Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

The Fall of Scientific American

The Fall of “Scientific American”

When the beloved science publication got too political, its corporate owners stepped in. Now its future is uncertain.

In March of 20doz26, in a nondescript, 46th-floor office overlooking lower Manhattan, about two dozen members of Scientific American’s editorial staff had gathered in person and online to talk openly about their approach to political coverage.

David Ewalt, the editor in chief, wanted them all to understand something: The magazine was not “kowtowing” to the Trump administration. In fact, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Nation, he asked staff present to “raise your hand if you’ve ever heard me say not to cover a political story.”

Two people raised their hands.

For well over a year, rumors had been circulating among the staff about top-level editors’ rejecting pitches they saw as too political, controversial articles triggering angry phone calls from Scientific American’s corporate owner, and even, on at least one occasion, ownership forcing editors to blunt language critical of the Trump administration.

Then there was what happened to the opinion department. In the first months of the new administration, it had been publishing about 15 pieces a month, many of which criticized Trump’s attacks on scientific research. But after the department published a particularly provocative column in May 2025—“Science Tells Us the U.S. Is Heading toward a Dictatorship”—management, in what one staffer would later call an “unprecedented” move, had told the department to “pause” publishing new articles until the new editor in chief started.

The opinion department’s hiatus had worried some people more than others—there were legitimate journalistic reasons to want to emphasize breaking news, even if not everyone agreed with them. But by March 2026, nine months into Ewalt’s tenure, the opinion section seemed to be gone for good—and other departments were feeling political pressure, too. That, along with a round of layoffs, a restructuring of the newsroom, and veiled threats about the future of the magazine, had left the staff frustrated and looking for answers. Now that the new editor in chief was finally coming to the full editorial staff “to listen as well as to speak,” as one staffer put it, they began asking questions.

What about that rumor, someone asked him: Had editors really been told to not put the word “Trump” in headlines?

That was true, Ewalt said. Last year, a Breitbart article had criticized Springer Nature, Scientific American’s German owner, for attacking those “skeptical of the coronavirus vaccine” and spreading “gender insanity.” “No more taxpayer money for woke publishers!” declared Donald Trump Jr., retweeting the article. In June 2025, Axios reported that all federal subscriptions to Springer Nature publications had been canceled. Although Trump officials later walked back the bulk of the cuts, they had shocked the scientific community: Without access to Springer Nature’s thousands of journals, including the prestigious Nature publications, researchers at federal agencies—from the NIH to NASA—would struggle to stay abreast of scientific developments. The company itself, meanwhile, risked losing as much as $25 million in federal contracts.

So if Ewalt had asked people to keep Trump out of the headlines last summer, it was because corporate higher-ups were visiting the site all the time. “And if they saw the word ‘Trump,’” he said, according to the recording, “they were wetting their fucking lederhosen.” People had no idea how “lily-livered and weak-kneed and cowardly” Springer Nature was, he said. “They are so fucking afraid of the Trump administration.”

The opinion editors had long since been reassigned to other roles, but now, almost a year later, Ewalt was telling his staff that even news stories sometimes had too much of a slant to them. “I am not ever telling anybody here ‘Don’t go after the Trump administration,’” he told them. “I’m saying I don’t want to hear your opinion.” He just didn’t think it was their “strongest weapon.” If everyone stuck to objective, hard-hitting reporting, Ewalt believed that they would be able to stay out of trouble with Springer Nature.

Mentioning Trump in headlines was now allowed. “But let’s be realistic about the world we live in,” he told his staff. Last August, Ewalt warned, Springer Nature could have easily decided that the magazine’s “$4 million in losses” wasn’t worth risking millions more that the company earned from federally funded subscriptions to its scientific journals. He had been “trying to keep Springer Nature from freaking out and shutting us down,” he said.

As the meeting came to an end, Ewalt seemed optimistic. “This is useful,” he said. “We’ll do this more.”

But staffers still felt uncertain. Could people really trust their editor in chief to stand by their reporting, like he promised? Or would he retract articles if readers sent too many angry emails, or if Springer Nature’s billionaire CEO called? Those concerns, one staffer said, weren’t “quelled in that meeting at all.” Rather, it had transformed accumulated gossip and implication into something far more concrete—and “set everybody’s teeth on edge,” said another staffer, who, like a number of sources for this story, chose to speak anonymously because they feared retaliation from current or prospective employers. “He was trying to be honest with us,” the staffer said. But, also, it “alarmed the shit out of everybody.”

Another meeting never took place.

In April, the staff of Scientific American took the first formal step to form a union with the Writers Guild of America East, citing a number of concerns, including editorial independence. And on June 23—three days before the National Labor Relations Board was scheduled to count the unionization votes—Springer Nature announced that it was selling the magazine to a little-known company called LabX.

Scientific American is the oldest magazine in the United States and, among science publications, one of the most familiar and beloved. Like other publications of its caliber, it also has a tradition of editorial independence. In the 1980s, after a tumultuous split between its co-owners, it was absorbed by the German publishing empire Holtzbrinck, which currently controls both Springer Nature and the Big Five publisher Macmillan. A 1998 Vanity Fair feature called the company the “shark of choice” for struggling publishers: It promised to allow them to continue their work with minimal interference.

In recent years, however, Springer Nature’s hands-off reputation has begun to falter. Interviews conducted this summer and fall with a over a dozen current and former Scientific American employees depict a magazine that, especially over the past two years, has struggled to protect its editorial independence in the face of sometimes overwhelming pressure from its corporate ownership—a picture corroborated by audio recordings and documents obtained by The Nation.

Back in 2017, Springer Nature........

© The Nation