Thank goodness for John Abrahamโbecause he does so well what no one should have toย do.
Thatโs my reaction after reading this recent exchange in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in which Abrahamโa co-founder of the Climate Science Rapid Response team and a professor at the University of St. Thomasโdismantles an array of misleading claims about climate science from one Jason Lewis, a syndicated radio talk showย host.
Lewis repeats the โhide the declineโ line from โClimategateโ and thoroughly misrepresents what it means. He incorrectly asserts ย that global warming concerns are based on โcomputer modelsโ rather than data. He claims that following 1998, temperatures โmay actually be cooling,โ and so forth.
These claims are wrongโas is the general impression left by the column that the Earth isnโt warming, and climate scientists donโt know what theyโre doingโand it isnโt simply a matter of opinion. Abraham scores all the intellectual points in this exchange, but I canโt help thinking, this is not how itโs supposed toย go.
A few posts back I highlighted new research suggesting that โon the one hand, on the other handโ coverage of fact-based political divides leaves citizens in a postmodern funk, uncertain what the truth is and whether they are capable of discerning it. Itโs yet another reason why journalists have a responsibility to serve as arbiters of factual disputesโrather than thinking their job is done if they let one side say the sky is pink, but then provide a counter-quote from an expert saying that in fact itโsย blue.
What goes for journalists ought to go for op-ed pages. While it might be more difficult to design a study to test the effect on readers of an exchange like that in the Star Tribune, I would guess it is the sameโmaking them feel helpless about discerning where the truthย lies.
But itโs not just that: Oped pages, too, have a journalistic responsibility not to print misinformation, as they have done by running Lewisโs column. And just providing a contrary โopinionโ to counter that misinformation isnโtย enough.
Lewisโs column should, at minimum, be officially correctedโand across the board, oped pages should put in place mechanisms to rigorously fact check pieces making contrarian scientific claims in politically contested areas, like the climateย debate.
In a range of ways, the norms of journalism simply have not kept up with the kind of misinformation that circulates todayโor with realities of human psychology. Journalists have abdicated, for too long, their responsibility to tell it like it is, and only like it isโin all parts of the paper. Theyโve forgotten that most basic of distinctions: Between fact andย opinion.
