This is not an appeal to an authority, though (which you acknowledge with your "hints at" comment). An argument from authority is of the form "this guy is at Ha

This is not an appeal to an authority, though (which you acknowledge with your "hints at" comment). An argument from authority is of the form "this guy is at Harvard, therefore his argument is correct." What is happening here is that the popular press is using the professor's association with Harvard as a heuristic to determine whether or not to take him seriously enough to publish his arguments. To a first approximation, this is a reasonable thing to do, because it's using the prior probability of someone having something interesting to say to guide your choice of where to devote your scant attention. By no means is this a substitute for an actual substantive evaluation of the claims being made; when that happens, you have fallen prey to the appeal to authority fallacy.