The Tracker is late in recognizing a terrible, illuminating row over climate change politics, ideology, data, history, and general perceived idiocy that has been raging for a couple of weeks now. It's not...
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The Tracker is late in recognizing a terrible, illuminating row over climate change politics, ideology, data, history, and general perceived idiocy that has been raging for a couple of weeks now. It's not just a cat and dog fight, but a roaring whirlwind of coyotes, stoats, wolverines, and other beasts ripping and snapping away. So here is an incoherent summary - the only thing possible in the midst of this ruckus - with enough links to get started anybody who also has missed it, and wants to catch up.
It started with newspaper column that, to these eyes at first, seemed nothing particularly unusual.
Anybody who keeps up on climate change politics has heard most or of the standard arguments why the world's climate is not changing so much or, if it is, it's not our fault or it's good for us and anyway the IPCC is full of meddling, hysterical eggheads who mistake...
A friend suggested The Tracker take a look at the current edition of Health News Review, the University of Minnesota's...
A friend suggested The Tracker take a look at the current edition of Health News Review, the University of Minnesota's excellent site for dissecting how medical research is reported in the media. It is a yin to this site's yang. The difference: HNR is the one with rigor, formal metrics for quality, and other scholarly embellishments. One cannot help noticing that its highest ratings - for five stars of attention to statistical significance, caveats, cautions, and underlying scientific method - aren't given out cheaply. This month it gave two such bouquets to one reporter,
Marie McCullough at the Philadelphia Inquirer. They are:
- ...
Fans of and worriers about the state of science reporting ought to look in regularly at the Columbia Review of Journalism's blog site The Observatory. Two pieces have recently landed there with distinct pertinence:
Fans of and worriers about the state of science reporting ought to look in regularly at the Columbia Review of Journalism's blog site The Observatory. Two pieces have recently landed there with distinct pertinence:
- Cristine Russell: Science Journalism Growing Overseas / AAAS meeting highlights dwindling American coverage ; Cris, currently at Harvard and also president of the Council for the Adv. of Science Writing, was at AAAS and noticed an effervescent Brit, Aussie, and otherwise not-American press corps having a great time. The old time US media were hardly to be seen. One might argue that the overseas cadre has a tradition of going to AAAS, a fun trip and good party, while cynical US reporters sniff that it no longer has much news. But one suspects there is...
Good thing the NYTimes's Kenneth Chang has a sense of humor. Or at least, to put a happy (and witty) face on a little bit of mortification. It's all in an...
Good thing the NYTimes's Kenneth Chang has a sense of humor. Or at least, to put a happy (and witty) face on a little bit of mortification. It's all in an on line mea culpa today, which he posted as a guest blogger on the TierneyLab blog on the Times's site. If you go to the site, do NOT miss clicking on the video link to a certain late night comment on Chang's boronic story. Chang's original, and now corrected story, is here.
I've often thought that among classic recurrent nightmares - you know, lost on campus on the way to the final exam in a course you never took, and you forgot your...
Newspaper people haven't had much good news lately about their own business, and things got no better in the last week. The good possibility that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is soon...
Newspaper people haven't had much good news lately about their own business, and things got no better in the last week. The good possibility that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is soon to be shuttered hits hard, even though any American town with two newspapers these days almost certainly has one in deep trouble and the other in deeper trouble. The Tracker just looked through the archives a little bit for a reminder of the good material that even this narrowly focussed operation at ksjtracker found to highlight from the P.I. Its science and environment writers - notably including Lisa Stiffler, Tom Paulson, and Robert McClure - are pros who write with an edge and a purpose. A list of the paper's appearances on these pages is...
The Tracker long ago decided the NY Times's John Noble Wilford has had the best beat in the science newspapering business. He expanded horizons writing about things long ago or far away or...
The Tracker long ago decided the NY Times's John Noble Wilford has had the best beat in the science newspapering business. He expanded horizons writing about things long ago or far away or otherwise yonder from our daily toils. That is, he was the Times's astro-cosmology-space writer (not so much lately, what with Chang and Overbye there), and was and is its preeminent writer on old bones, stones, and other reminders of our deep ancestry. Plus he likes old maps. He has a Pulitzer and lots of other office wall decor already. Now Editor and Publisher has a brief note bringing word that he is getting in Philadelphia tonight the Outstanding Public Service Award from the Archaeological Institute of America. It...
Newspaper-writing, TV- and Radio-talking doctors are not of course your average news reporters. They're often practicing medicine still, and don't seem as obligated as most reporters do to provide a citation to a source when they...
Newspaper-writing, TV- and Radio-talking doctors are not of course your average news reporters. They're often practicing medicine still, and don't seem as obligated as most reporters do to provide a citation to a source when they say something authoritative. They are doctors. But nonetheless it's more than notable that a man known best for his journalism on CNN, Sanjay Gupta, is a front-runner for surgeon general in the Obama administration. He is a neurosurgeon (and a one-time People magazine "sexiest men alive" designate) still doing the occasional procedure in Atlanta at the Emery U. Sch. of Medicine's Grady Hospital. Doctor Dean Edell, Nancy Snyderman MD, et al: eat your hearts out.
Washington Post's Howard Kurtz start off his...
The bloggomania that has overtaken the news flow is on balance a good thing- except for its erosion of mainstream media revenue I suppose. Information and opinion are part of the human condition. We...
The bloggomania that has overtaken the news flow is on balance a good thing- except for its erosion of mainstream media revenue I suppose. Information and opinion are part of the human condition. We get a much more constant exposure to the way people think when they don't have skilled editors to tap on the brake once in awhile when they detect murky exposition. But things can sure get screwy out there.
