Nicholas Dawidoff, the author of the NYT magazine cover profile on Freeman Dyson, was interviewed by Bob Garfield of NPR’s “On the media” (transcript, audio here). As was I, based on my post, “NYT magazine profiles climate crackpot, Freeman Dyson.”
Dawidoff made one of the most amazing statements ever uttered by a professional journalist writing on the very serious subject of whether human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases will have catastrophic impacts and what we should do about it:
NICHOLAS DAWIDOFF: When people feel strongly about something and when it’s a matter of great urgency and when it’s a matter, for many people, of a looming apocalypse, of course, it should be taken very seriously.
But just because many people are scared and worried and feel that this is a time of impending doom, if we don’t do something, doesn’t mean that you don’t listen to somebody who disagrees with them….
… you definitely always want to hear from people who are going to push back against consensus. It only makes the people who are the majority or the people who are going forward and making public policy sharpen their arguments.
… the fact is, is that, you know, I think it’s healthy in a democracy, when you’re going forward with monumental legislation, that you listen to everybody’s point of view.
BOB GARFIELD: Does it matter, from a journalistic point of view, whether he’s right or whether he’s wrong?
NICHOLAS DAWIDOFF: Oh, absolutely not. I don’t care what he thinks. I have no investment in what he thinks. I’m just interested in how he thinks and the depth and the singularity of his point of view.
That’s all you need to know about Dawidoff. This is all just entertainment, personality, and drama for him — not fact-based journalism.
He doesn’t care whether Dyson is dead wrong, whether Dyson is in fact completely misinforming the public, the media, and policymakers. He doesn’t care that if people actually listen to Dyson — and they clearly do when he gets this kind of high-profile focus — that we would be dooming many billions of people to completely preventable suffering. He just wants a sexy subject for a profile.
He says the “subject should be taken very seriously,” but his followup words — and the profile itself — give the lie to that platitude. If the subject should be taken very seriously, then the only thing that matters is whether Dyson is right or wrong. And since Dyson’s bizarre statements – “There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global” – are utterly invalidated by direct scientific observations, it’s clear that Dyson does not deserve any attention by serious journalists.
The NPR interviewer, Bob Garfield, seemed to think that the profile was so cleverly done that it gave Dyson the rope to hang himself and obviously discredited him:
JOE ROMM: The public is not scientifically expert, and the public’s ability to distinguish science and pseudoscience, which sound pretty much the same, is very small. So it is up to the filters, the media, to use its own judgment based on talking to many different sources and itself weighing the credibility of sources.
What The New York Times Magazine has done is elevate Dyson to a very high degree of credibility as a highly credible source on global warming, which he isn’t.
BOB GARFIELD: Wow, I so can’t believe we’ve read the same story. The story I read didn’t promote his opinions in any fashion, such as you’re describing.
But Garfield’s view was utterly given the lie by the stunning Newsweek acceptance of Dyson’s disinformation (see “What else is Newsweek wrong about? Pushing Freeman Dyson’s pseudoscience“). Apparently Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, a unit of the Washington Post Co. (!) read the same story that I did — but not the one that Garfield seems to have read.
The fact is many people read that article as a validation of Dyson. Most readers don’t pay a lot of attention to the subtleties of the technical arguments.
JOE ROMM: I disagree. Let me make two points. It states many of his positions at length and doesn’t rebut each one of them. That, I think, is very important.
Second, it is well known that most people, when they read things, they don’t recall many months later rebuttals or how things were couched. There are a lot of people who read this who don’t have an informed opinion, and they are going to read this and they’re going to think, oh geez, there’s a very smart guy out there who thinks global warming might well be good for us, and we don’t need to do anything about it because we’re going to invent genetically engineered carbon-eating trees.
And I just think that it is this, you know, height of journalistic elitism to think that we’re going to write a piece so clever that people will read between the lines to realize that we’re secretly mocking him.
BOB GARFIELD: I don’t suggest that he was mocking him either, but I think you’re also ignoring the preponderance of The New York Times’ reporting over the years, the extensive coverage that, for example, Andrew Revkin has given to this subject, you know, that I would say in no way sugarcoats the issue of climate change.
Ahh, so now it is the tremendous media coverage of global warming by the New York Times that justifies this dreadful piece.
