Slate used to be a trusted source for in-depth science journalism, writes Dr. Alex Berezow at Real Clear Science, so much so that the Real Clear aggregator even used multiple articles per week, but now it has devolved into "angry, opinion-driven reportage that is mostly aimed at insulting Republicans and Christians."
Obviously there is a place for cultural opinion, I have insulted both those demographics myself when it has been warranted due to various stances on science, but they may be following the easy road to selling pageviews rather than talking about science, says Berezow, doing "a grotesque disservice to the scientific endeavor". Certainly Slate's audience skews left - not Mother Jones left, but certainly not culturally agnostic like Science 2.0, and they were all recruited because they matched the political stance of the audience and had achieved readership success catering to it. Berezow compares it to Scienceblogs.com, the earliest 'group blog' from a decade ago, which used a pretense of science to talk about Republicans And Religion. (And to spectacular success - that early Scienceblogs roster is now a Who's Who of contributors at almost all large media outlets)
Berezow is particularly hard on activist Zack Kopplin and Bad Astronomer Dr. Phil Plait. It is hard to know if it is just cherry picking (someone could also do it to me easily, with 1,500 articles floating around the Internet I have enraged almost everyone at some point) or if the problem has gotten worse, partly because no one ever accused Slate writers of being Republicans - but the real reason it is hard to know is that most science writers who care about science rather than culture don't read Slate.
