Month: December 2009

Why Climategate doesn’t matter (I)

For the past several weeks, conservative commentators have been buzzing about “Climategate” — hacked e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit in Britain that show some scientists may have been cooking the books in an attempt to bolster the case for global warming.

“Assuming the e-mails are genuine, they are nothing short of scandalous,” writes Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, a prominent global-warming skeptic. And, inevitably, Climategate enthusiasts are demanding to know why the big, bad mainstream media are ignoring the e-mails.

I am not going to deal with the e-mails. As I recall a prosecutor once telling a jury, I don’t have to prove that Mr. Doe is the sort of person who’s capable of murdering his wife if I can prove that he, in fact, murdered his wife.

In the same vein, I don’t have to defend scientists who may have been mucking with the data to boost the case for global warming if I can show that the earth is actually warming. So today I present the first of 10 stories, some of which you’ve probably seen before, that are grounded not in data or computer simulations, but in the reality of global warming.

If you have any nominations, please pass them along. I’ll probably stop when I get to 10.

And if you really want to know more about Climategate, I recommend the excellent Climateprogress.org blog, written by Dr. Joe Romm. And so we begin:

On Sept. 10 of this year, the New York Times reported on a quest by two German ships to become the first to traverse the Arctic Ocean — a journey that would not have been possible were it not for the thinning of the Arctic ice cap.

“It is global warming that enables us to think about using that route,” Verena Beckhusen, a spokeswoman for the German shipping company, told the Times.

As the story makes clear, mariners have dreamed of using that passage for hundreds of years, as it would save a considerable amount of time, and, thus money. But it was only recently that the ice became thin enough to make it a reality.

Why was Dan Totten ousted?

Both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald today report on the ouster of Boston Newspaper Guild president Dan Totten, whose leadership during the union’s months-long standoff with the Globe’s owner, the New York Times Co., was widely criticized.

Each story raises more questions than it answers, starting with the use of the word “guilty” to describe the internal ruling against Totten on Wednesday. That’s a pretty loaded term, but neither account gives any indication whether it’s one that the union specifically uses, or if it’s just a less-than-legally-precise description of what happened.

As for the charges against Totten, let’s take a look at the specifics:

  • He was found to have signed the name of another union official to his own paycheck.
  • He was found to have improperly used his union credit card to buy $254 worth of personal items.
  • He was found not to have produced receipts in a timely manner.

Are any of these accusations the sort of thing that law enforcement would find interesting? Perhaps the second item, although — not to downplay the seriousness of the allegation — it probably wouldn’t be worth the time given how little money was at stake. But it would seem to me that if Totten is not under any sort of criminal investigation, then we should tread carefully before labeling him a union crook.

As for the two other items, you could argue whether Totten should be punished for signing someone else’s name so that he could cash his own paycheck, but it was, after all, his own paycheck. Not producing receipts in a timely manner? You’ve got to be kidding.

I want to make it clear that I’m not sitting in judgment of anyone. Perhaps Totten really was, uh, guilty of serious malfeasance. My only point is that we don’t know.

I’d like to see someone dig into this and find out whether we are truly talking about malfeasance, or if instead Totten was sacrificed because his members are unhappy with the way he dealt with the Times Co.

The Guild-Times Co. standoff was the biggest local media story of the year. Totten’s fall is an important element of that.

Update: One question has been answered. According to a copy of an e-mail from the Guild that has been forwarded to Media Nation, it is indeed the Guild itself that used the term “guilty.” Here’s the full text:

Dear Boston Newspaper Guild Member,

A jury of members of the Boston Newspaper Guild today found President Daniel Totten guilty of charges that he improperly signed a paycheck and ignored directives to turn over expense receipts in a timely manner. The jury voted to expel Mr. Totten from the union, and also ordered him to pay a fine of $254. The jury heard several hours of testimony from Union officers and office staff. Mr. Totten declined to participate in the trial process. The five members of the jury were chosen by random selection.  Mr. Totten has the right to appeal the verdict.

Sincerely,

Scott Steeves
Acting President, The Boston Newspaper Guild

Welcome, Romenesko readers. There’s a lot more where this came from here.

Huffington-Murdoch hatefest hits D.C.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dt2-mqgCZ8&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

New Haven Independent editor Paul Bass, on a busman’s holiday in Washington, covers dueling speeches by Huffington Post impresario Arianna Huffington and international media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch has been much in the news of late for threatening to make his properties invisible to Google and to cut a deal with Google’s leading competitor, Microsoft’s Bing — the better to stop aggregators like HuffPost from “stealing” his content.

Particularly entertaining is a video (above) Bass posts of Huffington explaining to Murdoch how to insert a line of code that would stop Google from searching his sites.

Huffington and Murdoch spoke at a Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism.

The state of distributed reporting

Amanda Michel
Amanda Michel

Can professional journalists and citizen volunteers play well together? It’s a question that has come up repeatedly in recent years. According to Amanda Michel, editor of distributed reporting for the non-profit Web site ProPublica, the answer is yes — but only for projects that are properly designed.

Speaking earlier today at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center, Michel described one example — the Stimulus Spot Check — whereby volunteers examined databases and interviewed local officials to track the progress of 520 of the 6,000 or so transportation projects that are part of the federal government’s $787 billion stimulus package.

By summer, she said, ProPublica’s citizen-assisted reporting had revealed that ground had been broken on 30 percent of the projects — behind the timetable Vice President Joe Biden had publicly announced.

Currently, Michel said, ProPublica is basing its reporting on health-care reform on concerns raised by people in a survey developed in conjunction with American Public Media.

The idea, said Michel, who was head of the Huffington Post’s Off the Bus project during the 2008 president campaign, is to “report stories that are beyond the capacity of a single reporter.” And it turns out that a number of volunteers will step forward, contributing some labor, she said, as though they were giving to their church, or to a local animal shelter.

So what doesn’t work? At Off the Bus, Michel said she learned that not everyone wants to be a reporter or a writer. Of the 12,000 people who signed up for the OTB e-mail list, only 14 percent ever wrote anything. Instead, she said many volunteers merely wanted to give some time and help out — as with the 220 folks who gathered data for profiles of nearly 400 Democratic “superdelegates” during the 2008 primaries.

Projects must be carefully designed to account for bias, she added, sometimes by assigning more than one citizen journalist (a term, I should note, that she disdains) to the same task. And the serendipity of old-fashioned reporting is lost when volunteers are asked to carry out very specific tasks that have been carefully designed in advance.

“You can’t always delegate what you don’t know,” she said.