Real Clear Politics: A critic says NYTimes’s gas fracking package not up to ethical snuff
Here’s a tough one to call. But I’ll make a stab at it. On Tuesday, in rounding up the NYTimes’s science section offerings, my post on this site gave a hearty nod to two pieces that ran in the main news by the paper’s reporter Ian Urbina. They dwelt on revelation of internal shale oil and gas industry emails. The two stories also asserted abundant doubt among some analysts and fossil fuel industry insiders that the boom in US extraction of fuel from shale will last. Quantities may be below projections, and production costs and risks may be higher than the industry and regulators estimate. So it said, and it is hard to argue that it could not possibly happen.
The stories (as seen in the previous post) got immediate blowback from industry. It also more recently got a long take-down, posted at the uber-trenchant but multi-partisan Real Clear Politics website late yesterday, by writer and general analyst Jon Entine. It accuses Urbina of cherry picking data and, more potentially damaging and possibly ethically curious, of misleading description of two of the sources he quotes. The post headline: Natural Gas “Bubble” Report: Market Tinkering or Shoddy Reporting?
It seems from here that Entine (bio here) – a visiting fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute with a history of cocking his eyebrow when activists and other worriers of any political hue see public peril in the way industries conduct their businesses – overdoes the reporting flaws. Urbina’s stories may be a little thin, heavy on unnamed sources, but they nonetheless raise legitimately that the enthusiasm for fracked oil and gas may be pushing us toward bubble territory.
However… The NYT public editor, seems to me, ought to look into whether or not named sources were misleadingly described. It’s hard to tell with the info available. How much does one need to say?
For instance, Entine makes much of a Texas goat cheese producer who gets id’d in the story as a former stockbroker and a member of an advisory committee to the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas. But she is more tellingly, Entine writes, a long time campaigner against shale oil and gas operations with little pertinent technical experience. I dunno. Here’s an old press release from the Texas agency which suggests it attaches significance to her expertise.
As I say, it’s hard to judge, in a quick morning’s head scratching, the merits of the RCP posting. But it does make interesting reading for anybody in the news business.
- Charlie Petit
July 7th, 2011 at 8:57 am
From Jon Entine: Charles, glad you engaged the issues, though I’m chagrined you backed away from your original post that called for the Times’ public editor to review the ethics of his paper. According to Wednesday’s New York magazine, Arthur Brisbane is now doing so.
Couple of quick reactions. –Curious why you did not cite in context the Council of Foreign Relations blog, which raises ethical/journalistic issues about the fairness of the reporter, Ian Urbina.. You made it seem like it was just me raising these framing and ethical questions. As CFR’s non-ideological energy expert Michael Levi noted in his analysis of the Urbina piece, criticism of shale gas in his story consisted almost entirely of carefully selected negative comments from anonymous sources culled from hundreds of emails that the Times got in a Freedom of Information Act request. Levi wrote: “Given the massive size of the industry, and the number of financial bets being placed upon the sector, that shouldn’t be a surprise. What is a surprise is that Urbina hasn’t done much to put them in context.” The general take on Urbina’s story by the “insiders” he claims to know is that he didn’t do his job as a reporter…he had a narrative and selected quotes to support it. What did the other 500 emails say? Why didn’t Urbina provide a fair minded analysis, with statistics, of what was said –recently–and what level the people were? He didn’t present an analysis of the hundreds of quotes that assuredly contradicted his thesis. That kind of reporting would get most reporters fired. Why didn’t you cite Levi and/or raise this critical point?
–Curious why for the second time in a post about me you cited my American Enterprise connection that is meager at best and yet left out what I actually do for a living…and it has nothing to do with AEI. You did what Urbina did–you cherry picked my “conservative” connection and deliberately left out my moderate and liberal affiliations, which define what I do. I’m listed as an (unpaid) visiting fellow because AEI gave me seed money years ago for a non-ideological book on personal genomics. I do no work at AEI. They post my stories, but they do that to all people listed. You ignored what I spend 98% of my time doing. I’m a writer, with 7 books, including two best sellers that don’t address ideological issues–they are on human ancestral genomics and sports and genes. As you know, I have foundation grants to launch the non-partisan Genetic Literacy Project–the holding site for it, is http://www.geneticliteracyproject.com. It’s at George Mason University, where I’m a senior fellow at the Center for Health and Risk Communications and STATS. My other major affiliation is as a columnist for the liberal magazine Ethical Corporation, based in London, for which I’ve written for ten years. In other words, you did exactly what Urbina did–you left out key contextual information and put in what supported your narrative! I expect more from you because you’re more experienced and less instinctively ideological than most reporters. I think.
