Matt Yglesias

Eugene Robinson: George Will “Crossed the Line”

The pushback on George Will continues as Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson slams Washington Post columnist George Will. Robinson also becomes the first Postie to note the role played by Will’s editors in helping him attempt to deceive the Post’s readers. He does it gently since, after all, he works for them. But he does it:

MADDOW: Eugene, I feel like factchecking politicians is a full-time job and it is a very fun one. But does it sort of feel like there is just more made up stuff in the daily back and forth of political news right now than usual?

ROBINSON: It certainly does, and it’s distressing. I think there’s a distinction here among the examples we cite. What George Will did was cherrypick a sentence in a report, be very persnickety in the way he parsed his sentences, and end up making it sound as if the report had said the exact opposite of what it actually said. He was persnickety enough that his editors, who happen to be my editors, felt he didn’t cross the line. I thought he did. And the ombudsman agreed with me, actually, and wrote about it in last Sunday’s paper.

I think the Post is in an untenable position here. If they think that Juliet Eilperin and Tom Toles and Eugene Robinson are slandering Will, then it seems that they ought to do something about that. But if they think that Robinson is right, and Will is cherry-picking phrases in order to make it sound as if reports say “the exact opposite” of what they really say, then it seems that they ought to do something about that. Why run Chris Mooney pointing out that Will is misleading people and then keep giving Will a platform from which to mislead them?

Tom Toles Hits George Will

Internal Washington Post pushback against George Will continues:

It’s very good to see Post staff standing up to Will’s nonsense like this. But ultimately this is an issue for Fred Hiatt and Hiatt’s bosses at the top levels of the company. The newspaper shouldn’t be printing stuff that’s not true, refusing to correct it, and then printing other stuff criticizing the author of the un-true stuff. It shouldn’t be printing the untrue stuff in the first place, and if an error is pointed out it should be corrected. If Will refuses to acknowledge that he’s misleading people, the paper should get rid of him.

Posties Rebel Against George Will

Here’s Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan writing in The Washington Post:

The new evidence—including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s—contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979.

This is very good to see, and kudos for the writers are deserved.

That said, I can already see the Post’s editors concocting a self-serving history here. In this history, Will published a controversial and widely-discussed column. Will’s ideological antagonists criticized the column viciously, but the Post did the right thing and stood by Will. They also published some different takes on the issue. And when new information came to light, it was duly reported in the news pages. What’s missing from this story is the fact that Will was misrepresenting the evidence all along. It’s true that the new data contradicts Will, but the old data never supported Will’s inclusion in the first place. Running the column was sloppy, and failing to respond in a substantive way when the problems were brought to the Post’s attention was unethical and irresponsible.

In other good news, here’s Post weather blogger Andrew Freeman taking Will on.

George Will Doesn’t Understand What a Trend Is

Another doozy from George Will on climate change:

Reducing carbon emissions supposedly will reverse warming, which is allegedly occurring even though, according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998.

I really think anyone working at The Washington Post or in conservative journalism who has a shred of intellectual conscience has a duty to stand up to this kind of nonsense. As the Secretary General of the World Metereological Organization wrote in The Washington Post two weeks ago:

Data collected over the past 150 years by the 188 members of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) through observing networks of tens of thousands of stations on land, at sea, in the air and from constellations of weather and climate satellites lead to an unequivocal conclusion: The observed increase in global surface temperatures is a manifestation of global warming. Warming has accelerated particularly in the past 20 years.

It is a misinterpretation of the data and of scientific knowledge to point to one year as the warmest on record — as was done in a recent Post column ["Dark Green Doomsayers," George F. Will, op-ed, Feb. 15] — and then to extrapolate that cooler subsequent years invalidate the reality of global warming and its effects.

I’m beyond caring what Will is thinking or doing here. But what on earth are the Post’s editors doing? This is an obvious fallacy, and the Post itself has run a thorough debunking of this talking point. Why did they do that if they intend to keep using their brand to enhance the credibility of Will’s misrepresentations? It’s unfathomable. Why would you expect anyone to pay money to read a newspaper that publishes willfully misleading information?

