This is a guest post by Danny Weston.
Just a few days ago our old friend, the Telegraph’s Geoffrey Lean, was rightly excoriated on this blog for yet another appallingly biased - not to mention incompetent – screed further justifying his apparent fear of imminent human caused thermageddon. Now it’s not news to any regular readers here that many of our glorious hacks appear to throw out all pretense of professionalism and impartiality when it comes to the issue of the seemingly ever omnipotent CO2 molecule belched from the belly of human industry. Motivated reasoning seems to be the root cause. Or is it? I’d like to propose an altogether more frightening theory – that in many cases it is in fact sheer incompetence that is the driving force and the reliance on climate catastrophist talking points is more an effect than a cause. It gives them a nice, tidy, heuristic for them to hang everything on, minimising their need to do their own research, editing or indeed, even thinking.
To explain why I’d like to talk through a number of personal anecdotes that all tie in together in various ways with both Lean’s article and his behaviour.
First, there’s Louise Gray. You’ll likely remember her as Lean’s younger, more energetic partner in crime at the Telegraph. She became well known for her “churnalism” of environmentalist press releases, which were then passed off as journalism with due diligence. Unfortunately only those regularly commenting on her pieces seemed to be aware of this. I traced a number of her articles online to see how far they would spread and depressingly the major, churned, talking points would be repeated far and wide, backed by the authority of the Telegraph as a trusted brand.
One of my favourite examples to use here of Louise’s incredible cut and pasting was the ‘Llamas help protect an ice age fish’ story.1 It was not only an egregious example of churn – it also demonstrated her complete lack of critical filters on her part. With regard to the former it was mostly copied from an April 12th, 2011 press release from the environment agency. With regard to the latter, it was quickly taken apart both in the Telegraph comments and over at WUWT.2 It’s also apropos to note that despite the cutting and pasting, Louise *still* made mistakes – she somehow rewrote ‘Sprinkling Tarn’ and ‘Sprinkler Tarn’.
I became quite interested in Louise’s work after this point and analysed dozens of her articles for churn, finding significant cutting and pasting from press releases in over 50% of them. I also regularly found those bizarre spelling mistakes and the fact that they occurred in largely copied segments still makes my head hurt to this day. In any case, I eventually confronted her face to face with these findings in public at an event held at the Royal Society last year “Fracking: science and scepticism”. Louise was on the panel. I managed to get a question in, demanding to know why or how she could be trusted given that she copied and pasted much of her content from environmental press releases. She started to open her mouth to respond but I interrupted – telling her not to deny it as I could place the articles side by side with the press releases and show the copied sections in no uncertain terms. She appeared to be gobsmacked and whimpered a quick response that I didn’t catch.
There was a reception afterwards, with drinks. I had taken two friends with me and we were chatting when Louise approached me, setting her pile of notebooks down on the drinks table next to me. My friends took a step back to witness the confrontation. What then followed was a painful hour of her attempting to justify her “journalism” to me. She cycled through three responses – i) it’s standard practice amongst journalists, ii) I shouldn’t pick out individual journalists for attention and iii) she only gets “four hours per story” and as such has to use press releases. As you’ve probably guessed I wasn’t sympathetic to any of these reasons and when pressed she would either not respond or change the subject. Also, the “only four hours per story” excuse rings particularly hollow for me and I’ll get onto that in the anecdote that follows. The encounter ended with her being so flustered that she disappeared, leaving all of her notebooks with me. I didn’t look at them. When handing them into the reception and giving them her details at the Telegraph I couldn’t help wonder if she would have given me the same courtesy had I left my notebooks with her.
This brings me to the next related anecdote. I imagine some of you – like me – immediately chortled at the pressure of having to cut and paste a story in “just” four hours. Given her pace of output at the Telegraph I did also wonder what she was doing for the rest of the time. Anyone who has worked in a genuinely high pressure environment and who has also seen the quality of output here in the blogosphere knows what is possible to do in four hours.
I was bemused at the idea that she struggled for original content so much that press releases were her only resort. Why? A number of years prior to this encounter I had been the administrator of two large EU funded research projects in robotics and AI. During this period I also worked as a researcher in the area, contributed to comprehensive proposals for new project funding and met dozens of academics from across the EU who were juggling numerous EU funded projects between them.
Something that isn’t widely known outside of these circles is that specific deliverables, time and resources are set aside in *every single* project for dissemination and promotion. A part of this is, obviously, the usual game of perverse incentives for academics – the publication and citation record. However the bulk of these deliverables is expressly aimed at reaching the wider public. And it is something that many academics express frustration over in that they find it difficult to drum up interest, even in such apparently “cool” areas as robotics and AI. I can tell you from direct, repeated experience that had a journalist such as Louise Gray called or emailed them, they would have ripped her arm off for interviews, given her project materials and shown her around the lab for photo ops.
It gets better (or worse depending on how you view it) than this, too. If I was a science or technology journalist I wouldn’t have to go looking for my content, I could deliver interesting original material week in and week out on this basis and without churning a single press release. All EU funded research projects are searchable on the CORDIS website.3 And if a project in your particular field (e.g. environmentalism) isn’t live at the moment, no problem. It is possible to search for projects going back to 1990. Many of those scientists and researchers would still be interested in talking to journalists about their previous work and how it may have had an impact since. And just like the spelling mistakes inserted into cut and paste jobs mentioned above, the fact that journalists do not make use of this amazing resource also makes my head hurt.
Speaking of the EU brings me to my third anecdote and back to the subject matter that Mr. Lean managed to ham-fistedly muck up: fish and fisheries. In November, 2012, I participated in a “hackathon” at Google campus, organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation and European Journalism Centre. The theme of the event was to look at data produced by the EU for interesting patterns and stories. There was a lot of interesting material (not least of which was the visualization of the number and location of lobby groups relative to the EU parliament). This included fish subsidy data. Unfortunately the main site that makes this information available in an accessible form, fishsubsidy.org is broken at the moment (check back in future though, it’s worth a look).
There were two distinct patterns we found in the data that shocked everyone there. Both of these related to the pattern of EU subsidy for fishing efforts that failed to catch their specific EU quotas. In these cases the EU would do two things: subsidise a bigger boat (no, really!) and sometimes also pay for the fishing to take place in waters outside the EU. Neither of these pieces of information seem to have reached out to the wider debates, concerns and narratives surrounding fish stocks in the EU. It is civically minded programmers who are digging this kind of thing out, making the data accessible, finding significant stories within the data and so on. And they are casting around for journalists who will run with it. But they don’t. Why?
I look at the rubbish routinely pumped out by the likes of Lean and Gray and have increasing difficulty in believing that they mendaciously cling to the climate catastrophism schtick to drive their journalism as a matter of pure ideology. If that was their primary motivation, they wouldn’t make so many ridiculous mistakes, they could find hundreds of EU Framework Program funded researchers to talk to directly who work on climate related research, and they could find competent hackers (in the positive sense of the term) to make large datasets available to them for free, complete with brilliant scoops. Instead, my current take is that following the collective hysteria and belief in imminent doom provides a fantastic cover if you have the unfortunate combination of being incompetent, a bit dim and looking for an easy ride being employed amongst the commentariat and attending jollies. I think I’d rather have the competent ideologues to contend with, personally.
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[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8444032/Fish-carried-up-a-mountain-on-backs-of-llamas-to-escape-global-warming.html
[2] http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/12/climate-change-craziness-of-the-week-a-fish-story-from-llama-land/
[3] http://cordis.europa.eu/projects/home_en.html