Collide-a-scape

That’s what three formerly reputable investigative journalists are saying here, in Howard Kurtz’s WaPo column, when they rationalize taking money from the Church of Scientology for a “study” on a Florida paper’s in-depth examination of the famously prickly and secretive self-help organization.

From Kurtz, this you have to read to believe:

Steve Weinberg, the former IRE [Investigative Reporters and Editors] executive, who has taught at the University of Missouri’s journalism school for a quarter-century, says he was paid $5,000 to edit the study and “tried to make sure it’s a good piece of journalism criticism, just like I’ve written a gazillion times. . . . For me it’s kind of like editing a Columbia Journalism Review piece.”

Oh, gag me with an Audit.

In August, after the hard-hitting special report on the Church of Scientology first appeared, CJR said this:

The St. Petersburg Times’s coverage of Scientology, though, is a noble example of a journalistic organization doing stellar and gutsy work, with the full understanding that lawsuits, or worse, could ensue.

“Worse,” in my book, is three investigative reporters becoming hired guns for the subject of an unflattering portrait in a newspaper.  They ought to be ashamed.  No word, yet, from CJR on Weinberg’s incredible assertion– that what he did is akin to a piece that might appear in CJR.

[Here's Gawker's take.]   UPDATE: CJR weighs in.

I have no problem with a leading climate scientist taking issue with how the media portrays his profession. And if Gavin Schmidt would have kept his criticism of recent press coverage limited to the UK, he’d be on semi-solid ground. (He’d also be vulnerable to charges of mischaracterizing this coverage as one big “fact-free” monolith.) But Schmidt leaves reality behind when he goes after two American journalists in this manner:

Two relatively prominent and respected US commentators – Curtis Brainard at CJR and Tom Yulsman in Colorado – have both bemoaned the fact that the US media (unusually perhaps) has not followed pell-mell into the fact-free abyss of their UK counterparts.

No doubt Schmidt is being sarcastic here, for surely he doesn’t mean that two “prominent and respected US commentators” would be advocating for “fact-free” journalism. No, what Schmidt is really saying is that all this stuff about the IPCC and its chairman, and those stolen emails from a few months ago warrants little legitimate media coverage.

Michael Tobis, nodding his head, writes:

Just because there are lunatics willing to spin a sort of tale doesn’t make it,  you know, actual news.

Yulsman’s rejoinder over there is worth noting, especially this:

Just because I and many other science journalists believe this story should be covered doesn’t mean that we are advocating for shoddy journalism. All I called for was for journalists here to follow the story wherever it leads. If it leads to a conclusion that the accusations have been blown up all out of proportion, then that is the story.

But right now, all Americans are getting is Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and other bloviators of their ilk who are filling the vacuum left by the absence of responsible journalism. Are you actually saying that you would like to cede the playing field to them? Or that if the press ignores the story it will just go away. If you believe that you are more naive than I thought.

Actually, it was yesterday, but I’m running behind. And Exum’s internal editor should have left it as this:

Why You Should Not Write Newspaper Columns While High on Qat.

Here’s hoping the mustache doesn’t return home with a bad case of the jitters.

In a recent post and comment elsewhere, I have suggested that better communication will not be enough to convince the masses to embrace climate change as an urgent concern. The philosopher Alain de Botton comes to the same conclusion is this elegant essay:

The role of the commentator on the environment is at one level to enable us to notice changes that are occurring. But at another level, it is also a question of getting us to care. And this is tall order, for we are being asked to worry about the possible reduction in the number of our species three generations hence, when we all have to deal with a far more imminent problem: our own death. We are being asked to worry about other people who are not yet born as much as we worry about ourselves. Never before in the history of humanity have we been asked to care so much about others of whom we know so little. Our empathetic powers have been stretched to breaking point.

The one thing that might get us over this hump, he believes, is art:

It is artists who are going to have to help us to picture – literally and figuratively – dangers which are generally invisible and are therefore constantly subsumed under the weight of our more mundane or personally intense concerns. Artists may have no solutions, but they are the ones who can come up with the words and images to make visible and important the most abstract and impersonal of challenges.

To this end, there are recent artistic efforts underway. Prodded by Alain de Botton’s essay, Piper Corp at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) blog examines some of the latest climate change art. It’s a mixed bag. Personally, I’m doubtful that the Carbon Counter or photographic images of climate change will do the trick. Sure, stuff like this can’t hurt, but I still tend to think that some ecological tipping point will have to occur before people feel the problem in their guts. Right now climate change is an abstract issue that is processed in the part of the brain that doesn’t register it as urgent danger. I realize that this fact is hard for climate advocates to wrap their own minds around.

Presuming that artists will eventually play a larger role in the climate change debate, Corp’s ESA post concludes with a dilemma for climate scientists:

As efforts to communicate climate science become more artistic—as they shift from presenting the facts to imploring emotions and making a case—where will the scientific community fit in? Sound science will always be critical to climate communication efforts, but scientists will once again have to walk a fine line between informing and advocating. Among the unprecedented challenges of climate change is its insistence that scientists engage in conversations about the subjective while maintaining scientific credibility.