Chris Mooney vs George Will

The Washington Post published a pretty good, though outrageously polite, Chris Mooney demolition of George Will’s nonsense on climate change.

The article really does, however, suffer from the crippling flaw of pretending to believe that Will is operating in good faith. If we were talking 48 hours or even one week after Will first published this nonsense, that would be fair enough. But there’s been tons and tons of time and Will’s errors have been brought to his attention. He simply refuses to correct them. He refuses to acknowledge that his characterization of the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center is at odds with the ACRC’s characterization. He refused to acknowledge that his characterization of the World Meteorological Organization’s findings are at odds with the WMO’s own account of their findings. He refuses to acknowledge that all the other available research supports the WMO and the ACRC and not Will’s idiosyncratic reading of their research. And he refuses to acknowledge that his claim about global cooling has been systematically investigated and debunked.

But Mooney can’t really bring any of that stuff up and point out that George Will is an enormous liar, because to do so would lead naturally to the point that it’s grossly irresponsible of The Washington Post to keep running his columns. And if you do that, you can’t get published in The Washington Post! So good for Chris—it’s a good piece—but it’s still a rotten system.

Jim Cramer Crawls Back Into the GE Bubble

Jim Cramer, done licking his wounds after getting humiliated by John Steward, was back on the Today Show showing no remorse, no sense of accountability, and no sense of responsibility:

The Jim Cramer story, as such, is not all that interesting. The man’s a charlatan, like everyone else out there promoting to offer stock tips. What’s fascinating about it is the extent to which the entire General Electric corporation has rallied to Cramer’s defense. You might think that the non-Cramer news personnel would be concerned that their own credibility would take a blow of GE’s news organizations invested so much time and energy in defending the reputation of a charlatan. But the elite press lives in a little universe of its own, where to work for NBC News or The Washington Post is, as such, to have credibility no matter how much time and energy NBC News or The Washington Post invest in defending charlatans like Jim Cramer and George Will. Ultimately, however, one main reason any media organization might invest some time and energy in disciplining its own celebrity talent would be pushback from other employees. And it seems that the bosses don’t get much of that kind of pushback.

Washington Post Still Dodging Core Issues in George Will Scandal

The latest from Washington Post ombudsman Andy Alexander is really pathetic. I’ll quote Ryan Avent’s recap:

George Will wrote a column suggesting that there was a broad scientific consensus in the 1970s regarding the threat of global cooling. This is simply not true. Moreover, this untruth is readily verifiable. And George Will attempted to sow doubts about global warming by citing a bogus analysis of research findings, from an organization that has publicly said that the analysis was bogus and that their research in fact says just the opposite of what George Will argued. And then of course there is the fact that there is a broad scientific consensus regarding the threat of global warming, supported by overwhelming evidence.

The Post continues to not even address the majority of these concerns. Instead, in the eyes of the Post the only issue here is that there’s a disagreement between Will and some other people about how to characterize research findings from the Arctic Climate Research Center. The Post thinks that the opportunity should have been taken to foster more constructive debate about this. But why would there be a “debate” about how to interpret scientific findings undertaken between, on the one hand, the scientists who did the research and on the other hand a political pundit who’s misrepresenting it? Then the Post simply has nothing to say about the fact that Will’s column falsely claimed—and not for the first time!—that there was a scientific consensus in the 1970s about a global cooling phenomenon. This myth, though widespread, is false. And though false, it’s widespread, because prominent media organizations like The Washington Post see misleading people about climate change as a valuable service that they’ll pay people money to do.

Meanwhile, The New Republic thinks liberals are too hard on the MSM and that we should be defending it from right-wing jackals rather than piling on to its corpse. Mark Thoma replies:

When the press does its job well, it deserves defenders, and when it does a lousy job, it deserves being taken to task. The complaint seems to be that the criticism is without foundation, and there’s some of that, but the fundamental problem is not, in my view, the people doing the criticizing, it’s the media companies themselves. The argument also seems to treat “media” as something other than Fox News. I agree that the term journalism conjures up another image, as it should, but presently Fox News isn’t clearly separate from other media outlets, far from it, and the commingling of all of these sources of information in the minds of the public is part of the problem. If journalists in the mainstream media want respect, they need to differentiate themselves from the “partisan outlets,” including calling foul loudly and in no uncertain terms when Fox or whomever crosses the line, and they also need to do a better job themselves of establishing and maintaining their credibility through solid reporting.

