Spurious Research as Tendentious Propaganda

By Oliver Kamm

Palestinian protestors confront Israeli troops in Gaza City during the first intifada in 1987. Photo by Efi Sharir/Israel Press and Photo Agency (I.P.P.A.) / Dan Hadani collection, National Library of Israel / CC BY 4.0

A liberal society depends on its procedures as well as its institutions. Foremost among these is the error-correction mechanism of scientific method and critical inquiry. In his important book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch identifies current threats to the pursuit of reliable knowledge. He argues that “politicising an academic discipline like sociology or literary criticism, or spreading propaganda to discredit and drown out fact-based journalism” is as damaging as, in the hard sciences, banning the teaching of evolution or denying the efficacy of vaccines.

This article recounts a case of bogus and politicised scholarship—propaganda—in the social sciences. A research article claiming to provide computational linguistic proof of bias in America’s premier n…