Could it be that a curse, a hex, or some other toxin on the brain invades every reporter who tries to report on the errors and miscues behind the IPCC’s careless prediction of an imminent disappearance of the glaciers of Himalaya? And that those reporters become incapable of reporting the affair without compounding things with further errors?

Two writers – not journalists, but academics – at Yale University’s Forum on Clilmate Change & the Media, Bidisha Banerjee and George Collins, have out this week a very long and detailed autopsy on the offending passages and how their genesis has been reported. They write:

Dozens of articles and analyses of this situation, whether dashed-off  blog posts or New York Times coverage, exhibit a curious consistency. Not a single article or analysis appears to include all the relevant issues without introducing at least one substantial error.”

They then use the word “curse” to characterize the pattern. They use this trope as an amusing device to keep readers going through their long reaction. And, the authors say they might be under the curse too – so let them know if you spot its footprints in their prose.

I don’t know, but this analysis for the first time reveals to me how glaringly obvious the problems with the IPCC’s language were. They take it apart phrase by phrase. The twisted route by which it got in there is persuasively traced. Did any reporters already get this in the news? It says here nobody did, or even came close without muddying the path with their own miscues. Read this and see just how far from peer-reviewed literature the IPCC editors strayed as they put the Himalayas section of the report together.

All very persuasive. The recounting is so detailed and, hence, confusing that one inevitably feels a bit of sympathy for reporters who, often on daily deadline pressure, muffed a few details, skimmed pages that might better by read slowly word by word, fact-checked erratically, and made a few leaps of logic while – this is important – still getting the main point across. Which is that in this instance at least, IPCC’s goal to provide material either backed by peer-reviewed, robust scientific literature, or labeled if otherwise,  was not met. And that is what the UN body conceded rather promptly.

The lesson: Journalism is often called the first draft of history. We journalists must be as careful as we can be. But ours is hardly ever and  maybe never the final draft. We must never forget to include a lot of maybes and other qualifiers in our efforts to summarize complex events. This report appears to be a much more solid second or third draft of history. The authors of this report are reasonable in their phrasings. One wonders – how would these two summarize it in, say, 25 words, with five minutes to do it?

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.