WSJ opinion piece: 16 scientists say "No need to panic about global warming". Good journalism?

In My Humble Opinion
21

The issue isn’t having an opinion, but having specific opinions… especially ones commonly assumed to be somewhat crazy. For example, how would you react if they published an op-ed by the Flat Earth Society?

I’m ok with papers having editorials and op-eds (now that I know the difference, thank you Dewey). But I’m still confused as to the amount of editorial discretion over which viewpoints they choose to promote. Surely there must be some criteria, not “we’ll publish any viewpoint”, if only because there’s limited space.

And that criteria is important, even in the opinion pages, because it illuminates (arguably) what the paper as a whole finds worthwhile for the public. You would think that the viewpoints they’d stand behind would be relatively defensible.

Again, using the same example, wouldn’t you find it odd if highly-respected journalists held the position that the Earth was flat? They’re entitled to their opinion, certainly, but you’d think (or at least I would) that their profession of fact-finding and sorting out bullshit would cause at least some amount of cognitive dissonance if they consciously choose to promote certain fringe perspectives.

If they don’t actually have that degree of fine editorial control, then of course this wasn’t their fault. (See below)

It improves it, perhaps unfairly. It’s also interesting that this piece was in the European edition, which is much less prone to AGW denial.

That’s the crux of this: How much endorsement does an op-ed page get? Certainly there is SOME selection going on, but how much and by what criteria?

Thank you for the clarification of editorial vs op-ed. I didn’t quite grasp that before.

However, the same question stands: How much of an endorsement is there? “Suggesting that they are worthy”… the determination of that changes from paper to paper, so there’s got to be sort of criteria or process by which a paper evaluates which op-eds to accept, and by extension, they are exercising (to a lesser degree) their editorial decision-making.

Ultimately, journalism cannot be done without journalists, and journalists who have biases not steeped in data are dangerous because the biases may consciously or unconsciously affect their performance in reporting factual events. (In other words, I would hope journalists have biases that tend to lean towards reality.)

22

But of course, the problem is that many conservative readers do like to get those unfounded opinions as support that then gets turn into votes and then legislation to make the denial a government policy. It is irresponsible specially when one notices that the Item you cited from Professor Muller was the exception and not the rule.

23

I’ll take the word of the esteemed professor at Sufolk County Community College at face value. He took the time to research it and I did not. I just know that the first cite that came up when I was trying to find the one mentioned in the OP was the one for global warming. But that is irrelevant since my only point is to answer the OP. What ever appears in the OpEd section is not journalism in any paper. It annoys me in the way someone brings up Olbermann or O’Reilly and cites that as bias of the network. Opinion is not news, news is not opinion. You may be right about the bias but you have to look at the news not the opinion because thats whats supposed to follow the rules of journalism.

24

The fact that the OP characterizes an opinion he disagrees with as “irresponsibly propagating an extremist viewpoint” rather than “discussing an alternate opinion” is what I find troubling.

25

Oh you had to mention Faux news… :slight_smile:

One thing that undermines that is that every one of their opinion shows has the spinning FOX NEWS logo embedded on them, and then there is plenty of evidence that the reports that are supposed to be serious news like their business reports are in reality peddling denialist points.

Link to the spot on the Climate Crocks video showing FOX business reporting on an already debunked point:

26

Lump in any news network. There isn’t one anymore that isn’t mostly opinion. Even headline news stopped reporting the news.

27

Way to take a statement of context. The entire sentence reads “Is the Wall Street Journal doing a public service by giving the “other side” a voice and advocating for science without bias, or is it irresponsibly propagating an extremist viewpoint refuted and shunned by the majority of scientists?”

Meaning, I was trying to summarize two of the main opposing views on the topic, not necessarily my own, in order to spur some discussion.

My own opinion, if you actually care, leans towards the scientific majority, but I agree with the letter in that the critics really should not be silenced, shunned, or anything of that sort, but allowed to speak freely and then refuted with data where appropriate.

