Paul D. Thacker
Paul D. Thacker, sometimes bylined as Paul Thacker, is an American journalist who specializes in science, medicine, and environmental reporting. He has written for Science, Journal of the American Medical Association, Salon.com, and The New Republic, and Environmental Science & Technology. In 2009, he was working on the Senate Finance Committee for Republican Senator Chuck Grassley investigating medical research conflicts of interest. He left Congress in 2010, the day before releasing a report on ghostwriting in a medical journal run by American Heart Association.
In September 2006, Thacker wrote a story for Salon that reported on political suppression of climate science within the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration during the G.W. Bush presidency. The agency sits within the Department of Commerce. Chuck Fuqua, an official in Commerce, was choosing which NOAA scientists could speak to the press about the link between global warming and hurricanes. Fuqua has no training in science. One of the documents Thacker found was released by the office of Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman. Based partly on Thacker’s reporting, 14 Senators launched an investigation into NOAA and NASA.
In 2006, Thacker resigned and was then fired from the journal Environmental Science & Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society. Thacker had written a series of exposés that a senior ACS official claimed showed an anti-industry bias. Thacker wrote an account of this for the journal of the Society of Environmental Journalists, writing that the matter concerned an article he had written on the Weinberg Group That year, Thacker won 2nd place for the Weinberg Group article in the annual awards presented by the US Society of Environmental Journalists. Later that year, Thacker’s work was profiled on.
In Thacker's story on the Weinberg Group, he wrote about a letter that the group sent to DuPont outlining a plan to protect DuPont from litigation and regulation over Teflon. The Weinberg Group had done similar work for Big Tobacco and then began working in Europe to defeat alcohol regulations.
In August 2015, Thacker and fellow journalist Charles Seife wrote articles for PLOS One and the Los Angeles Times on the importance for freedom of information laws in uncovering corruption in science The piece in PLOS was retracted, which Thacker wrote about for the New York Times, emphasizing again the importance of freedom of information laws.
