Science journalism faces its toughest test as trust in evidence erodes
As New Scientist marks its 70th anniversary, the publication warns that science, truth and independent journalism are under simultaneous pressure from climate breakdown, political attacks on research and the rise of AI-generated summaries.
Trusted science journalism has never been more necessary, as the forces it exists to explain — climate breakdown, artificial intelligence and organised attacks on scientific evidence — converge to reshape public understanding of the world. That is the central argument advanced by New Scientist as it prepares to mark its 70th anniversary, warning that the conditions which made sceptical, evidence-led reporting essential are now under strain from multiple directions at once.
The publication recalled its own 60th-birthday feature from 2016, which listed the gravest threats facing humanity: a giant asteroid strike, global warming, a new plague, rogue nanomachines and artificial intelligence. A decade on, those warnings read less like speculation and more like a checklist. The Paris Agreement entered into force in 2016 with the ambition of holding global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. In 2024, the planet breached that threshold for a full calendar year for the first time. With a powerful El Niño compounding an already warmer climate, 2026 is projected to surpass that record, bringing heatwaves, wildfires, landslides and other catastrophic events in its wake.
Political pressure on science has intensified in parallel. The election of Donald Trump a decade ago was treated as a shock; his second term has produced stronger anti-science rhetoric than at any previous point, driving cuts to research funding and spreading dangerous misinformation, particularly on health and the environment. The consequence is not merely a debate about budgets but a contest over whether verified evidence retains any authority in public life.
Artificial intelligence has meanwhile moved from theoretical risk to present reality. Even some of those developing the technology now warn it could threaten humanity itself. Whether or not that existential danger materialises, its effects are already visible, changing how people work, how wars are fought and how the public receives its news. For many publishers, that last shift represents an existential risk in its own right, as audiences increasingly turn to pre-digested AI summaries and social media pundits rather than original reporting. No news organisation is immune.
The result is a moment in which science, truth and journalism are all under threat simultaneously — and in which the case for high-quality, trusted and sceptical science journalism is stronger than ever. The argument is not simply defensive. The past seven decades have delivered transformational advances in medicine, green technologies that support more sustainable living, and astonishing progress in understanding the universe. Those gains, too, depend on a public able to distinguish verified discovery from noise.
New Scientist said it will celebrate many of those breakthroughs in anniversary coverage over the coming weeks, alongside predictions for future advances and life-affirming stories from readers, some of whom have subscribed since the beginning. The anniversary programme begins in under two weeks with New Scientist Live in London, an annual event marking its tenth year and expected to draw tens of thousands of attendees, including an emergency briefing on the nature and climate crisis featuring three leading climate scientists.
The broader point is about endurance rather than nostalgia. Nobody can predict what the next decades hold, the publication acknowledged, but it intends to keep covering whatever arrives — including, it noted, in 2096. At 70, retirement is firmly off the cards. The stakes, however, extend well beyond one masthead: the same pressures reshaping how science is reported are reshaping how societies decide what is true, and who gets to say so.
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