This thread aside (meaning in regards to the letter itself), my main gripe with it is not that it dissents – which is awesome – but that it does so without substantial scientific evidence, and certainly without enough evidence that it refutes its opposing studies. I find it sad that a scientific question has become political theater and that truth in journalism is no longer sought through thoughtful analysis or measured debate but empty charisma and repetitive rhetoric, kind of a “drown out the audience until they no longer care to think” approach.

28

And just to be clear, I want to separate the two different (but intertwined, of course) issues because combining them makes for a difficult thread.

  1. The letter itself, an example of a AGW skepticism, is one issue (thoroughly debated in the other thread)

  2. My concern is with how much editorial control newspapers have over their editorial (and specifically op-ed) sections, how much the content in those pages reflects their writers’ stances, and whether that significantly impedes their objectivity in their news (i.e. non-opinion) articles. For all intents and purposes, we could replace the AGW stuff with Flat Earth letters and my question would still stand.

(And yes, perhaps it’s a bit offensive to compare the AGW debate to flat earth debate, but as far as I know the scientific majority in both cases leans pretty strongly towards one side over the other. If that’s not correct, let me know.)

29

It’s not journalism in the “only the facts, ma’am” sense, but it IS part of the modern journalism industry that actively seeks to inform AND persuade the audience towards a particular viewpoint. The papers don’t put editorials and op-eds there without some degree of oversight, do they? In terms of seriousness, I thought opinion pieces leaned more towards “These are issues that we thought you should be aware of, and here are the stances we think you should take because of X and Y” and less “Here’s a random entertaining article that we could care less about”. In other words, I thought it was like saying “We’re a big paper, you trust us, and here’s our opinion on topic Z that you really should listen to.”

Is that an accurate interpretation? For editorials or op-eds? Or for neither?

30

The best way to analyze the objectivity of a media outlet (be it a newspaper, TV station or what have you) is to analyze the objectivity of the media outlet. Do you see anything in the Wall Street Journal’s normal reporting that suggests certain biases?

Editorial pages and Op-Ed pages are old, and are seen in pretty much every Newspaper, magazine, website and et cetera out there. There is some social responsibility for reporters of the news to be dispassionate in how they cover a story; however there is no larger social responsibility of the newspaper itself to be dispassionate in what it choose to print. The primary driving force for a media enterprise is to attract readers. Papers like the WSJ have a somewhat “targeted” audience, while the Journal is more broad-based today than it traditionally has been, it is still primarily aimed at the business world so it is going to predominantly choose to print news article, editorials, and Op-Eds that are most likely to be read by people in the business community.

Scientific American is most likely to print stuff that people who are interested in science are going to read. Entertainment Weekly, on the other hand, is going to print stuff mostly related to the entertainment industry because that is what their readers expect and demand.

People interested in the markets and the larger business world are very interested in global warming primarily because of how governments are going to respond and how that response is going to impact the economy, corporations, and the markets. However, since the Journal isn’t strictly business / market oriented it’s also going to print “general interest” Op-Eds that they think will interest people likely to read the Journal.

So on that count, I don’t believe that there is anything intrinsically dangerous about the Journal choosing to publish such a letter. I read a few news outlets regularly, mostly the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the Washington Post. WSJ and FT are mostly right-leaning in their editorial stance, the WaPo is generally considered left leaning. However I’ve read a lot of editorials published by the editorial boards of all three newspapers that don’t really sync with the larger characterization of the paper’s respective political stance. I’ve also read published Op-Ed columns that don’t necessarily fit into the neat political stances we ascribe to these major newspapers.

I do think the choice of what news to investigate and what editorials to write and what Op-Eds to publish will be heavily influenced by bias; but far more of a bias towards one’s readers than ones own personal politics. The Atlantic has no problem publishing 10 articles a month about the immorality of consuming meat or the immorality of using drones to kill terrorists. The WSJ is much less likely to do that, not necessarily because the people who run the WSJ are anti-vegan or pro-drone warfare (although I suspect they are), but because the reader base of the WSJ is anti-vegan and pro-drone warfare, so it doesn’t make sense to publish opinion pieces that only serve to piss off your readers.

