Time for a Blogger Ethics Panel
It turns out that beyond his serious distortions regarded the alleged “global cooling” scare of the 1970s, George Will’s latest climate change denialist article contained some very clear-cut factual errors. He said that the Arctic Climate Research Center had found that global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979, but that group disagrees with Will. Will also claimed that the World Meteorological Organization says there’s been no global warming over the past ten years, when in fact the WMO says no such thing. They say that 1998 was the hottest year on record, and also that the world is experiencing a warming trend. Zach Roth has been trying to get some kind of response to this out of Will or out of Fred Hiatt:
Will’s assistant told us that Will might get back to us later in the day to talk about the column. And Hiatt said he was too busy to talk about it just then, but that he’d try to respond to emailed questions. So we emailed him yesterday’s post, with several questions about the editing process, then followed up with another email late yesterday afternoon.
But still nothing from either of them, over twenty-four hours after the first contact was made. Nor has the online version of Will’s column been updated, even to reflect the fact that the ACRC has utterly disavowed the claim Will attributes to it.
We’re hearing that the Post’s editing process for opinion pieces is virtually non-existent. Maybe that makes sense in some cases — it certainly seems reasonable to give most columnists a freer hand than straight news reporters get. But it’s difficult to know for sure when the Post won’t talk about it. And that approach sure didn’t serve the paper well here.
I think Roth is being too-cute-by-half here. The point of giving columns to Will and Charles Krauthammer and now hiring Bill Kristol is to show that Fred Hiatt and The Washington Post believe that whatever random crap the conservative movement wants to make up on any given day will get a hearing in The Washington Post. They’re not interested in informing their audience, they’re interested in showing that they’ll bend over backwards to be fair to the right wing. Publishing error-free articles by movement icons serves that purpose, but publishing sloppy error-filled ones serves that purpose even better.
33 Responses to “Time for a Blogger Ethics Panel”
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February 17th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Hiatt said that people need to get Social Security straightened out before worrying about this stuff.
February 17th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Wait! “Being fair” to the right wing means “publishing whatever they write down?” That makes the Post Op-Ed page no different from a blog comments thread! How about some moderation!
February 17th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Well, if you look at the Arctic Climate Research Center webpage, it isn’t too mysterious where Will got his information. Specifically, got to
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/global.sea.ice.area.pdf
From this statement put out by ACRC, Will’s statement appears to be true using that groups data for Dec. 31, 2008 , a date that was picked by Michael Asher for “Sea Ice Ends Year at Same Level as 1979” which appeared on the Daily Tech website.
This may actually be a unintentionally misleading statement by Asher, who looked at the last date available (which is subject to idiosyncratic fluctuations — this is weather) and not longer term averages.
February 17th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
No, because even if you do, it explains why global ice is such a bad measure of melting, because it adds the less-affected southern hemisphere to the data, giving a false impression of stability.
Also, Will lied about “no global warming since 1998,” and he lied about a “global cooling” consensus in the 1970’s.
Finally, Will has already been corrected on the latter as recently as 2006 in Newsweek, so George Will knew he was lying.
.
February 17th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Yes. That.
I don’t recall anything I’ve agreed with more on this blog than this shrill summary.
February 17th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Someone get stefan a job as a publicist for the Post!
February 17th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Well, if you fact checked the conservative columnists, then there would be no conservative columnists. And you can’t be ‘balanced’ without conservative columnists. So what can a newspaper do? I guess they could post rebuttals, but that would mes up the ‘balance.’ The only solution would be to have no liberal columns, only the liberal rebuttals to the recent conservative columns. But that wouldn’t be so bad.
February 17th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Well, they might as well suffer a bit from their decisions and be made to see clearly the consequences of their actions:
fredhiatt@washpost.com
ombudsman@washpost.com
georgewill@washpost.com
February 17th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
It occurs to me that Highly Important Commentators like Hiatt and Will might be on record as disliking the rise of blogs because there IS NO FACT CHECKING and people can just say ANYTHING THEY WANT without consequences. Before bloggery went mainstream these were the most often cited complaints among Serious People for why blogs should be ignored. It’d be fun if there was a quote out there from one of them making this argument. I’m off to Google, anyone care to join me?
February 17th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
I’d say that getting your ass mocked on TPM and Yglesias counts as a Great Big Horse Laugh — if WaPo is interested in protecting whatever value their brand still has.
February 17th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Matt, you better be careful. Will might snub you at a cocktail party.