There’s been a lot of discussion recently of the narrow question of the declining economic feasibility of the newspaper business model. But there’s a broader crisis of legitimacy in the broader news media. And I think The New Republic is looking at this in precisely the wrong way. Decades ago, the press began to come under systematic attack from a conservative movement that wanted to transform it from something that’s primarily a vehicle for truth-telling into something that’s primarily a vehicle for transmitting right-wing propaganda. Media organizations could have chosen to stand firm against that. And those institutions and—more common—individual journalists who’ve done that of course deserve support. But most organizations chose to respond to the attacks by bending to the will of the right.

So George Will will lie to you about climate change, and when this is pointed out The Washington Post will throw its institutional weight behind a defense of lying and an attack on people being rude to Will. This kind of behavior doesn’t earn you a respite from the right’s attacks, but it does make it impossible for a progressive to, in good conscience, defend your organization.

The George Will Scandal and the Decline of Great American Newspapers

I’ve heard a number of MSMers suggest to me in recent days that maybe bloggers should stop complaining about how The Washington Post publishes non-true statements about climate change as fact in its pages, and then has its editors and ombudsman claim that these false statements are true, because said complaining is contributing to the deplorable crisis in American newspapering. This strikes me as badly wrong. Clearly, the main cause of the crisis is structural/technological shifts in the media and economic landscape. But a small number of news organizations are actually well-positioned, in principle, to benefit over the long run from these changes. Papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have strong brands and the possibility of becoming national news organizations that partially fill the space left empty by the receding metro dailies in Detroit, Seattle, San Francisco and elsewhere. But The Washington Post, by standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is is, is pissing that brand away. Rather than complaining to me, people who work at, or care about, The Washington Post need to complain to Fred Hiatt and ensure that something gets done.

Meanwhile, one of the Post’s main competitors in the world of papers with potential to attract a national audience is The New York Times. So faced with a humiliating abrogation of basic responsibilities by its competitor, does the Times take the opportunity to pour some salt in the wounds? No! Instead, out comes Andrew Revkin with a false equivalence article painting Will with the same brush as Al Gore. Will’s sin is to say that the world is not getting warmer when, in fact, it is. Gore’s sin was to say that warming is happening (it is) and to illustrate the problems with this trend by referring to a chart that Revkin deems unduly alarmist but that Gore found in The New York Times. Hm.

Most of the newspapers in the United States don’t seem to me to have any real future. And this is going to pose some real problems. In particular, I’m not sure where intensive coverage of state and local government is going to come from in the brave new world and as Paul Starr points out that probably means more corruption. But interested consumers of national and international news will, I think, be extremely well-served. There will be a proliferation of niche media, and there will also be a handful of global English-language news media brands offering video, test, and audio coverage. I think it’s clear that one of them will be the BBC and that one of them will be based on Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. It strikes me as very plausible that another could be based on the Times and plausible, though somewhat less likely, that one could be based on the Post. But to reach that promised land you need to take care of these brands not flush them down the toilet to avoid angering conservatives or in pursuit of a cute conceit.

George Will’s Odd Aversion to Democracy

I somehow managed to miss George Will’s latest missive, an idiosyncratic attack on the idea of voting for politicians in elections:

The Wisconsin Democrat, who is steeped in his state’s progressive tradition, says, as would-be amenders of the Constitution often do, that he is reluctant to tamper with the document but tamper he must because the threat to the public weal is immense: Some governors have recently behaved badly in appointing people to fill U.S. Senate vacancies. Feingold’s solution, of which John McCain is a co-sponsor, is to amend the 17th Amendment. It would be better to repeal it.

