Chris Mooney (journalist)

Family and education

Mooney was born in Mesa, Arizona, and grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. Both of his parents were college English professors. He attended Isidore Newman School before entering Yale University, where he graduated with a B.A. in English in 1999. His interest in science, and especially biology and the impact of Charles Darwin, was strongly influenced by his grandfather Gerald A. Cole, a biologist at Arizona State University and author of Textbook of Limnology, a noted book in the field. Mooney is the oldest of three siblings: his sister Kate Mooney is a freelance writer and his brother Davy Mooney is a jazz guitarist.

Journalistic work

Upon graduation from Yale, Mooney took a position at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York but soon returned to New Orleans to consider his future as a writer. He became a freelance writer for the magazine Lingua Franca before earning a one-year fellowship at The American Prospect magazine in 2000. Upon the completion of the fellowship he was hired by the magazine and moved to Washington, D.C. as a staff writer. As online editor for the magazine he helped establish Tapped, the group blog of American Prospect.

After leaving The American Prospect Mooney continued his freelance work contributing to a variety of other publications, including Slate, Salon.com, Reason, The Washington Monthly, the Utne Reader, Columbia Journalism Review, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. Mooney maintained the column Doubt and About for the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, last contributing in 2006. Mooney started the blog The Intersection which ran on ScienceBlogs from 2006 to 2009, then at Discover Magazine until 2011, before moving to Science Progress in 2011. From 2007 until 2013 he contributed to DeSmogBlog, a blog that focuses on topics related to global warming. Mooney is presently a correspondent for The Climate Desk magazine and for Mother Jones. In October 2014 the Washington Post announced that Mooney would begin writing a new, environmentally focused blog for the paper.

In 2005 Mooney's first book, The Republican War on Science, was released. The book explored the premise that the presidential administration of George W. Bush regularly distorted and/or suppressed scientific research to further its own political aims. The book became a New York Times Best Seller and its success landed Mooney interviews on popular television programs such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, as well as podcasts such as Point of Inquiry and Rationally Speaking. In 2012 a paper published in the American Sociological Review confirmed the book's thesis that conservatives in the United States have become increasingly distrustful of science.

Podcast host

From 2010 to 2013, Mooney served as one of the hosts of the Center for Inquiry podcast Point of Inquiry. In June 2013, due to disagreement with Center for Inquiry president Ronald Lindsay over his remarks at a conference focused on women in secularism, Mooney, co-host Indre Viskontas, and producer Adam Isaak announced their resignation from the Point of Inquiry podcast. Mooney, Viskontas, and Isaak started a new podcast at Mother Jones, titled Inquiring Minds, and the first episode of the new podcast was released in September 2013. On October 10, 2014, Mooney announced his departure from the Inquiring Minds podcast, in order to pursue a new assignment with the Washington Post.

Affiliations

In 2009, he joined the Center for Collaborative History at Princeton University for the Spring semester as a visiting associate. From 2009 to 2010, Mooney was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In February 2010, Mooney was named a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow at the Templeton Foundation.

Science communication and "Framing"

In 2007 Mooney and co-author Matthew Nisbet wrote a paper for Science on the topic of "Framing Science". They advocated that scientists and science communicators tailor their messages to account for how the general public filters information based on pre-existing beliefs. Practical examples of this filtering include the impact of fundamental religious beliefs on the topic of evolution and conservative political beliefs on the topic of climate change. Mooney and Nesbit called out popular biologist and author Richard Dawkins, noting his criticism of religion was unlikely to change religious fundamentalist minds and in fact more likely to strengthen their doubt of the scientific data. The framing science proposal created a large, often contentious debate within the online scientific blogging community, though research continues to study the influence of framing.

In the book Unscientific America, Mooney and co-author Sheril Kirshenbaum expressed the concern that some science communicators were pressing the view that one must make a choice between accepting science or accepting religion. Critics of Mooney labelled him as an "accommodationist", or one who seeks to find compatibility between religious and scientific beliefs. Mooney defended his position in a number of publications and podcasts by citing that ongoing scientific studies continues to support the hypothesis that people integrate new information based on their pre-existing worldviews, and that failure to account for this fact will lead to continued failures in science communication.

Bibliography

Critical reviews

The Republican War on Science received many positive reviews. A review in Scientific American described it as well-researched and closely argued. Michael Stebbins wrote in Nature Medicine that the book should be a wake-up call and stated, "Mooney's documentation of the willful manipulation of science on the part of conservatives to suit an agenda is well supported and nauseating." It was featured on the cover of The New York Times Book Review and selected as an "Editors' Choice" by The New York Times.

Storm World was written after Mooney witnessed the devastation of his mother's house in Hurricane Katrina. Tom Hayden wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Mooney deftly handled the complexity of the questions surrounding global warming and its effect on hurricanes while weaving an intriguing and important story. A review in The New York Times Book Review called it "a well-researched, nuanced book" but criticized its organization and lack of "pizazz".

Unscientific America cowritten with Sheril Kirshenbaum addressed scientific illiteracy in America. A favorable review in Science Communication anticipated controversy. Less favorable reviews in the BMJ and the New Scientist supported the authors' analysis of the problem but were critical of the solutions proposed. American Scientist and Science published negative reviews, complaining about its lack of depth.

Writing about The Republican Brain in The New York Times Paul Krugman stated that Mooney makes a good point: the personality traits associated with modern conservatism, particularly a lack of openness, make the modern Republican Party hostile to the idea of objective inquiry. The book sparked some controversy.

Other noted articles

Public appearances and podcast interviews

Mooney has lectured extensively including appearances at Harvard Medical School, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Interviews featuring Mooney include: