Memo to Joe Nocera (and the People Who Hired Him): Try Harder!

Some of you may have noticed that The New York Times has added a new columnist to its editorial page. His name is Joe Nocera and, as a long time correspondent for business periodicals, he seems now to be the official mouthpiece for corporate insanity at The Times.

To date Nocera has published not one but two columns trumpeting the virtues of hydraulic-fracturing as a way of extracting natural gas. I have posted here several times about the stupidity of that process. Nocera seems not to have read my posts. I suppose that is excusable. But he also seems not to have bothered reading this series of articles that his own newspaper published last month on the lunacy of "fracking." And he seems to have missed the stories running in The Times today on (1) the actual practice of (as opposed to the imagined oh-so-nice-and-clean industry propaganda about) drilling for natural gas and (2) the campaign from the right to subvert state-level environmental regulations.

What is wrong with this sort of oversight? Well, there is the obvious problem is that it makes Nocera look exactly like a shill for industry. But there are a couple of other reasons. The first is that Nocera simply is dismissive of those who raise well-founded objections to natural gas drilling. His standard retort is that skeptics are somehow "biased" or self-interested. The second is that his own position depends and depends crucially on the good-will of industry and the competence of regulators. Unfortunately, there is no basis for either of those presumptions.

In his first column Nocera announced that his thinking on the "fracking" issue specifically and on natural gas drilling more generally owed a large debt to his friend T. Boone Pickens. Talk about a credibility deflating admission.* Of course, good ole T Boone is unconcerned with the money. Ask him and he'll say as much. And as for the safety of natural gas extraction here is Nocera: " In Texas and Oklahoma, it has been used for decades, with nobody complaining much about environmental degradation." You know, those two southwestern states who've built a well-deserved reputation for environmental stewardship!

This is reasoned argument? Yet Nocera has the temerity to attack the credibility of the Cornell University scientist who - as The Times reported - published research findings suggesting that just maybe natural gas is no panacea. Here is a simple asymmetry to ponder. The Cornell scientist might just possibly have come to his policy conclusions on the basis of his research; spokesmen for the extractive industries in Texas came to their policy views on the basis of the profits they have made or stand to make. We are supposed to think of the common good, the national welfare and so forth; they are allowed to speak for their economic self interest. Of course, many property owners in Pennsylvania and "upstate" New York are concerned about their property values. They might also be concerned about the water pollution and other environmental degradation that follows on gas drilling ('fracking' or otherwise). They may also be worried that the Northeast will turn into Texas or Oklahoma (and I mean that in the best of all possible ways!). Nocera never countenances either possibility.

Instead, Nocera promises us nirvana: "The truth is, every problem associated with drilling for natural gas is solvable. The technology exists to prevent most methane from escaping, for instance. Strong state regulation will help ensure environmentally safe wells. And so on." All we have to do is set aside all the reporting, all the research. Or perhaps, like Nocera, we simply need to place our faith in a world in which vigorous regulators and virtuous energy companies will take great care and avoid the incompetence and venality we've come to expect from them. Any takers? How about all those city dwellers in NYC who get their water from reservoirs upstate?

If you cannot muster the faith, Nocera will invite you on the guilt trip. The one that meanders through the corpses of American military personnel dying for oil in the middle east. There is a leap! Basically, Nocera's "argument" amounts to non-sequitors, ad hominem attacks, cozy-ing up to gas industry billionaires, leaps of faith in industry and regulators, and a plea to believe him (as opposed to reporters and researchers) that natural gas exploration is clean and safe. All this in the first few weeks of his residency on the op-ed columns. What a joke. The Times cannot be that desperate for columnists.
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* Memo to Joe: Simply admitting that you are working as a mouthpiece for the rich and financially involved does not excuse sloppy thinking or make otherwise incredible statements believable.

Calling a Lie a Lie

This post by Glenn Greenwald over at Salon.com is worth your time. How can journalists live up to their (usually vastly exaggerated) claim to 'speak truth to power' if they cannot say that something is false? I am not a fan - at all - of Anderson Cooper. But Greenwald suggests how deep the problem actually goes:

"Had Anderson Cooper used such harsh language to describe the statements of someone universally despised in American mainstream political circles (an American Enemy -- such as, say, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hugo Chavez), it would likely have gone unnoticed. But here, Cooper used such language to condemn one of America's closest and most cherished allies, and it was thus gently deemed a departure from journalistic propriety. But had Cooper said such things about a leading American political official, then a true journalistic scandal would have erupted."

Orwell's Shadow (2) ~ How "Torture" Disappeared From (or, Was Banished By) American Journalism

"Yet the most dangerous side of our new semantic war, our use of the words of power – though it is not a war, since we have largely surrendered – is that it isolates us from our viewers and readers. They are not stupid. They understand words in many cases – I fear – better than we do. History, too. They know that we are drawing our vocabulary from the language of generals and presidents, from the so-called elites, from the arrogance of the Brookings Institute (sic) experts, or those of those of the Rand Corporation. Thus we have become part of this language." ~ Robert Fisk

In my last post (here) I recommended the essay by Robert Fisk on journalism and the language of power from which I've lifted this passage. The "we" and "our" he refers to are journalists. His complaint is that the press (print and broadcast) have embraced the language of the powerful. Sometimes this is because of the putative need to retain "access"; sometimes it reflects the convention of being "fair" or "neutral" or "objective." Either way, capitulating to the powerful and their claims leads, as Fisk indicates, to decidedly partial and political reporting.

As if on cue, yesterday Glenn Greenwald posted on a newly released report on the U.S. media entitled "Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media." The study finds that the four largest circulation national print news outlets - The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today - capitulated more or less completely to the campaign by the Bush Administration to redefine interrogation techniques commonly recognized to be torture as something other than torture. They did so in a sharp break from their own historical practice, reaching back nearly a century, and from their own descriptions of practices in other countries. ("They" torture, "we" don't; we simply rely on "enhanced interrogation techniques.") These outlets, thereby, did not maintain "neutrality" or "objectivity" or "fairness" but actively connived in legitimating the torture policy that the Bush administration implemented.

This is a damning report. We are not talking about the clowns at FOX "News" here. We are talking about the purportedly "liberal" media. Fortunately, as Fisk notes, people are not stupid. They know torture when they see it and can call it by its name.
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P.S.: While I don't want top ring my own bell on this one (too loudly), this is a pattern that I have posted about repeatedly - see here and here and here, for instance.

P.S.(2): You might want to see Andrew Sullivan's post on this, and the reply issued by the lackeys at The New York Times. Why read Pravda, when you can read the American mainstream media.

P.S.(3): Update 7/6/2010 ~ See this follow-up by Glenn Greenwald on the vapid response of editorial higher-ups at The Times.