The Framers established election of senators by state legislators, under which system the nation got the Great Triumvirate (Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John Calhoun) and thrived. In 1913, progressives, believing that more, and more direct, democracy is always wonderful, got the 17th Amendment ratified. It stipulates popular election of senators, under which system Wisconsin has elected, among others, Joe McCarthy, as well as Feingold.

As it happens, I agree that the progressive-era fetishization of direct democracy was not a great idea. On the other hand, this mode of argument is absurd. The post-1913 era has given us plenty of good Senators. Indeed, I think Russ Feingold’s a pretty admirable guy. Or consider a statesman like Michigan Republican Arthur Vandenberg who forged an alliance with Harry Truman to lay the foundations for the postwar internationalist consensus. Or McCarthy’s Senatorial opponent, Herbert Lehman. Besides which, the idea that all was hunky-dory until direct election of senators ruined everything in 1913 is pretty nutty. The blessed framers also maintained chattel slavery. And, indeed, it was in defense of that system that Calhoun made his name, while Henry Clay’s big idea was to try to split the difference on the issue of human freedom in the interest of national unity.

I would hardly say that indirect election was the cause of slavery, any more than direct election is the cause of our problems. Indeed, I suspect that in a macro sense it just doesn’t make that much of a difference. Either way, the Senate would broadly-but-imperfectly represent public sentiments mixed with a bias toward the interests of small states mixed with a bias toward the status quo.

Feingold’s idea, by contrast, targets a couple of real problems. One is simply that the possibility of appointment-driven changes in partisan makeup of the Senate is weird distorting effect on presidential appointments. The other is the potential for corruption and self-dealing. And on the other side I see basically . . . nothing to recommend the appointments system. It was written into the constitution at a time in which we hadn’t yet become accustomed to Senators being elected, and didn’t really have the modern party system, so the ways in which it doesn’t make sense weren’t evident at the time.

A Suggested Correction for George Will

As you can see at this suggested correction for George Will’s witless climate change column, the reason the Post can’t offer a correction is that absent the errors there’s basically nothing left. But to reiterate my earlier point, everyone who writes for the Post has a problem now. The Post is standing foresquare behind the errors, which makes it very difficult for any writing that appears in the Post under any byline to have credibility or be taken seriously.

Washington Post Stands By Climate Change Denialism

For those who are late to the party, recently George Will wrote a column claiming, most broadly, that in the 1970s there was a scientific consensus that the world was suffering from “global cooling” that was as firm as the current consensus about global warming. This is false. Will also made a number of additional, subsidiary factual errors that have been documented elsewhere. Yesterday, the Post finally responded to complaints about the column, sending a reply to my colleague Brad Johnson that stands foresquare behind Will, citing the existence of a “multi-layered” process to check the facts in the article. As for why it’s okay for Will to write stuff that isn’t true, the Post didn’t have much of substance to say. They picked one of debunked subsidiary claims, and said they think Will is right, though they acknowledge that the very organization Will was citing as an authority says Will is wrong. One could say that on this subsidiary point, Will perhaps made an honest mistake that the Arctic Climate Research Center has since corrected. But the Post instead says that Will is right and the Arctic Climate Research Center wrong about what the ACRC’s own research says. Meanwhile, they have nothing whatsoever to say about the other problems with the column.

These problems, it should be said, include Will’s overarching thesis. Will wrote, and is trying to get readers of The Washington Post to believe, that there was a scientific consensus about global cooling in the 1970s. This is false. Post readers are being deceived. And the Post is standing by the deceivers.

This started as a problem for Will, his direct supervisors, and the Post’s ombudsman. But now that the Post as a paper is standing behind Will’s deceptions, I think it’s a problem for all the other people who work at the Post. Some of those people do bad work, which is too bad. And some of those people do good work. And unfortunately, that’s worse. It means that when good work appears in the Post it bolsters the reputation of the Post as an institution. And the Post, as an institution, has taken a stand that says it’s okay to claim that up is down. It’s okay to claim that day is night. It’s okay to claim that hot is cold. It’s okay to claim that a consensus existed when it didn’t. It’s okay to claim that George Will is a better source of authority on interpreting the ACRC’s scientific research than is the ACRC. Everyone who works at the Post, has, I think, a serious problem.

