"In a new HuffPost/YouGov poll, only 36 percent of Americans reported having "a lot" of trust that information they get from scientists is accurate and reliable. Fifty-one percent said they trust that information only a little, and another 6 percent said they don't trust it at all.

"Science journalists fared even worse in the poll. Only 12 percent of respondents said they had a lot of trust in journalists to get the facts right in their stories about scientific studies. Fifty-seven percent said they have a little bit of trust
. . . . "What’s more, many Americans worry that the results of scientific studies are sometimes tainted by political ideology -- or by pressure from the studies’ corporate sponsors.

"A whopping 78 percent of Americans think that information reported in scientific studies is often (34 percent) or sometimes (44 percent) influenced by political ideology, compared to only 18 percent who said that happens rarely (15 percent) or never (3 percent).

 "Similarly, 82 percent said that they think that scientific findings are often (43 percent) or sometimes (39 percent) influenced by the companies or organizations sponsoring them."
The survey was done with a group of 1,000 U. S. adults that matched the demographics of the U. S. population in each of 13 categories, so it should be reliable.   The results should not be surprising;  it is to the credit of the American people that they are suspicious.  

It is not surprising because of the alarming number of academic scientists -- whom we have historically accepted as the least biased -- who have been caught either falsifying their data or playing the statistics game to distort the true meaning of the data.

 Behind much of this is the corrupting influence of corporate financing of academic research these days.    Often the corporate sponsor controls what can be published.  So, even honest scientists have to hand over their data to the corporation, which will refuse to publish results that are not favorable to their product.   One of the hall marks of science is that negative results are just as important as positive results.

The problem about political ideology is less with the scientists themselves than it is that political operatives have become very sophisticated in ferreting out "junk science" studies with little validity -- and trumpeting them loudly as "scientific studies," so that people lump such shoddy work with real science and then distrust both.

 Now money and power are corrupting an institution -- scientific research -- that is vital to all kinds of progress in our society.  We cannot let this happen.

 Ralph