Welcome to Entanglements. In this episode, hosts Brooke Borel and Anna Rothschild talk to Tom Zeller Jr., Undark’s editor-in-chief, about covering science under the Trump administration.
On most episodes of Entanglements, our hosts invite two experts with differing opinions to share their points of view, in an effort to find some common ground. The point isn’t to both-sides an issue or to try to force agreement. Instead, they aim to explore the nuance and subtleties that are often overlooked in heated online forums or in debate-style media.
Over the course of its second season, the podcast has covered contentious topics ranging from gain-of-function research to geoengineering to searching for the cause of autism to the use of psychedelics in medicine. All of these topics are politically charged, but they have become even more so in the current political climate.
Below is the full transcript of the podcast, lightly edited for clarity. Stay tuned for our upcoming season. You can also subscribe to Entanglements at Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Anna Rothschild: Welcome to Entanglements, the show where we explore the most controversial issues in science and search for common ground. I’m science journalist Anna Rothschild.
Brooke Borel: And I’m Brooke Borel, articles editor at Undark Magazine.
Anna Rothschild: So, Brooke, it has been a wild time for science.
Brooke Borel: What do you mean?
Anna Rothschild: Right? Nothing has happened at all since Trump took office, right?
Brooke Borel: Nothing has happened. Business as usual.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah.
Brooke Borel: No, but really a lot has happened. There have been changes across the board in science. Billions of dollars in grant funding have been cut. RFK Jr. is Secretary of Health and Human Services, and thousands of scientists have lost their jobs and grants.
Anna Rothschild: Right. And as science journalists, we’re having to figure out the best way to cover all of the changes happening.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. And this is our final episode of the season. We’ll be back soon with Season 3. So we thought this would be a good moment to reflect on how our team is approaching covering science in this moment. Entanglements is produced by Undark Magazine, so we figured we’d bring on Tom Zeller Jr., editor-in-chief of Undark, to talk about how this publication is directing coverage.
Brooke Borel: Welcome Tom.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Thanks. Great to be here.
Anna Rothschild: So, Tom, let’s grill you.
Brooke Borel: Yes.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Bring it on. Bring it on.
Anna Rothschild: What has been Undark’s approach to covering all of the changes in science under the second Trump administration?
Tom Zeller Jr.: Yeah. I mean, I would like to say that we’ve been approaching it in the same way we approached science under the Biden administration. That’s not to say that things aren’t a little more chaotic now, but Undark was created with a pretty explicit mission: To explore the intersection of science and society and all of its messiness. And to do that with the rigor of investigative journalism where we could. Its editorial stance has always been that science is not only about discovery and progress but it’s also about politics. And about economics and about ethics, and all the uneven ways that knowledge and technology touch different communities. I guess I’d also add explicitly that built into Undark’s DNA is this idea that science journalism works best when it’s skeptical, curious — I’d say unsentimental — and very much not partisan.
You know, once science questions get coded as belonging to this tribe or that tribe, then the evidence itself is sort of secondary to the identity politics surrounding it. And I think we lose something when we go there. So I hope that’s reflected in Entanglements, too, and I think it is.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, one thing that I’ve found interesting is the moments that that idea has really come up in our interviews. We did an episode on gain of function, which is where scientists intentionally make microbes more dangerous to learn how they evolve and hopefully prevent the next pandemic.
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: In that episode, we had one scientist say that people who didn’t agree with Trump’s executive order, which seriously restricted federal funding for this research, were just responding to their own partisan views about the Trump administration, not really the substance of the order itself.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. And not really the evidence on that area of research to begin with.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Yeah, I’d also say that you set yourself up sometimes in the current political moment with this approach because you get accused of false balance, for instance. And I think that our insistence on neutrality is not about false balance. They’re two different things.
And you know, we wouldn’t give equal weight to climate denialism or to conspiracy theories just for the sake of appearing balanced. But the goal, I think, is always to acknowledge the political and social and cultural context in which all these ideas are sort of happening to analyze why people believe what they believe without caricaturing them.
Brooke Borel: I will say that while what Tom is describing has always been Undark’s approach, we have had conversations about how to cover specific issues during this administration. One thing we’ve been talking about is how to actually cover all of these major cuts that are happening at funding institutions and the jobs that are being lost in all of this — at NIH, at NSF, and so on. These are huge institutions where people had valid criticisms on how these were run prior to this administration. And I’m not saying that what’s happening now is the way it should be done, but there’s a more complex context that we want to be considering and covering versus just: cuts bad. You know, it’s more complicated.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Yeah, and directly to your question, and bouncing off what you’re saying, Brooke, is that we do see in a lot of coverage and, you know, I’m not singling out any particular publication, but there is this sort of reflex among certain members of the press to sort of rally the forces in response to a particular move of the Trump administration, particularly when it relates to cuts to science-based agencies, whether it’s NIH or NOAA or EPA. There’s an immediate sort of reaction to a cut without really examining how much of it is economic and how much of it is cutting into the bone of what those agencies are designed to do. And I do think that it’s wrong to assume that there is some sort of natural size for each of these agencies, or that there’s some magic number that dictates when an agency is going to do really good science and when it’s going to just fall apart.
