The controversy was one more step in the trends we have seen operating since the mid 20th century. First, the decline in the prestige of all authorities and would-be authoritative organizations. Second, the great expansion of the scientific community coupled with an increasing interdisciplinarity: strengths which brought a weakness in that that there were no longer any universally respected spokespeople (like Millikan, Einstein, or even Sagan); it is characteristic that the spokesman for the I.P.C.C., Pachauri, was unknown before he took the position, was not even a scientist, and indeed was accepted for the post by the Bush administration precisely because of these deficiencies. Third, the decline of science journalism; where Walter Sullivan and his like had admired the scientific community and were respected in turn, many of the media people who now attempted to explain science, such as the “weather” reporters on television, scarcely understood what they were dealing with.
These trends had been exacerbated since the 1990s by the fragmentation of media (Internet, talk radio), which promoted counter-scientific beliefs such as fear of vaccines among even educated people, by providing facile elaborations of false arguments and a ceaseless repetition of allegations.
