NYTimes Public Editor: Big shale gas & oil “Ponzi scheme” story has holes in it
As this site has recognized, several vociferous writers have argued that a front-page installment in the New York Times‘s series on hydrofracturing, or fracking, in shale country did not back up its theme. Yesterday, the Times’s public editor, or ombudsman, Arthur S. Brisbane essentially agreed with the critics. His account yesterday says not only that the story’s sourcing is thin and some of it not adequately portrayed, but also that it conflates two issues – whether the overall shale oil and gas boom could be a speculative bubble that endangers the whole industry, or only that smaller, independent operators may be over-claiming to investors what they can deliver.
The Times and Brisbane did well by posting on line a full-throated response from two of the editors involved.
The Times ran two stories by reporter Ian Urbina on Sunday June 25, and on Monday June 26. The latter story, with its hints of possible Ponzi Schemes and parallels to the Enron meltdown, got most of the criticism. A post here mentioning them and the blowback the first was getting ran as an add-on to a post I filed on June 28th. It included links to several responses by critics, including a telling one at the Council on Foreign Relations site by Michael Levi. I wrote that I rather liked the Urbina story. I still do, on the grounds that it is among the few to raise a flag of possible hazard – not just to water supplies but to the economy – in the tremendous shift of investment into shale-locked fossil fuels. But others did not like the story at all. Their objections are now seen largely to be shared the Times’s in-house watchdog.
The growing backlash led to a second post here at the tracker July 1. Its goad was a sharply-worded critique from Jon Entine at Real Clear Politics that called for the Times’s public editor to do what he now has done, which by that time I could see as a good idea too. But I also have to concede I was hardly sold at that point on the notion that the Urbina article significantly breached the standards of good journalism, even if the suspicion of such merited an ombudsman’s inspection. Such breach can be a hard thing to prove one way or the other. It does look like I could use better b.s. antennae. Entine for his part says the result is “pretty extraordinary. I’ve never seen such a direct criticism, ever, on an entire article on the Times in the 10 years of the existence of an ombudsman.”
More from Entine at a blog post on STATS: NYTimes Ombudsman Rebukes his Own Paper for Reporting Lapses on Natural Gas..
One wonders what further repercussions will transpire inside the walls at NYTimes, or outside them too for that matter.
- Charlie Petit
July 18th, 2011 at 4:12 pm
The NYT’s ombudsman’s lame critique of the Time’s excellent story on fracking could have been written by an ExxonMobile public relatiions flack. Yes, shale oil fracking has grown in scope, but that does not mean it is an acceptable source of energy. It proveably destroys clean air and water and is very cost-inefficient. Check out the fine documentary GASLAND or great reporting by ProPublica. What is the ombudsman’s real role in this matter? to squash out of the Chamber of Commerce box reporting? to kill well-sourced, well-resourced journalistic initiative? maybe the ombudsman would like to bring back Judith Miller. An ombudsman should be looking out for the interests of the public, the reader, not Exxon–which is PROVEABLY a clear and present danger to life on earth.