A case in point is a blog at the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. It takes dead aim at Andrew C. Revkin, the influential NYTimes climate and environment reporter and writer of the Dot Earth blog. Revkin comments in response. The Tracker's...
Science writer, weather maven (and backup Tracker) John Cox - thank you very much - brings to our attention a succinct critique at the influential Real Climate blog by...
Science writer, weather maven (and backup Tracker) John Cox - thank you very much - brings to our attention a succinct critique at the influential Real Climate blog by geochemist Eric Steig. Seeking to redress a bit the site's usual tilts at the denialist camp of anthropogenic climate change commenters, he takes on common errors among mainstream environmental reporters. Mostly it has to do with interchangeable, hence misleading, use of the terms weather and climate in the Brit press. But its message has broader pertinence. One comment, by "Thom" offers some slight solace perhaps to the UK's enviro journalism corps. It argues that in Britain, climate and weather are taken by the culture to be pretty...
Two items here from outside the usual trapline. Both are of keen interest to those of us who hope to see robust, competent, and professionally fair, objective reporting on science and related news...
Two items here from outside the usual trapline. Both are of keen interest to those of us who hope to see robust, competent, and professionally fair, objective reporting on science and related news continue to reach the public in as many and as diverse ways as possible - and who believe that such reporting pays off in a better informed and wiser society.
- 1) TOP SCIENCE JOURNALISM TRADE ORG's PROTEST to CNN: Early this month CNN made public its decision to sharply cut its staffing for science and environmental news (earlier post) . The most prominent casualty was veteran broadcaster and anchor Miles O'Brien, but it was a lot more than one man out the door joining the throngs of unemployed journalists from all over, from nearly all beats. In response The World...
It's fine to read, in the Telegraph (UK), a review by ...
It's fine to read, in the Telegraph (UK), a review by Robert Colvile that declares Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker not only wildly successful with a good new book out - called Outliers - but that he spent a while earlier in his career as a science writer at the Washington Post. Sure enough, this beat can make one a star. Dunno if he, as it says here, has a claim on "most successful journalist on the planet" but it's a lively way to say he's a player of the first magnitude. So keep on scrivening, science writers!
Most of us have been infiltrated by Gladwell's coinages, particularly his propulsion of "tipping point" into one of the...
About two months ago The Tracker helped out with a climate change conference at Ohio State University for journalists. Also participating was a man named...
About two months ago The Tracker helped out with a climate change conference at Ohio State University for journalists. Also participating was a man named Berrien Moore III. He's a mathematician with a resume jammed with proof of his savvy as a politically-astute science adviser to government agencies - NASA in particular. I have an instinctive rubric when I meet accomplished and persuasive technical people who are smart, buttoned-down, and socially sensitive. I tend to think "man, I wish he/she were science adviser to the White House."
Plus Moore was listed as director of something new called Climate Central. But I didn't really get what it is that Climate...
CNN has been giving environment and global climate matters a good, if somewhat breathless and teary-eyed, ride lately with its Planet in Peril project. So a stunned wave of anguish is running among US...
CNN has been giving environment and global climate matters a good, if somewhat breathless and teary-eyed, ride lately with its Planet in Peril project. So a stunned wave of anguish is running among US science journalists today upon word that CNN has just announced near-demolition of its science, technology, and environment news staff. One post down is news of an ancient star-destroying explosion in space; now we get a star-eating implosion in the news biz. Included for criminy's sake on the exit rolls is Miles O'Brien, a 17-year veteran who cut his teeth in the space program, has been a regular as an anchor, and now is taking his fat resume out the door. What in blazes is going on? Same old, same old, unfortunately. It's been a busy sidewalk lately, jammed with out-of-work journalists. This site's beats are no exception. The idea of cutting environment beats in particular,...
4Dec 2008
Another post today covers news of more layoffs and cutbacks in US science media staffing. Here's news of another sort: a major publisher celebrated a science writer! Monday evening the San...
Another post today covers news of more layoffs and cutbacks in US science media staffing. Here's news of another sort: a major publisher celebrated a science writer! Monday evening the San Francisco Chronicle and the Hearst Corp. jammed the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate park with a throng to salute David Perlman. He turns 90 at the end of this year, and still gets up every morning raring to get into the office and to do what he's wanted to do since seeing The Front Page in New York at age 12: be a newspaperman. He had a whole career as a general and foreign correspondent, but he's been at science for a little over half a century. He's also an old and dear friend and mentor of mine, as I spent 26 years cheek by jowl with him at the Chron. As I am so deeply entangled in feeling, and info, about him, I'd not done a post. Fortunately the...
On Sunday the Sacramento Bee's Tom Knudson provided for readers a dispiriting requiem-in-advance for the...
On Sunday the Sacramento Bee's Tom Knudson provided for readers a dispiriting requiem-in-advance for the tall conifer-dominated forests of California's high country. Ecosystems are sensitive things. Much of the Western US's landscape appears to be in tumultuous reorganization. Climate change and a legacy of flawed forestry are taking their tolls largely via fire, drought, and insect blight, we've heard. This piece provides a few specifics. Knudson's focus is on the intensifying and lengthening fire season in the state's primary mountain range - the Sierra Nevada whose granitic ramparts cradle the likes of Yosemite Valley and Lake Tahoe.
It's a big and brawny story. The sources seem to be well-chosen: veteran wild land workers, longtime residents, and the occasional...
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