Science & Tech Quote by Michael Pollan

Science journalism likes to imagine itself as a watchdog, but Pollan points out how often it behaves like a stenographer for prestige. By naming the usual suspects - Nature, Cell, NEJM - he’s not just listing journals; he’s tracing a supply chain of authority. A “handful” becomes an attention monopoly: what gets published there becomes what gets covered, what gets funded, what gets replicated, what gets translated into policy and dinner-table advice. The line “set the agenda” lands like an indictment because it frames journalism not as discovery but as downstream distribution.

The intent is corrective, almost hygiene-minded. Pollan is warning readers to notice how ideas become “news” only after passing through elite gates, and how those gates have their own incentives: novelty, career-making results, institutional branding. The subtext is that journalists, even with good intentions, outsource judgment to impact factor. That’s efficient in a newsroom and disastrous for public understanding, because it quietly turns science into a horse race of flashy findings rather than a slow, self-correcting process.

Context matters: Pollan’s broader work sits at the intersection of food, health, and environmental claims - areas where single studies routinely get inflated into lifestyle commandments. His critique also echoes the replication crisis and the churn of press-release science. He’s not dismissing peer review; he’s interrogating the cultural machinery around it. When a few journals define what counts as important, the public doesn’t just get a filtered picture of science - it gets a curated narrative about progress, certainty, and consensus that may be more institutional than empirical.