Anna Rothschild: Mm-hmm.
Tom Zeller Jr.: So I think we do have to often sort of pump the brakes a little bit and say, OK, what, what’s actually happening here? I say this as the spouse of a government scientist who’s been sort of operating under the threat of layoffs for months and months and months, just like so many other people. But I would never want to sort of believe that every cut or any cut is the end of the agency or that it’s the end of science. It’s just not that simple. I say that also at the risk of sounding like I’m defending the cuts, which I’m not. I think they all have to unfold inside a certain context and we as journalists need to understand that context if we’re going to report on them.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. This is definitely a trap that I guess some outlets have fallen into.
Brooke Borel: Yes. Not to name names.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Diplomatically put, yeah. Well, let me flip it back to you guys. How do you feel the current political moment has shaped the podcast this season?
Anna Rothschild: I think we knew that certain topics were going to be political. We wanted to tackle what was in the news because of RFK wanting to find the cause of autism in a ridiculously fast timeline.
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: He backed off from that timeline since.
Brooke Borel: Gain of function.
Anna Rothschild: Gain of function. So these were things that we knew were going to be political. But there were certain topics that we didn’t realize were going to end up being so political, and where we even at a certain point made the editorial decision to kind of cut the link to politics because we felt like we were…
Brooke Borel: We were doing it every episode — how many times can we have RFK Jr. at the top of the episode saying something or referencing something that he said in the news?
Tom Zeller Jr.: Can I ask which episodes you’re referring to?
Brooke Borel: Psychedelics. We had an episode asking the question whether the scientific evidence is strong enough to be moving towards FDA approval for psychedelics as medicine. Earlier this summer, RFK Jr. had said that he would like to fast track this approval and have it happen within the next year or so. That happened as we were working on the episode. And at one point when I was working on the script, I had that up at the top, and then I just — we just decided let’s not even. We’d already mentioned him in so many episodes. Why? I don’t know. We just took him out.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: It felt relevant even without the political tie-in.
Brooke Borel: Yes, it absolutely did.
Anna Rothschild: But there was, as it turned out, also this political tie-in as well.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Well, and I think that those politics predate RFK in every possible way in every one of these topics. Even if you remove the Trump administration — which admittedly is full of, its MO is shock and awe, and the media likes to take that bait — if you remove us and all these topics from that administration, they’re still political.
Brooke Borel: Absolutely. But bringing up to the mainstream and the highest level of attention, the federal government looking at these things more closely and executive orders coming out over the stuff — that’s a little bit different.
Anna Rothschild: Just to highlight another moment where we didn’t realize this story would be so political. You know, at one point we tried again this season to do an episode on deep sea mining.
Brooke Borel: We tried last season. It didn’t happen.
Tom Zeller Jr.: I mean, would you guys be willing to tease that out a little bit? If you were to put all the topics that you’ve covered in the first season and all the topics you’ve covered in the second season together, I would’ve never picked out deep sea mining as being the one that would be the hardest to get two people to sit down and talk about.
Brooke Borel: I know. It surprised us too. In the first season, to be fair, scientists were literally out to sea when we emailed them.
Anna Rothschild: They were on boats.
Brooke Borel: Exactly. This season I think was a little different, but Anna, maybe first we should explain to the listeners what deep sea mining is.
Anna Rothschild: Oh, right. That would be helpful.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, that would be helpful.
Anna Rothschild: Deep sea mining is a way of getting minerals that are used in batteries for electric vehicles and also in solar panels. And these minerals are found in these nodules, which are basically rocks that are just littered across the seafloor. And so the vision is what if we can scoop up these nodules and like, boom: Now we can easily transition away from fossil fuels.
Brooke Borel: Boom. Sounds so easy.
Anna Rothschild: I know, right.
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: But, unsurprisingly, many scientists fear that this is going to have untold effects on deep sea ecosystems, which could even end up having horrible effects on Earth’s climate. We just simply don’t know.
Brooke Borel: And this became more political than we were expecting this season too.
Anna Rothschild: It became a lot more political because Trump signed an executive order basically saying that he wants to start deep sea mining. And in fact there was this moment where I was emailing a scientist who studies plumes of dust that are made when these mining vessels suck up the nodules from the seafloor. And unbeknownst to me, I emailed him the same day he was testifying before Congress.
Brooke Borel: So he didn’t get right back to you.
Anna Rothschild: No, it took a few days, and ultimately he declined to speak to me.
Tom Zeller Jr.: I’m curious, are there other topics aside from deep sea mining that have been a tough nut to crack in terms of getting guests on board?