February 17th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
As I’ve said elsewhere, the root of this particular canard is Drudge. Will got his information from piece on http://www.dailytech.com that was linked on the Drudge Report on January 5, 2009 here:
http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2009/01/05/20090105_150707.htm
Click on the second link in the left hand column titled “Global Sea Ice Ends Year at Same Level as 1979. . . “
February 17th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
It’s high time for a Blog Commenter Ethics Panel!
February 17th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
As someone who used to read Daily Tech quite a bit, they’re good for gadget news, but they push anti-climate change pieces, and the commenters there aren’t nice to anyone who begs to differ.
February 17th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Oh come on now, what’s the old saying about glass house residents and rocks
Here’s one of my all time favorite M Ygeslias posts:
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=08&year=2006&base_name=post_1284
Matt completely rewrites North American prehistory in a misguided attempt to revise land policy in the western states
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The thing of it is that before some clever rebranding, the area we currently know as the “Great Plains” was called “The Great American Desert.” It’s not genuinely a desert, but it really is quite dry. And, of course, an area that’s dry-ish most of the time is going to be subject to frequent droughts. Many Native American practiced agriculture, but the ones who lived on the plains/deserts generally didn’t and this was not a coincidence. The local climate has its ups and downs, but it’s a fundamentally marginal area that already stays viable mostly because of federal protections for domestic agriculture products. It seems a bit perverse to just encourage the empty-ish part of the country to get emptier at a time when housing is becoming increasingly expensive, but it got empty-ish out there for a reason. Before it was flyover country, that’s the part of the country you would try and pass through in a covered wagon before reaching the more promising terrain in Oregon.
===================================================
Many Native American practiced agriculture, but the ones who lived on the plains/deserts generally didn’t and this was not a coincidence
*****************************
I won’t disagree with your observations that large-scale modern agriculture on the Plains is abetted by Federal subsidies, but you founder on trying to push that back into prehistory. Your statement above isn’t strictly true. During late prehistory, the Plains from Texas north through North Dakota were settled by agricultural tribes who farmed in the river valleys. Some foot nomad hunter-gatherers ranged the driest Western High Plains. There was a trend away from agriculture in this area when Europeans came and horses became available to help in bison hunting.
The desert Southwest was almost completely populated by agricultural people: the Anasazi, Mogollon and Hohokam. They had extensive irrigation facilities.
The Great Basin was more mixed. The Fremont and Patayan practiced some agriculture in the southern Great Basin, but it never penetrated to the northern and western Great Basin.
Ironically, in some of the richest agricultural land in the country in California agriculture never caught hold. The Indians knew about it, they traded with the Anasazi, but the natural environment was rich enough that they couldn’t be bothered.
Same in the Pacific Northwest – that fine land the pioneers were crossing the barren Plains to get to – no agriculture there either.
Kind of turns your theory inside out doesn’t it. Agriculture in the Plains and Desert and no agriculture in well-watered lands on the West Coast.
Posted by: Campesino | August 29, 2006 5:55 PM
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Ah, I see that Campesino has already pointed out that the pre-columbian natives of the southwest were primarily agricultural and continue to be largely pastoralist
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They’re not interested in informing their audience, they’re interested in showing that they’ll bend over backwards to be fair to the right wing. Publishing error-free articles by movement icons serves that purpose, but publishing sloppy error-filled ones serves that purpose even better.
M Yglesias – sloppy? error-filled?? Trouble with figuring out historic climatic information and it’s implications. I won’t even go into spelling and grammar.
Maybe not a “Blogger Ethics Panel” but a “Blogger Truth and Reconciliation Commission”
February 17th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
The Post has a new ombudsman. Write ombudsman@washpost.com and complain about Will. More specifically, ask if Will is still taking money from the special interests he champions in his column.
February 17th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
Opinion pieces are just opinions. An opinionist is not a journalist any more than a reporter for the National Enquirer is a real news reporter. The saying goes that everyone is entitled to their opinion and some are also entitled to have them featured in the WaPo and get paid real money for them. This idea that an opinionist needs an editor to do fact checking flies in the face of what an opinionist does: they opine which requires no foundation in reality really.
February 18th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Will’s ethics have been in tatters since at least 1980 (when he participated in Reagan’s debate preparation, which, by the way, used stolen Carter materials, then reported on the debate without revealing his partisan activities). So what else is new?
February 18th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
You’re the one being too cute here, Matt. Even assuming Roth shares your opinion, his questions to the Post assume that the Post acting in good faith, because that is how one inquires. It’s just the first step. Roth has taken another step in publicizing the lack of response (which works better with civil questions rather than attacks).
See Obama for examples of this technique in action. Oh, hell. I think I’m being too cute now.
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