It’d be against a journalist’s social responsibility to fabricate news reporting just to serve the reader’s political bias, and I don’t think the Journal does that. I think the Journal is rightfully respected in its news reporting and its writing in general. But as for choosing what Op-Eds get published, what editorials get written, and what news gets reported on? That has never been dispassionate and unbiased, nor should it be.

31

While I respect your desire to have a discussion about [random extremist view] being reprinted by a respected newspaper and how that impacts a newspaper’s journalistic integrity, I think in the case of this specific letter you are mischaracterizing the letter’s intent, what it said, and its conclusions.

I will first say that maybe the letter was written by people that believe there is no global warming at all, and that humans are not causing any warming. If that is the case, the people who wrote the letter are not part of current mainstream science. However, regardless of whether they are or aren’t, their letter is not actually about that.

Their letter isn’t saying there is not consensus on global warming. It’s saying there is not a scientific consensus on how society should respond to global warming. The article certainly doesn’t include any scientific data, but it isn’t designed or intended to be a peer reviewed scientific article. If it was, it would be in a far different format and published in a very different place.

Your problem being it is scientifically unsourced could be made about almost every Op-Ed that gets published, and editorials in general for that matter. Editorial pieces are not usually scientifically sourced because they are not intended to make scientific arguments.

This letter isn’t making a scientific argument, instead it is simply making a claim that there is not wide consensus in the scientific community about what the response to global warming should be. They go off the rails a little bit when they talk about the lack of warming over the last 10 years, but mostly the article stays on point: that there is not scientific consensus on how to respond to global warming. On the side issues made in the letter, for example about a desire by some members of the APS to remove the word “incontrovertible” in reference to global warming, that’s opinion, not fact. The people who wrote the letter have the opinion scientific bodies shouldn’t call anything “incontrovertible” we can agree or disagree with that, but it isn’t something I think has to be scientifically argued, because science isn’t involved in deciding what wording the APS should use in its communications bulletins. On the side issue that dissenting scientists shouldn’t be fired from their tenured positions and etc, that again, is opinion–and not one I necessarily think is all that extremist.

32

Maybe that’s a good point, but I’m not entirely convinced.

For the past few years, the WSJ has been one of my highest-rated sources in Google News, and no, I’ve never been bothered by their reporting, even after they were taken over by Murdoch (which I actually didn’t know until this thread). I trusted it more than most sources. Maybe I should try to continue to by judging their news separately from their opinion, but…

It makes me uneasy to listen to anybody whose position isn’t evidence-based, because it suggests that somewhere in their world view, certain things are assumed to be irrefutably true, which does scary things to objectivity. I’m worried that their editorial stance might cross over to their news, consciously or unconsciously, in subtle ways like cherry-picking which stories to cover at all or how much reporter time to spend on them (as opposed to injecting bias directly into stories).

If the divide between opinion and news can be kept clearly sacrosanct, maybe the influences could be kept to a minimum. Maybe. But I try not to read Mother Jones for the same reason I don’t watch Fox News, because skewed coverage isn’t really useful information unless an opposing view is readily apparently and available.

A newspaper necessarily editorializes, despite their best efforts, in more ways than one: It’s not just how each individual story is written, but how in-depth a trend is covered, how much space legitimate opposing views are given, or indeed whether an opposing view is considered legitimate at all, where in the paper a story appears, whether it gets a big color photo or no picture at all, etc. All of these are editorial decisions made by (I think?) the same staff that decides which editorials and op-eds to print… right?

If so, it’s not exactly a huge stretch of the imagination to think that a paper which takes a particular stance on one topic might think that an opposing perspective warrants less paper space (“Oh, they’re just a fringe group… not front page news… let’s give them a little paragraph on page C9”) than might otherwise be warranted.

