No, this isn't going to be another post attacking George Will's "Dark green doomsayers" column last month. If you want to read a well-reasoned, temperate response, take a look at Chris Mooney's op-ed last Saturday and the op-ed from Michel Jarraud, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Association that accompanies it.1 You'll find a catalog what he gets wrong there.
No, I'm going to comment on John Quiggin's comment about the uproar.
No, I'm going to comment on John Quiggin's comment about the uproar.
The absolute refusal of the Post to take a position on the truth or falsity of what it publishes ... leads me to a steadily more negative view of the question of whether we actually need newspapers and whether we should regret their seemingly inexorable decline. The standard claim is that without reporters, we in the blogosphere would have no material to work on. But Will's recycling of long-refuted Internet factoids (something very common among rightwing pundits in particular) shows that, in important respects, the opposite is true.I hesitate to do this, because Quiggin's a smart guy,2 but I'm going to have to disagree with him. We do need reporters.
If Will's column and the Post's response to initial criticism of it tell us anything, they tell us that we don't need columnists. Or at least we don't need columnists whose columns aren't subject to fact checking.3 The deficiency the Will episode illuminated is a deficiency in columnists and the editors who edit columnists. It appears that standards of accuracy we expect from reporters aren't, or weren't, applied to columnists. As Mooney puts it in his column.
1Matt Yglesias calls Mooney's piece "pretty good, though outrageously polite" and suggests that "[t]he article ... suffer[s] from the crippling flaw of pretending to believe that Will is operating in good faith."
2Probably a lot smarter than I.
3 I'm not going to rehearse the ways in which Will's "facts" weren't facts at all and the reasons why a respected science reporter, Carl Zimmer, concluded that the Post only pretends to fact check its columnists. Go read Carl's post if you want a good analysis of how the Post failed its readers.
Readers and commentators must learn to share some practices with scientists -- following up on sources, taking scientific knowledge seriously rather than cherry-picking misleading bits of information, and applying critical thinking to the weighing of evidence. That, in the end, is all that good science really is. It's also what good journalism and commentary alike must strive to be -- now more than ever.Will's failures don't show us that we don't need newspapers. They show us that we need newspapers where fact checking is routine, even on editorial pages. Maybe especially on editorial pages.
1Matt Yglesias calls Mooney's piece "pretty good, though outrageously polite" and suggests that "[t]he article ... suffer[s] from the crippling flaw of pretending to believe that Will is operating in good faith."
2Probably a lot smarter than I.
3 I'm not going to rehearse the ways in which Will's "facts" weren't facts at all and the reasons why a respected science reporter, Carl Zimmer, concluded that the Post only pretends to fact check its columnists. Go read Carl's post if you want a good analysis of how the Post failed its readers.
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