Update, April 27th: Carolyn Johnson of The Boston Globe alerted me to a story that ran after the story I linked to below. This later story adds a little more information to the mix, including an emailed response from Hauser.
On August 10th and 11th, 2010, The Boston Globe and then The New York Times reported that the well known Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser was going on leave pending an investigation of allegations of scientific misconduct. Both papers wrote lengthy stories, although the Times won hands down with its pointed headline: “Expert on Morality Is on Leave After Research Inquiry.” (Compare that to the Globe’s drab “Author on Leave After Harvard Inquiry.” And note that these were the headlines on the web; I do not know what appeared in print.)
On August 20th, the Times reported that Harvard had found Hauser “’solely responsible’ for eight instances of scientific misconduct.” On August 28th, the Globe reported that a journal editor said the only plausible conclusion he could draw from Harvard’s internal investigation of the matter was that “some of the data had been fabricated.”
Yesterday, the journal Science reported that Hauser had redone the experiment and replicated the findings. That gets Hauser partially off the hook (a separate study that was challenged is still awaiting explanation.)
Our question here is: Did the papers do a fair job of reporting this partially exculpatory evidence, as we might call it?
Both papers did indeed report this latest development (Nicholas Wade was the reporter at the Times, and Carolyn Y. Johnson at the Globe). Both noted that this was far from a complete exoneration of Hauser, although the Times did a better job of explaining the remaining outstanding issues.
Neither paper devoted as much ink to the controversy as they did last August, which might pass muster, considering that last August’s developments were more newsworthy, and more dramatic, than this partial explanation of the problem.
It’s worth noting, as I’ve observed before, that neither the Times nor the Globe linked to the Science article, something that all newspapers should by now be doing. It should be as easy for them as it is for me. Nature News published a very short item on Hauser yesterday. It should have done more, but even this short item supplies far more information than the Times or the Globe by virtue of the 9 links in the three-paragraph item.
The Hauser story is complicated by Harvard’s refusal to release any information from its ongoing investigation, which may well be doing Hauser an injustice, allowing speculation and innuendo to substitute for fact. Harvard is not administering swift justice, and you might argue that, by waiting so long, it is not administering justice at all. The longer Hauser remains in limbo, the harder it will be for him to resume his career–if it turns out that he was guilty of mistakes, not fraud.
– Paul Raeburn
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