This sort of bias is insidious and difficult for mere individuals like to evaluate, especially in the online world where it’s hard to tell if a particular article is part of an overall trend without having a historical relationship with that particular source. So as best as I can, I try to stick to sources that have little observable bias overall, and when they make stances, I expect them to be well-reasoned and to take into account opposing views and data.

This particular op-ed in the WSJ did not exhibit that sense of well-researched, honest scientific rebuttal I would expect from a paper of its standing.

Maybe their standards are just looser for the op-ed section and does not reflect their news reporting. Is that actually the case? I had assumed so up to this point because their reporting has never bothered me, but now I wonder if I just hadn’t been paying enough attention. I haven’t been able to make up my mind, which is why I posted here.

33

It is not the job of the scientists.

And this is also one huge black eye for the editors, they give to their readers the idea that this lack of consensus on what to do is relevant. What scientists have said is that we need to stop, limit, or sequester CO2 and other GW gases. It is the governments and the people to should decide how to do it.

Incidentally I did miss that point from that editorial and reading it again it is an even more retarded point that the 16 scientists (that most of them are not experts in climate research) are making there.

34

I just realized I never linked to the actual opinion piece in the OP. :smack: I completely missed that. Sorry, and thanks to Dewey Finn and others for finding it.

I think we can agree that the letter has a few main points:

  1. In science, silencing dissenting opinion and claiming that evidence is incontrovertible is not an acceptable practice, and a few heroic scientists have stood up against this, risking their jobs in the process.

  2. There is no scientific consensus on how to respond to AGW.

And perhaps this is where my own bias comes into play, but upon reading (and re-reading) it, I got the distinct sense that they were also saying:

  1. The evidence for AGW itself is not strong enough. What evidence exists is weak (it may not be happening all that much, or if it is, it’s probably good for the plants) and the evidence is funded (and thus biased) by strong economic interests.

  2. The weak evidence should be overriden by strong and immediate economic concerns.

You’re saying that their main point is #2. Maybe so, but it’s predicated on #3 and #4. As in, “We think there’s no need for alarm. The evidence is insufficient, and the economics are more serious.”

I think all those points (#2 to #4) are arguable, and the responses are all over the Internet. What makes this letter seem “extremist” is that the majority of scientists, I believe, would argue that #2 and #3 are outright false, that there is in fact consensus on both AGW’s existence and the actions needed to combat it. #4 gets into crystal-ball territory on both sides. and #1, to me the letter’s strongest argument, is sadly mostly just a side topic.

And to bring it back to the WSJ, #2 and #3, the most salient issues, ARE scientific questions even if #1 and #4 aren’t. This is a persuasive piece premised on what most scientists in the field would call poor science, and to misrepresent the issues as matters of policy or debate instead of a matter of data is a disservice to the public. If this is a problem with all editorials, that doesn’t make it ok; that means all the other editorials ought to change too.

It’s one thing to have an editorial say “Here’s what scientists agree on. Now let’s talk about how we should handle it”. That’s a different beast from “There is actually no scientific agreement. Let’s do nothing until more research is done”. The former turns a finished scientific debate into a policy debate. The latter attempts to dismiss the question altogether by misrepresenting a finished scientific debate as a wide-open question.

Again, this thread pre-assumes that this consensus does exist, that the debate IS finished (for the time being, unless significant new evidence appears), etc. If you wish to argue that there is actually not a consensus (like the letter does), please take it to the other thread. AGW and journalistic ethics are both interesting topics, but both in one thread will just be crazy.

35

Do you read many editorials? Editorials are very rarely sourced, it’s part of the medium. I would probably disagree with your opinion that “all editorials should change” to be dry recitations of fact…that’s what news is for, and that’s why when I want news I don’t want opinions and editorializing, but when it comes to actual opinion sections I’m wanting to read opinions.