Hmm, I wonder what advice Roger Pielke Jr. would offer about straddling that line? After all, Roger has made it clear that he thinks James Hansen is an admirable example of someone who has made his own climate advocacy transparent. But hasn’t Hansen’s scientific credibility been called into question (unfairly or not) precisely because of his open advocacy? Or is is because Hansen has engaged in subjective conversations about future scenarios, which are very much open to debate? Either way, what an excruciating “fine line” for scientists to walk, since projections of future impacts flow directly from the findings of climate science.

UPDATE: Roger Pielke Jr. responds:

“I don’t think that the idea of a ‘line’ is the right way to think about the distinction between ‘informing and advocating.’  In fact, I don’t think that ‘informing’ and ‘advocating’ are even mutually exclusive categories.  In my book, The Honest Broker (Cambridge, 2007) I define four different ideal types for how scientists might interact with decision makers.  They are:

The Pure Scientist – seeks to focus only on facts and has no interaction with the decision maker.
The Science Arbiter – answers specific factual questions posed by the decision maker.
The Issue Advocate – seeks to reduce the scope of choice available to the decision maker.
The Honest Broker of Policy Options – seeks to expand, or at least clarify, the scope of choice available to the decision maker.

The scientist has to choose what role to play in specific contexts.  I define a fifth category, and that is the scientist who claims to be a Science Arbiter or Pure Scientist but who is really working to reduce the scope of choice — this is the Stealth Issue Advocate.  Communication is obviously important in each context.  One can be credible in any of these roles.  It is when scientists present themselves as one thing and act as another that credibility is lost.”

RE: But hasn’t Hansen’s scientific credibility been called into question (unfairly or not) precisely because of his open advocacy? Roger responds:

“Of course.  We like our experts to be disinterested, or at least without bias and conflicts.  When experts show strong biases or have conflicts, we question their credibility.  That is a trade-off associated with becoming an advocate.  Of course, if you want to change the world, advocacy has its own rewards.  We therefore need poeple in each of the four roles outlined above.”

The reinvention of journalism in the digital age is happening, let there be no mistake about that. Yet, despite the promise of crowdsourcing, hyperlocals and even the Huffington Poacher, it’s not as if anyone has figured out how to make newspaper reporting as we know it economically viable on the web. Hence the unending stream of buyouts, closures of foreign bureaus and elimination of news beats.

I recognize that the old print edifice is decayed and anachronistic. Yes, we waited too long to replace it. So now that it is collapsing, does this mean journalism as we know it is disappearing? Well, for some fields, this appears to be the case, as a recent discussion on the state of science journalism indicates. But some fields are also finding welcome mats laid out at other edifices, such as those provided by think tanks.

I find this intriguing, though hardly ideal. But if professional journalistic standards can be transferred over, then perhaps think tanks can help ease the print to digital transition.

The LA Times has an amusing profile on Arianna Huffington, in which she said this howler:

Our site is not built around the freebie.

In the next breath, she also said this, apparently with a straight face:

Our site is built around very hard-working editors and reporters who do all the curating and aggregating and original content.

I don’t have a problem with the Huffington Post being a link farm for poached journalism. (I do have a problem with it being a prominent forum for anti-vaccine crusaders like Jim Carrey and Bill Maher. Sure, let them publish their views, just put something up there that balances out their nuttiness. That’s where those “hardworking editors” come in.) But for Huffington to claim that her site is not built on the “freebie” is sheer chutzpa.

In recent years, as newspapers have severely downsized and/or gone under, much of the concern has focused on investigative reporting. But the call to action has been taken up by numerous foundations and individual donors, who have helped launch well-funded and well-staffed new media outlets, such as Pro Publica.

There appears to be no such equivalent call to action for science journalism. As NYT science writer Natalie Angier said recently to Poynter about her profession:

It’s basically going out of existence.

To which Tom Yulsman dryly notes,

This isn’t exactly breaking news.

And which leads me to wonder again why science journalists aren’t rising to the challenge and making a case for their own Pro Publica’s. Let’s not sit around and bemoan what’s lost. The denuded newspaper landscape is going to become more barren and forlorn in years to come. Magazines like Discover and Scientific American can only plug so many holes, and in any case, they are a different beast than a newspaper, which traditionally has provided regular “beat” coverage of science.

So there’s this tremendous need for new outlets to spawn a new era of science journalism. Yet, I’m not aware of any pioneering new media initiatives that are filling the science journalism vacuum, much less a groundswell of concern for the profession.

In that same Poynter article, Mariette DiChristina, Scientific American’s editor-in-chief, says:

It behooves us in science journalism to make it clear to readers why science matters to them.

Absolutely, but if science journalism as a “beat” is withering because of continuing newspaper cutbacks, which is obviously the case, then it also behooves science journalists to convince funders and other institutions (such as universities) to help rescusitate it–on the web.

