I posted a link to a
Daily
Kos piece that praised the NY Times for doing a really good job
with a piece that examined Syria’s actions in the chemical attack
that President Trump felt obliged to respond to with an attack by 59
drones. Then, I posted a piece
from Crooks
and Liars that took the NY Times to task as the paper was now
supporting a climate change denier. A commenter said: “The NY Times
does not promote climate denial.“ and “Do not believe everything
you read, especially if the source is a sleazy tabloid like this
one.”
I read the piece
that C&L criticized and am unimpressed. The author starts off by
suggesting that the Hillary Clinton campaign somehow misread or
didn’t fully grasp the poll numbers and so was blindsided by the
2016 election results.
But that’s not
true. Clinton was maintaining a small, but steady lead over Trump.
Trump was trying very hard, but couldn’t bridge that gap. The real
problem was that FBI Director Comey came out of the blue with
supposedly new emails that he hadn’t yet examined himself. That
threw a giant monkey wrench into the campaign and pushed Trump
over the top.
From there our
author goes on to call into question the authority of climate science
and suggests that we should be much more cautious about claims that
sound too certain.
My own view on
certainty is that if you feel someone is wrong, it’s up to you to
show where and how the person is wrong. If you’re simply saying
“don’t be too certain,” then you’re just trying to create
doubt and confusion and yes, you count as a denier. And yes, back in
late 2002, early 2003, the NY Times ran some editorials that were
skeptical of the Iraq War, but they also published Judith Miller’s
“OMG! Saddam Hussein’s got WMDs!!!” stories on their front
pages. So yes, on balance, their promotion of the Judith Miller pieces outweighed their cautious editorials and they
promoted the war.
Okay, so how do we
properly judge news sources? I regularly check a number of sources
that have weird names, Balloon Juice, Hullabaloo, Informed Comment and Talking Points
Memo. I once told a right-winger that some information I was
presenting came from the magazine called Mother Jones. He thought
that was a stupid name and so therefore, my information must not have
been any good.
If we say that we
can’t tell how good or bad the reporting on a blog is by the name
of the blog, in other words, if a quickie, surface examination is
insufficient, how are we to tell how reliable a source is?
One major criteria
of mine is whether the blog gives you a way to verify what they say.
If the blog regularly provides links to their sources and quotes
their sources accurately, that’s a very good start. If the blog
sometimes just quotes the terribly provocative thing that was said
without even bothering to add editorial comments, even better. Media
Matters is especially good on this. They’ll frequently just allow
the provocative comment to stand by itself without any further
editorial comments from them.
Modest editorial
language is a plus, but sometimes the provocation really calls for
some serious cussing. If a blog generally shows restraint, but
occasionally lets loose (Balloon Juice does this) with Not Safe For
Work (NSFW) language, then that’s a pretty good sign their
information is reliable.
And of course,
there’s the matter of track record. Dean Baker was an economist
that I became familiar with in the late 1990s. He
decided in 2002 that the US had a housing bubble (the bubble had
actually started in the late 1990s, it took Baker a while to figure
it out). The NY Times columnist Paul Krugman agreed with him. These
two became rather tiresome with their constant warnings that when the
bubble burst, it was going to be awful. Well, sure enough. It burst
in late 2007 and the result was indeed awful. So yeah, I give these
two lots and lots of credibility.
There’s no such
thing as a source that’s always right. So developing a list
of reliable sources is a waste of time. Even the lefty sources that I
like and regularly check can be wrong. There are many tests that one
can apply to news stories to see whether they’re credible or not.
The NY Times is often right, but they can be wrong as well and we can
run tests to see whether they’re right or not. I’ve mentioned a
few such tests. I’m sure that I regularly apply a few others that I
can’t recall at the moment.