The whole concept of an opinion section is it’s basically a place where people can spout off about things. Even opinion columns written by Nobel prize winners are rarely heavily sourced. Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize winning economist who writes a regular opinion piece that typically deals with political/economic issues. His opinion pieces typically include some data points, but only at extremely high levels. While many people who agree with Krugman point to his accolades as authoritative support for his opinions he writes in his regular op-ed, the fact of the matter is when he’s writing his op-ed he’s basically just a guy telling us his opinion. He has a good CV to back it up, but Krugman hasn’t been a practicing economist in years, doesn’t do formal research or studies to support the arguments in his opinion pieces, and often gives little supporting information for the scant data he includes in his piece. That’s not me criticizing Krugman (I don’t like him or his opinions, but that’s irrelevant) I’m just pointing out that even when you have an expert in the field writing op-ed pieces about their field, it’s still just an opinion piece. You can’t publish real sourced, scientific pieces every month about big topics. You can report on events multiple times in a month, but Op-Eds are about ideas and real research into things like that take place over months and years, and the Op-Ed/Editorial columns of newspapers aren’t the place where people are looking for that stuff in any case.

36

The WSJ only considers them “experts” because they agree with the WSJ’s discredited viewpoint. WSJ ran what is for practical purposes a flat-earther op-ed. Since they’ve run many flat-earth editorials we know the WSJ management is not joking. They really believe their nonsense.

37

So there is need to panic?

What if it costs more than it is worth? And yes, that is possible.

Regards,
Shodan

38

It’s neither. It’s calm rational and correct. You can believe in Global Warming but also agree that "there’s no need to panic." * Panic is useless in any case*. NOTHING we can do will work quickly, even the most radical scientists agree there.

Or you can panic and get nothing done at all, which would be worse.

39

The WSJ op-ed piece, as noted, is not “journalism”, but it is a crappy op-ed article which uses the same tired tropes as denialists do on other issues.

(Disclaimer: I subscribe to the Journal and while not a climate change denier, have doubts about some of the sweeping proposals made to address the problem).
This letter from climate change scientists printed in the Journal earlier in the week effectively addresses problems with the op-ed piece, notably that it represents opinions from people who are mostly known for their work in unrelated scientific fields, and that those with actual credentials represent a tiny minority of climate experts.

Other typical denialist tropes include the one about The Man suppressing minority views, and that Big Money is behind the push to address climate change (there’s money involved, sure, there always is, but it’s a bit hypocritical not to admit that there’s also a lot of money involved in casting doubt on climate change).

Shodan should recognize these tropes from their frequent use by another bunch of denialists - antivaccine activists (who for instance often cite lists of medical people who agree with them, who turn out to lack credentials in immunology or pediatrics if they’re even MDs at all - typically they’re chiropractors, naturopaths and goofball academics with no connection at all to health care).

If you read the WSJ consistently you will find climate change denialist nonsense turning up in their actual editorials, as when they crowed over a chemist with an initially controversial theory winning the Nobel Prize (as an example of how we should be dubious of a scientific consensus like that on climate change). They also editorially smirked when Huntsman dropped out of the Republican presidential race, noting that he had stood apart from other Republicans over scientifically dubious positions like climate change denial. The Journal also takes an anti-FDA stance queasily like that of Ron Paul (see their editorial blustering over the FDA’s rescinding approval of Avastin).

The Journal is welcome to question costs and benefits of plans meant to address climate change. It should not be giving the false impression that there is a large debate in the scientific community over the existence of climate change.

40

Can a strawman be “calm, rational, and correct”? It’s a strawman because very few people are literally panicking about global warming.

The letter may be calm.

I don’t think it’s a rational argument, because it’s using dishonest debate tactics to try to prove a point by attributing argument your opponents didn’t make. Granted, it may be a rational letter in that they may intentionally use these sloppy arguments for political purposes.

As to correctness, I don’t think it’s either correct nor incorrect as it is answering a question no one is asking.