It is no secret in science media that The Conversation is overtly political, any more than it's a shock that ProPublica or Mother Jones is. If you are going to get hired in most corporate media - and there are all corporations even if they are Non-Profit Corporations - in 2021 you are first going to have liberal credibility.
An acquaintance of mine even had a job offer as an editor at The Conversation pulled a few years ago because another staffer sounded the alarm that he might be *gasp* a fiscal conservative.
When you make hiring decisions based on whether or not someone thinks poor people should pay lower taxes, you are really, really political.
Politics bleeds into science acceptance also. COVID-19 aside, if you are anti-vaccine, you are almost always on the left. The same goes for beliefs about energy, like hyrdoelectric, nuclear, and natural gas (only solar and wind are endorsed now), medicine (supplements and alternative medicine are better than Big Pharma) and food, where the organic process and its archaic pesticides and fertilizers are superior to modern kinds.
It's why an editor had no problem at all letting a commentary which claimed that the weedkiller glyphosate, once made by Evil Monsanto - the now gone boogeyman of anti-science progressives - was found in breast milk and therefore was probably causing cancer or autism or whatever
You might be able to find a molecule of glyphosate in breast milk, technology is so advanced we can detect anything in anything in 2021, but if it was the case in their link, we have no way to know. A group of activists paid a private lab founded by an anti-science activist in order to detect any chemical you want in anything (for a fee!) you want to detect glyphosate in breast milk.
What a shock he did.
It also is not a shock that Mother Jones and their political allies repeated this hoax so loudly that the English majors who work at The Conversation believed it without question.
At the American Council on Science on Health, Cameron English takes them to task for repeating anti-science tropes - they might as well also claim that vaccines cause autism, this breast milk junk has been so thoroughly debunked - precisely because they have no diversity of thought. If everyone has the same opinions, and beliefs, there is no need for more than one of them.
After the blowback, they removed the claim from the activist group, not that it matters if you can 'detect' glyphosate in breast milk anyway. It literally can't act on human biology unless you fall into a pool of it and drown. Farm workers who use it every day have no effects.
Obviously it's great that editors removed the link under pressure from the science community, but how many similar claims did not get caught? And why it is that they only act as editors when they do get caught?
While scientists may be liberal, and science itself certainly needs to be, peer review is conservative, as is editing. The Conversation would know that if they didn't have a hidden policy that prevents anyone from outside their political tribe being hired.
