Who is looking out for WaPo op-ed page readers? Apparently no one
January 27, 2010 5:32 am ET by Ari Rabin-Havt
On March 1 of last year, Washington Post Ombudsman Andy Alexander began his weekly column in the Post stating that "Opinion columnists are free to choose whatever facts bolster their arguments. But they aren't free to distort them." He was absolutely right.
It is unfortunate that Alexander cannot hold opinion columnists accountable when they do distort the facts. He told me as much on the phone yesterday.
Let me back up.
Alexander made his comment that opinion columnists "aren't free to distort facts" response to widespread criticism from Media Matters and others of the Post for allowing George Will to suggest that data from an Arctic research group undermined the overwhelming scientific consensus on human-caused global warming -- a claim that the group itself debunked. Alexander acknowledged that "readers would have been better served if Post editors, and the new ombudsman, had more quickly addressed the claims of falsehoods."
In the time since Alexander's response, Will has on four additional occasions misled Post readers about the scientific basis for the existence of global warming -- most recently this past Saturday when he wrote that the "menace of global warming" is "elusive" and claimed that an acknowledged error about Himalayan glaciers in a report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) constituted "another dollop of evidence of the seepage of dubious science into policy debate." But scientists have routinely presented strong evidence of long-term global warming and its consequences, including evidence of "widespread mass loss from glaciers." Just this month, major meteorological organizations throughout the world -- including NASA -- released reports showing that the past decade, 2000-2009, was the warmest on record.
Alexander assured readers in March that Will's column undergoes "fact-checking at multiple levels." Based on the number of errors since, that system clearly is not working.
I decided to raise the issue with Alexander. Either the Post needed to guarantee a more rigorous fact-checking of Will's column or the columnist should no longer be allowed to opine on climate change. His track record of global warming falsehoods have damaged the public debate on this important issue for far too long.
Considering his March 1 column, I believed this issue would be well within the purview of the paper's ombudsman. But, according to my phone conversation with Alexander yesterday morning, that is simply not the case. He informed me he is the "reader representative for news coverage," pointing out that this was reflected on page 2 of the Post's print edition which states, "Ombudsman (reader representative for news coverage)."
Previous Post ombudsmen have criticized opinion coverage, when they deem it necessary. Alexander's predecessor, the late Deborah Howell, criticized columnist Harold Meyerson, though she also wrote:
Some readers mistakenly think that the ombudsman can force change on The Post, its editorial policy or what columnists write. My job is not to tell the editorial board what to write, and I wouldn't presume to tell David S. Broder what to say about politics. Columnists own their space. If they make a mistake, let me know, but the opinions are theirs alone.
So, let me get this straight. If a reader finds a "mistake" in an opinion column, they can alert the ombudsman. The ombudsman just can't do anything about it. Perhaps that explains why, with the exception of Alexander's March 1 column, George Will's multiple errors on the topic of climate change have gone unaddressed.
A newspaper's editorial page is clearly different from its news pages and Howell is correct: It is not the job of the ombudsman to dictate columnist's opinions. But Alexander was also correct when he wrote that columnists should not be free to distort the facts in order to support those opinions. After all, errors in opinion columns are just as much a reflection on a newspaper's journalistic integrity as errors in news articles.
If the Post's policy dictates that the Ombudsman serves as the "reader representative" for pages A1-A13, then who is looking out for us on pages 14-15? Considering Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt in the past has refused to respond to inquires or run corrections to Will's errors, the answer is no one.
Writing an opinion piece where I can announce to my audience how things work and why. And yet, there is no mechanism to correct any errors or falsehoods since, after all, it is merely my opinion.
Too bad everyone else in the world doesn't have the same kind of ability to pour forth their opinion on how things work and why.
We may all have the right to free speech, in the US, but; some of us have the means to have their speech more widely heard.
And I think this is the most important sentence in the whole opinion piece above - "His track record of global warming falsehoods have damaged the public debate on this important issue for far too long."
That's the problem that MMFA is always trying to combat and the problem that the Obama White House is confronting when dealing with FoxNews. Nonsense like this poisons the national discourse. We waste time debunking that junk instead of being able to debate the subjects we should be talking about!
MMFA calls the IPCC glacier statement an "acknowledged error." But it wasn't an error at all - it was a blatant, preposterous lie. The people who put it in the report knew that it had no credibility, but they used it anyway. Wills argument is that the whole of 'Climate Science' is so mired in deceit and distortion that claims of GW, and AGW especially, are not credible. To respond with a statement that NASA (one of the main culprits in the lies and deceits of the AGW controversy) says that the last decade is the warmest on record is not answering Wills' argument. It is begging the question.
Times changed, literacy grew and pretty soon opinion pages opened up not only to men of letters but to letter writers made of common clay. Publishers may feel their columnists aren't just anyone. But to preserve credibility today, a newspaper must allow readers to disagree publicly -- especially when its opinion-meisters make fools of themselves.
As a Washington Post nonreader, I don't know how well editors control opinion page traffic. Certainly they can accommodate but a small fraction of letters received. But when George Will plays hob with scientific fact, David Broder predicts George W. Bush's next comeback and Charles Krauthammer lists causes of Middle East blowback without mentioning Israel, editors had darned well better let critical readers ride that stage coach.
Jerry Elsea
And since it is not science, it should be treated for what it is - fraud. Certainly, to base public policy on reports like the IPCC would be unimaginable folly.
It seems to me that MMFA favors AGW, not out of any respect for the facts of the case, but simply because it looked to be the best shot to expand the role of government and shrink the liberty of individuals. If you don't have a crisis to use against liberty - create one! Such is AGW, and such is the statists' support for it.