with not just its booming core website but news aggregator The Atlantic Wire. But it also revitalized the magazine’s buzz quotient by thinking somewhat more narrowly about what kinds of stories “lay intellectuals” would want to read. Where once that might have meant the same broad subject palatte that magazines like the New Yorker and Harper’s still publish, The Atlantic doubled down on the kind of stories about the future of family and foreign policy, and the snappy cover lines, that Newsweek said served the publication well in 1993.

Newsweek has an advantage that The Atlantic didn’t have in 1999 when Bradley bought it: a strong web arm of the publication that boasts established internet-native writers (rather than traditional print journalists who are in the midst of transitioning to learning to write comfortably for the web) who do a mix of reporting and commentary. But it also has two deficits. First, it remains a very general interest magazine, which means it’s competing with everything, even when it can’t necessarily do, say, food coverage better than a specialist magazine like newcomer Lucky Peach, which caters to exactly the kind of wealthy, sophisticated readers the new, digital readers Newsweek would like to lock down. And even worse, unlike The Atlantic’s brand at the time of its reinvention, which may have been somewhat dry, but was definitely positive and respectable, Newsweek has degraded its own editorial reputation in a mad, and as it turns out final, rush to sell issues and generate traffic. “Final Newsweek cover: Why Barack Obama is the Worst Gay President to Ever Breastfeed Muslim Rage,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tweeted this morning. Certainly, Newsweek has had covers in the past that look unattractive today: the July 30, 1945 cover with the tagline “The Jap: How Long Can He Take It?” is less than attractive. But the magazine has seemed exceptionally cheap lately, recycling sexually provocative stock images for shock value, in marked contrast to, say, its shattering cover photo for the feature on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral, or fanning Islamophobia rather than substantively dissecting the attacks on American diplomatic facilities.
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The good folks at Eater have chronicled all of the different ways in which the stock photo of a woman either eating or being fed asparagus (the hands could be her own) that Newsweek put on its cover to illustrate its 101 Best Places to Eat in the World has been used by other publications, and handily illustrates the latest one:

The cover’s been called food porn, which is absolutely true. But more to the point, it’s not actually much of an illustration of the story itself. The asparagus look just fine, but they also don’t appear to be cooked, which is a little odd since the story is about restaurants. And orgasm is one of the most-used and least creative metaphors for the experience of eating really fabulous food.

It might have been hard to choose between restaurants, chefs, and dishes, and it would have been more expensive to do a shoot at one of the restaurants in the piece than to use a stock photograph. Given Newsweek’s financial woes—Barry Diller’s IAC took sole control of the company, and he has said he plans to invest less in the magazine, cost considerations might have been reasonable. But even under those circumstances, there are a lot of photos in the Getty library and others, probably even of some of the people, places and things mentioned in the cover story. Newsweek could have gone less sexy and more specific, but that might mean trying to sell a cover package on its actual merits.