–Why did you not publicly acknowledge to your readers that you were taking a partisan view of this issue. In an email to me last Friday, you wrote that “I’m posting on this today in my thoroughly objective (liberal version) way.” Tell your readers that. Be transparent. You also wrote to me that you find the “precautionary” view (that clearly infects Urbina’s reporting) as less than credible. As you wrote to me: “I see from your history that you are frequently very skeptical of activists and their description of hazards in various industrial or consumer product practices. Don’t put much stock in the precautionary principle. I’m with you on that.” Why did you not frame your comments in this way to your readers? Why do you present yourself as a skeptic to me but in your posts you embrace partisan writing? Yet you were quick to frame me as “conservative.” Hmmmm.
–You write: “Urbina’s stories may be a little thin, heavy on unnamed sources, but they nonetheless raise legitimately that the enthusiasm for fracked oil and gas may be pushing us toward bubble territory.” That’s an implied (and I think unfair) knock/insinuation about what my story was about). My article did not take on his central claim, however dubious…other’s, including Michael Levi, have done that. We do know his story consisted mostly of tired Internet chatter that every legitimate news organization has known about and had long since assessed, and found wanting. My concern as a journalist committed to transparency and ethics is that you gave the reader the sense that I believe examining this issue is somehow illegitimate. That’s not what my story suggested, and you know that. You dodged the key issue: Urbina and the Times selectively biased the story by not presenting the contextualized background of the only two identified critics in the story.
–Why did you not raise questions about the way the Times headlined and hyped the story. It claimed in a blanket fashion that industry insiders were hyping natural gas when they knew it was more empty gas than fact. But it’s own article doesn’t support such a blanket, exaggerated claim. In its promotion it’s used such phrases as “Ponzi scheme (does the Times even know what a Ponzi scheme is?) and linking it to Enron. Based on the “evidence” he presented, the responsible headline might have read: “Doubts exist on industry claims of bright future for shale gas.” That would have been a fair and honest headline, and would accurately have characterized the evidence. But then, if the Times wanted to accurately portray what the facts show (at least the verifiable facts based on this report) the story most likely would not have been written because the narrative that Urbina cooked up would not have been as entertaining and black and white. Sometimes the truth is dull. I suspect it is in this case. The Times, apparently was not prepared to accept that, or it had a young, somewhat rogue reporter and it didn’t provide proper oversight.
In sum, considering the role you play in this business, I’m disappointed that you didn’t raise these issues in your commentary–in context. Food for thought.
Regards, Jon Entine http://www.jonentine.com
July 7th, 2011 at 9:42 am
Hi Jon – Good to see your comment.
I don’t know why you think I backed off on suggesting an internal review at the NYTimes by the public editor. While I feel that the story you criticized by Ian Urbina was not likely to win any Pulitzer Prizes, it did not seem to fall outside the boundaries of ethical journalism. That said, you raised issues I did not know about regarding accurate description of sources – which merits Mr. Brisbane’s attention. And that’s what I said in the post.
I was pleased to call attention to your Real Clear Politics article and the issues it raised. I have had my own doubts about some aspects of Mr. Urbina’s reporting in previous posts – for instance I shared in a previous post reservations about his piece on the radiation hazards of wastewater from fracking. It appeared to ignore whether dilution, as industry says it does, provides the solution. But the story on a possible bubble in investment enthusiasm raises an important issue. As a journalism critic I don’t spend a lot of time reporting or digging into the substance of allegations such as yours. But somebody should do so.
I doubt that the industry is a Ponzi scheme too. The effect may be similar, but those are supposed to be deliberate cons, not merely products of irrational exuberance. Headlines are so often off the mark, I tend to ignore them, even at NYTimes.
The NYTimes is not going to throw the hydrofracturing shale oil and gas industries off their tracks. The actual reserves and economics will do that. And just the other day the NYT (Biz section?) wrote that the practice is spreading rapidly overseas.
July 8th, 2011 at 7:53 pm
Mr. Petit –
There seem to be all kinds of allegations being thrown around. I’m not exactly impressed by Mr. Entine’s long attack on Mr. Urbina’s journalistic ethics (and now yours too apparently). I read the story on realclearpolitics and it seems like if you look past the innuendo, what’s left seems like quite a reach. I’m not quite sure I follow a lot of the financial ties that are described. For example, the accusations of market manipulation stem in part from, if I understand correctly, the idea that a key figure in the story was once a paid speaker at an event sponsored by a Canadian bank that has a division that could profit if shale gas is maligned … this sort of thing leaves you waiting to see where the degrees of separation to Kevin Bacon somehow also figure in.
Honestly, I’ve been following this Times series pretty closely and thought that the stories on radioactivity were solid – I thought that the whole point was that there were EPA studies that found dilution wasn’t always reliable. But it’s clear that it has kicked up a pretty heated debate and I can’t help but think that’s a healthy thing, given the importance of the issues.
Thanks for continuing the discussion,
Matt Hurst