Years ago, when science media was generally in decline, both financially and content-wise, I held up Popular Science as the poster child for how to be successful: Appeal to your market and stay out of the culture wars.

Things have changed, and they have begun the slow, sad decline already experienced by their competitors, which got those companies sold for peanuts. Their editorial tone began to be called out in comments, leading to their online content editor to declare, in elitist tones that would make any cultural mullah proud, that "shrill, boorish specimens of the lower Internet phyla" had spoiled it for everyone and they were shutting off comments.

Here's an idea; don't print partisan rubbish.

We have finally gotten mainstream media around to sometimes accepting science - the New York Times endorses turtle blood as medicine but no longer instills fear and doubt about GMOs - and so Popular Science is filling the woo void, recruiting a "community/theoretical/experimental Ecologist" blogger for their new network to invoke the Precautionary Principle and declare that, since no one knows that GMOs won't kill the ecology 30 years from now, they shouldn't be planted in places where poor people need to be fed. 20 years is "only a fraction of the time necessary" to know whether or not GM foods are dooming us all.

To bolster that, we get the same tired postmodernism we have seen for decades - scientific "truths" don't exist. And if we just feed poor people, or keep kids from going blind by using Golden Rice, the public will fail to understand science as a 'process' and that could "erode the relationship between the public and the scientific community".

It's Paul Feyerabend-lite. Basically it boils down to, if you love science, block it. Maybe scientific truths don't exist in theoretical ecology but in the real world they do. No food on planet Earth can pass the ideological litmus test of 'we must show growing it can cause no ecological damage in the future.'

Since it's their blog network, Popular Science has comments open - and that will be bad because talking to a lay audience of environmentalists is different than talking to a science audience. The first comment lauded a French study done by an anti-GMO activist that was so flawed even France made fun of it - and they hate GMOs - while others have already noted one of her sources was not a peer reviewed study, it was denied as an article by Nature but they agreed to publish it as an editorial.

When environmentalists can trip of your research, you are in for a tough science ride.