Fred Hiatt Won’t Correct Dishonest Climate Change Columns, Will Lecture Congress on How to Handle Climate Change

An excellent point from Dave Roberts:

The Washington Post editorial board, which just this weekend elected to run a column from George Will denying climate change entirely, now presumes to lecture Barbara Boxer on how to solve it.

The classic post-war American newspaper has been largely insulated from market pressure and competition. Typically, you’d have a city and the city would have a newspaper. People could choose to subscribe to the newspaper, or they could choose not to. But they couldn’t choose a different paper. You just had to decide, as a citizen and as an individual, if you wanted to be the sort of person who read his town’s broadsheet or else if you didn’t want to be that sort of person. Thus, the audience was guaranteed and, at the time, so was the advertising. Under the circumstances, papers were remarkably free to just do whatever they wanted to do with their actual content.

When you talk about this with working journalists and newspaper nostalgics, there’s a tendency to focus on the upsides of this insulation from market competition. You could dispatch some reporters to work on a Pulitzer-contending feature or major investigation and not really worry too much if the marginal increase in readership justified the cost. You could keep a Moscow bureau open just because you thought it was important. All good stuff. But it’s also bread this weird arrogance where nobody in the business seems to think that the deplorably low quality of the product plays any role whatsoever in the declining relevance of these institutions. But here’s a George Will column in my paper, lying to me about global warming. Here’s Will’s editor refusing to correct the record or say anything about why he decided it would be a good idea to run a column in which George Will lies about global warming. And now here’s the very same indifferent-to-the-truth editorial team writing about global warming. And I’m supposed to read the editorial why? What value to me, as a consumer of information, do inaccurate uncorrected George Will columns offer me? How will the addition of Bill Kristol to the roster increase the value of the newspaper to me as a consumer of information?

These issues don’t get considered, at all. These guys are Important Conservatives so it’s important that we pay them to lie to people.

George Will Loves Recycling

Brad Johnson notes that the core of George Will’s sloppy, error-ridden column on climate change is an almost exact repeat of a tendentious article he wrote in April of 2006. What he had back then was a very misleading account of the “global cooling” controversies of the 1970s. What he seems to have added since then is zero actual knowledge about the issue, but a couple of additional factual errors.

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.

Ruffini: Kristol, Brooks, and Will Not Conservative Enough

Right-wing rising star Patrick Ruffini Twitters:

How representative are Will, Kristol, and Brooks of conservative media?

This strikes me as somewhat reminiscent of Erick Erickson’s planned “Operation Leper” targeted at right-wingers insufficiently wingnutty to recognize Sarah Palin’s eminent qualifications for high office.

Bloggers Loving It

Barack Obama went to a dinner party last night with conservative pundits such as George Will, David Brooks, and Bill Kristol, prompting the pool reporter to snark “This is for real, folks. The bloggers are going to love this one.”

Honestly this blogger is ready to wholeheartedly endorse a strategy of acting in a personally cordial manner to conservatives. I’m not enthusiastic about doing things like larding down a stimulus package with ineffective business tax cuts in a misguided effort to attract massive Republican support for the bill. But sitting down and being nice? Hard to see what’s wrong with that. Obama appears to be very effective at convincing people he speaks to in small group settings that he’s a good guy (I got to witness this firsthand in the summer of 2007 and you can see it indirectly as well) so it seems worth trying. Kristol’s probably a lost cause, but neither Will nor Brooks is a dogmatically on-message partisan.

Will Gets Fair

What a strange column from George Will:

If reactionary liberals, unsatisfied with dominating the mainstream media, academia and Hollywood, were competitive on talk radio, they would be uninterested in reviving the fairness doctrine. Having so sullied liberalism’s name that they have taken to calling themselves progressives, liberals are now ruining the reputation of reactionaries, which really is unfair.

Nobody is trying to revive the fairness doctrine. I’m not sure how many times this can be said.

Meanwhile, how dominant can liberals really be in the mainstream media if we can’t even stop George Will from just making stuff up about us in his widely syndicated Washington Post column?