Out With A 'Big Bang'

Politically correct censorship these days most often occurs in the Old Media or in other circles supportive of left wing or so-called 'progressive' agendas. However, it can have negative consequences whichever side of the spectrum it come from.

A young public relations official assigned to NASA by the White House, George Deutsch, resigned this week following a controversy which surfaced in a New York Times article surrounding his restricting reporters' access to climate scientist James Hansen. Another episode involved Deutsch's alleged insistence that a web designer append every reference to the Big Bang with the word 'theory'.

Now I'll grant that I'm usually skeptical of any social/political controversy stirred up by the NYT. Never-the-less, I have heard that this is a real concern at NASA Goddard and other centers and in other federal science agencies, and that it goes beyond this one individual. Space.com describes the situation in this article.

Administrator Michael Griffin sent an e-mail to the agency's workers on Saturday in which he discussed scientific openness and the role of the agency's public affairs office.

“The job of the Office of Public Affairs, at every level in NASA, is to convey the work done at NASA to our stakeholders in an intelligible way,'' Griffin wrote. ``It is not the job of public affairs officers to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA's technical staff.''