Brooke Borel: This season, one surprising one for us that Anna can talk about more because it was her episode, or it would’ve been if it had happened, was cell phone use and kids. Which is so in the zeitgeist right now. Anna, do you want to talk more about what happened there?
Anna Rothschild: Sure. On the one side are people who think that cell phones are destroying kids’ brains, right? And then on the other side are people who are like, “Well, I just don’t see great data for that.” They’re not necessarily in the pocket of Big Cell Phone or whatever.
Brooke Borel: But that’s the accusation.
Anna Rothschild: But that’s basically what they’re being accused of online. And people have said really terrible, abusive things to these folks who are just trying to be like: “But the data’s not showing this. I’m not saying you should doomscroll all day. I’m just saying maybe this isn’t as bad as we all think and maybe this is a bit of a moral panic.” I’ve had one person tell me: “I don’t want to talk about this because I’ve already been abused so much online.”
Brooke Borel: Oh wow.
Anna Rothschild: And then I can really only speculate on the other side, but I feel like people with the opposite point of view really just have no incentive to talk about it because they already have the public on their side, right?
Brooke Borel: Right.
Anna Rothschild: So why would they submit themselves to a conversation like this?
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: And they haven’t.
Brooke Borel: At least so far.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. At least so far.
Tom Zeller Jr.: What other things did you notice this season in some of the episodes? What did you see coming out of the guests that you invited that you weren’t expecting?
Brooke Borel: We had such a wide range of topics. We covered geoengineering. Gain of function. We covered autism. We covered, what else did we cover, Anna?
Anna Rothschild: Should we settle Mars?
Brooke Borel: Psychedelics.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah.
Brooke Borel: Ranked choice voting. And there were some themes that sort of emerged amongst all of these that were surprising. I guess in retrospect, not so surprising, but we just weren’t expecting on such vastly different topics. One example is a lot of the debates didn’t really have to do with the evidence necessarily this season, but more with the values of the scientists who were discussing these things or the experts who were discussing these things. How they sort of valued that research and whether it was important or not to be doing, versus the actual evidence — like, is this showing us this thing? And another thing that was coming up, too, is the role of scientists, which brings us back to the political moment, I think. Should they just be doing their science? Like, shut up and do your science and just be a scientist? Or should you be advocating for science, for your science to exist? Should you be advocating for a certain thing to happen out in the world, with respect to the science?
Tom Zeller Jr.: I’m just curious, I mean, did you actually have those discussions with scientists or …?
Brooke Borel: Yes. In the geoengineering episode. For example, one of the scientists was saying: “Hey, I’m just trying to do some science. I’m trying to put some information out there so that policymakers and the public can make an educated decision on whether or not to go forward with geoengineering experiments.”
So of course, geoengineering is this idea that we could use technology to change the atmosphere in some way to mitigate at least some of the effects of climate change. And the other scientist was like: “No, I think that I should be advocating — who else is better placed to make an argument for or against” — in his case, very against — “this technology? I know how this works and I know what the risks are and of course I should be advocating for this not to happen. I don’t want to put it just in the hands of the public or the policymakers.”
And I think that this is a perennial issue in science and a longstanding conversation. Should scientists be activists or not? But I do think that in this current political moment, we’ll see more of that happening and more of those conversations happening because scientists are having to defend their work in ways that maybe they haven’t in other recent years.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Is there some sense that that might not necessarily be a terrible thing?
Brooke Borel: I don’t know.
Tom Zeller Jr.: No. I mean, I think that you’re right and a lot of scientists are not accustomed to having to defend their results or to defend sort of the larger consensus idea on a lot of things. And without saying that that consensus is wrong or necessarily should be undermined, I do think that if we live in a moment where people are skeptical then scientists have to be willing to come out and defend even consensus positions in a reasonable way, rather than folding up their arms and saying: “No, I’m taking my ball and I’m going home.” Because all that does is breed more suspicion and skepticism.
Anna Rothschild: We would love to do an episode on science activism and how much should scientists be activists, like what are the rules for that?
Tom Zeller Jr.: That’s a great idea. Yeah, because I think it’s probably a double-edged sword, right? I mean, in some contexts you really need them to be able to speak up. But I can see that being highly fraught, too, and there being a lot of downsides.
Anna Rothschild: For sure.
Brooke Borel: On that note, I’m curious to hear from our listeners. What do you think about all this? What do you want to hear from us next season?
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, send us an email at [email protected].
Anna Rothschild: Tom, thank you so much for chatting with us. This was great.
Tom Zeller Jr.: Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun. I learned a lot.
Brooke Borel: And that’s it for Season 2 of Entanglements, brought to you by Undark Magazine, which is published by the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT. Our amazing producer and editor is Samia Bouzid. The show is fact-checked by Undark deputy editor Jane Reza. Our production editor is Amanda Grennell and Adriana Lacy is our audience engagement editor. Special thanks to our editor-in-chief, Tom Zeller Jr. I’m Brooke Borel.
Anna Rothschild: I am Anna Rothschild. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you in Season 3.