Indeed, his examples are comically telling: CNN and MSNBC but not Fox which had equivalent and bigger audiences.
But for our present time, I presume the point of resurrecting a 17 year old speech from a fiction writer is to further reduce confidence in a press that dare criticize the ruling party.
Can you expand on that? I presume you're talking about his book, "State of Fear". I guess "Andromeda Strain" could be in that category. I found most of his books interesting, educational and often insightful.
Even if he has written books that don't follow this pattern, Jurassic Park surely does; I'm not sure why you didn't mention it yourself
Some of his books have the premise that some scientists are short sighted and myopic, while others aren't. We can briefly talk about Jurassic Park the book, which I assume you have read. The movie shares only the most broad story arcs with the book.
....and I started typing a synopsis... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_(novel)#Plot_sum... is pretty good.
To your point: yes, there's a group of scientists that fucked up, and there's another group of scientists that are trying to honestly work things out.
I'd say the biggest antagonists in Jurassic Park are big corporate interests.
Upon reflection, aside from his first couple of books, that seems to be a common theme.
The the corporation and its scientists are tied together in that they try to predict the future, which as Crichton kindly explains, is completely impossible. The corporation believes that investing money will lead to profits later, and the scientists it employs believe that their safety measures and female-only population will prevent things from going wrong.
The "good" scientists only react to events in the past and the present; observing the dinosaurs as they are, taking action against immediate threats, and reconstructing the series of events that led to the catastrophe. The chaos mathematician may as well be a self-insert in the context of this article; he spends half his time explaining to people that nothing can ever be predicted, with mathematical "proof".
It hardly generalizes to everything Michael Crichton has written though.
No, that's an inaccurate and uncharitable summarization of his literary career. Scientists fucking up covers some of his more popular works accurately, Jurassic Park more than the rest, but other stories have the scientists/doctors working hard to save lives, or otherwise behaving admirably. Sphere has the scientists accidentally acquire godlike powers, only to willingly relinquish those powers for the greater good.
In fact, in several of his novels, including Jurassic Park, I think there is stronger anti-corporate sentiment than there is anti-science sentiment. The book makes clear that the problems at Jurassic Park are caused by a corporation cutting corners to turn a profit on a complex system before pausing to understand what they were dealing with. In the novel, the park owner John Hammond is consumed by dinosaurs. For whatever reason the movie let him live, and otherwise tuned down the anti-corporate angle. In the book his idiocy and greed made him a villain, but the movie makes him seem like a cuddly victim. In the book the two heroes are paleontologists (scientists) who were not to blame for the disaster but nevertheless behaved heroically in their attempts to mitigate harm.
A similar theme is found in Airframe though, which covers the interactions between a crash site investigator trying to find a truth that's inconvienent to the airline (that the pilot was to blame.) It could have been about aircraft engineers or aerospace scientists fucking up... but it wasn't. Disclosure and Rising Sun are controversial for their own reasons, but both have prominent anti-corporate themes.
Then there are the novels that seem unrelated to the discussion at all, like Eaters of the Dead which was a retelling of Beowulf from the perspective of an Arab traveler from Baghdad.
> Scientists fucking up covers some of his more popular works accurately, Jurassic Park more than the rest
To this I would add: one group of scientists are fucking up, but another group are trying to do the right thing.
“We need to start seeing the media as a bearded nut on the sidewalk, shouting out false fears. It’s not sensible to listen to it.»