The progression Jonathon Keats describes — from the science of gentleman intellectuals to the science of tenured professionals and then back again with the likes of Venter — is less about an inevitable pendular swing between different approaches to science than about the evolution of science and its role in the economy.

Prior to the twentieth century, the greatest accumulations of wealth were in the hands of aristrocrats, generally well-educated and otherwise not gainfully employed, for whom naturalism was, so to speak, a natural inclination. They had inherited the wealth upon which they were able to depend for support as they pursued knowledge for its own sake.

The industrial age saw the decline of most of that private mercantile wealth and the rise of the even greater fortunes of the "self-made" tradesman-capitalists. Generally people who didn't care personally for research beyond its narrow applicability to their business, they also tended toward corporate-mindedness, and funded scientific training and research largely indirectly, through inter-institutional transactions via their foundations and grants and so on.

The point is that for all this time, there was never such a thing as a self-funded scientist as such. You had people who inherited or acquired wealth in ways unrelated to scientific pursuits, who then developed a greater or lesser interest in science and found various ways to subsidize research out of their fortunes.

Only in the post-industrial era — when the idea of information as a commodity in its own right has really come of age — has it become possible for someone who is first and foremost a scientist to make enough money doing science — and especially "big science" — to fund themselves in perpetuity. People like Venter don't represent a return to the gentleman-scientist ethos of a bygone time — in a sense they represent the opposite, the completion of the process by which that relationship has been inverted. In the end the scientists have, as it were, become the gentlemen.

What kind of magazine smears its targets with patently false statements and then blocks them from responding?

Oooh, ooh, I know the answer to this one: the one that's been pulling the same business all along!

All praise to Glenn Greenwald for doing the research and beating the drum so long and so hard on this. More power to those who are canceling their subscriptions, refusing to ever touch Time again, and so on. And for anyone who has wondered about the seeming silence of Democrats on these issues, perhaps this is part of the answer.

But I would like to take a step back and make an observation about the larger issue here. This is not the first occasion on which Time or its ilk have behaved this way — not by a long shot. This is only the latest, and nowhere near the most severe, example of what has been common practice in the mainstream press for decades.

Other writers here have taken exception to my critique of mainstream liberal thought as having fallen captive to right-wing narrative. As Exhibit A I point to the number of people in this letters column who are now realizing that Time is wholly without merit as a source of information about the real world.

I don't think it's overstatement to say that this is by and large an exceptionally progressive-minded crowd (even you, shooter, in your own way). Many more mainstream liberals are as yet still uncomfortable "going as far" as Glenn Greenwald does in his critique of power and the press in America. So given that, what does it say if this exceptionally critically attentive subset of American liberalism is still struggling to shed itself of the illusion that a magazine like Time is worth looking to for political news?

As I say, more power to everyone who's inspired to action over this issue, no matter when or how. This is how we get out of the bad place we're in, one step at a time. But as mean or harsh or unpleasant as it may be, it's a fact that this self-same magazine has been poisoning public discourse — including liberal pubic discourse, meaning us — with the same lies and distractions and artificial narrative for longer than just this past week. It's not just that the corporate press is sick. Liberals are sick, too, having caught the disease through long exposure. And that should be a sobering realization for all of us.