Should the Washington Post’s value as a newspaper be measured solely by the content on it’s op-ed pages? This seems to be the yardstick that Tim Lambert, a widely read climate blogger, uses in a current post, titled,

The Washington Post can’t go out of business fast enough

Now why would he wish that? Well, he’s pissed off that the Post published Sarah Palin’s ridiculous commentary on “climategate” and continues to publish George Will’s whacky opining on global warming.

Let me be clear: it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize Palin and Will, but I have to confess, I don’t understood all the anger and scorn heaped on the Post for providing them with a forum. These are opinion columns we’re talking about here, not news stories or even offical newspaper editorials.

And opinion columns, by their nature, are highly subjective, highly biased, and yes, can be hugely misleading. If you were a liberal during William Safire’s decades as a NYT columnist, you were probably often infuriated by what you read. But I don’t recall anyone wishing the Times went belly up because Safire had wrote yet another whopper of a column on the Democrats.

To put it another way, as one commenter to Lambert points out:

Opinion pieces are allowed to be lacking in factual accuracy; most readers are probably aware of this.

And most readers are also “probably aware” of the political and/or ideological orientation of op-ed columnists. That frame of reference is how most of us come to any column by well known pundits or politicians. So we process opinion columns differently than we do news stories. We tend to think that a news story is presenting information in a more evenhanded manner than an op-ed column. Yet I think the critics who yell foul over Will and Palin are are not making this distinction. They would have a better case with someone like Lou Dobbs, who combined news and opinion at CNN in a way that gave biased commentary the veneer of being supported by factual reporting.  There’s no such veneer with Will and Palin.

Anyway, why on earth would Lambert be willing to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, when the WaPo provides valuable climate reporting from the likes of Juliet Eilperin and perspective from the Capital Weather Gang’s Andrew Freedman? Tim, I just don’t get the wholescale dismissal of an entire newspaper because you think the Post shouldn’t publish certain viewpoints, no matter how skewed they may be.

There’s much that intrigues me about this recently published study, but let’s start with the University of Utah press release, titled, “Is Global Warming Unstoppable?”

In case that didn’t catch your eye, here’s the dek: “Theory also says energy conservation doesn’t help.”

Now let’s go to the first three concise graphs of the release, which, like the headline, grabs you by the throat:

In a provocative new study, a University of Utah scientist argues that rising carbon dioxide emissions – the major cause of global warming – cannot be stabilized unless the world’s economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day.

“It looks unlikely that there will be any substantial near-term departure from recently observed acceleration in carbon dioxide emission rates,” says the new paper by Tim Garrett, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences.

Garrett’s study was panned by some economists and rejected by several journals before acceptance by Climatic Change, a journal edited by renowned Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider. The study will be published online this week.

Who ever wrote this copy had to have previously worked in journalism. And when was the last time you saw a press release provide that kind of a back story to a study? (Hey, this research was panned and rejected well before it found a publisher.) It’s just brilliant stuff. And so is the rest of the release, which lucidly lays out the study’s methodology, key findings, and implications. There’s even a colorful bit on the researcher’s own “green” lifestyle, set up by this exchange:

So is Garrett arguing that conserving energy doesn’t matter?

“I’m just saying it’s not really possible to conserve energy in a meaningful way because the current rate of energy consumption is determined by the unchangeable past of economic production. If it feels good to conserve energy, that is fine, but there shouldn’t be any pretense that it will make a difference.”

Yet, Garrett says his findings contradict his own previously held beliefs about conservation, and he continues to ride a bike or bus to work, line dry family clothing and use a push lawnmower.

The only thing missing, if this were a typical newspaper story, are the obligatory quotes from fellow scientists applauding and trashing the study.

So allowing that this study is indeed “provocative” and credible, since it found a home in the journal Climatic Change, why hasn’t it gotten greater pick up in the science media or the blogosphere? After googling the researcher, Tim Garrett, I see that ScienceDaily distributed the University of Utah release and that a few bloggers and local journos noted the study. Beyond that, however, pretty much a black hole. No way you can fault the PR release. It all but screamed, LOOK AT ME. So what gives?

If Garrett is on to something here, then shouldn’t his study be getting more attention?

H/T: Michael Tobis

UPDATE: My hunch was correct. Lee Siegel, the writer of the press release, is a former reporter of 25 years–12 spent with the AP. He also has a flair for headlines and sizzling copy. Check out this one, which gained worldwide notice.

You want another reason why American newspapers are knocking at death’s door? They won’t take a stand on climate change. This according to media maven Michael Wolff, who notes that only one U.S. paper (the Miami Herald) signed on to that special Copenhagen editorial written by the Guardian and carried by 56 papers in 45 countries.

Wolff wonders if the U.S. press lords were skittish about signing on to a perceived “liberal” issue. He also believes Americans are put off by the preachy nature of climate change advocacy. “But mostly,” he says,

I think US newspapers have not grabbed this easy opportunity to rally readers and stand up and be counted because they have no fight left in them.