Not! (see “NYT’s Revkin embraces false balance, equates Will’s active disinformation with Gore’s effort to understand and communicate climate realism” and Unstaining Al Gore’s good name 2: He is not “guilty of inaccuracies and overstatements” and is owed a correction and apology by the New York Times – and don’t get me started on “In a stunning journalistic lapse, the NY Times gives credulous coverage to Swift Boat smearer Marc Morano, the Jayson Blair of global warming” or their “science” columnist “John Tierney makes up stuff, just like George Will “” does the New York Times also employ several know/do-nothing fact checkers?“).
Let me end with my best answer I gave:
BOB GARFIELD: You know, I’ve got to say, back in the ’70s a guy named William Shockley, who had won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on developing the transistor, started coming out with some generally crackpot theories on race and was ridiculed and attacked, but the outrageousness of his theories did not make me less want to know what led to his using his Nobel Laureate status as a bully pulpit for racist, pseudoscientific views. I wanted to know more about him, not less.
When people say controversial things, shouldn’t we want to know more about them, not less?
JOE ROMM: Because of the way it covers global warming and similar issues as he-said/she-said, the media guarantee that a certain fraction of the community is going to go out there and say outrageous things to be covered. I think that if there’s a fire in a theater and you are screaming, there’s no fire, don’t move, then you don’t deserve a cover profile in The New York Times Magazine.
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Not sure what King is trying to say here. Is it that the situation is beyond costing?
I think he may be saying – throw everything at it now because of the chaotic nature of the beast.
Yes, isn’t King saying that the error bars overwhelm central predictions? That the huge potential downside, even at small probabilities, makes the average cost estimate less valuable.
I think the primary problem is that the NYT is completely ignoring the power and dominance of climate denial discourse, and the deliberate work that went into manipulating the entire frame of the argument (which is ironic given the Revkin article we saw just a few days ago that made it clear that climate denial is not just ‘another opinion’). It may be journalistically valid to cover someone’s alternate opinions (though not challenging those clearly ridiculous and damaging opinions strikes me as irresponsible.) But it is not journalistically valid to take the ‘skeptical’ discourse we’ve been hearing over the last number of years as anything less than manipulative, anti-democratic, and situated in a particular position. Common understanding is entrenched for a reason, and failing to contest that common understanding, taking it at face value is simply irresponsible. That distinction seems to me to be one that the NYT has failed again and again to make.
It’s a cross between asking Britney Spears what her opinion is on Global Warming and that interview Michael Moore did of Charleton Heston and gun control. I quess Mr Heston was getting a little old and it was a little embarassing, like it was ambush Journalism.
Are they going to interview every elder scientist on their opinion?
Another jewel:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/26/AR2009042601515.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
ecostew, the article states…
…America’s energy needs in 2030, as estimated by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Compared with 2007, the United States is projected to have almost 25 percent more people, an economy about 70 percent larger and 27 percent more light-duty vehicles.
The thing is if we curtail cheap energy then growth too will be suppressed. The only reason the wold population is what it is today is because of cheap energy.
Speaking of jewels, this appeared today in the tabloid rag that all Philadelphia rail commuters read on the train:
http://metro.us/us/article/2009/04/27/05/0650-82/index.xml
I’ve already sent the author a “corrective” email and encourage others will do the same.
Useful resource:
https://www.nrdc.org/energy/renewables/default.asp
No doubt the reporter would not be disinterested in whether his interview subject had an opinion on the Holocaust. Climate change is at least as certain has that historical event.
The problem is that modern journalistic “standards” do not provide for different methods of handing a story that is opinion-based and one that is fact-based. A story on how Britney Spears latest release is being received by the critics and a story about reactions to the latest scientific findings on climate change are treated the exact same way: Find someone who says one thing, then find someone who says the opposite, print quotes from both viewpoints and call it journalism.
Given that the public gets its view of scientific reality from the media and that at least of half of that public have their doubts about the seriousness of GW, the failure of the media in this regard is self evident.
If Dawidoff sees his piece as being outside this media failure, he is delusional.
I think the comparison to holocaust denial is accurate in that it pinpoints why the Times, and many of my colleagues, think there was nothing wrong with this profile: at the end of the day, they feel no moral urgency when it comes to climate change.
On the other hand, they would never in a million years profile a holocaust denier in as sympathetic a manner – because of course few things in the west have more moral urgency than the attempts by some to erase the memory of the deaths of millions (and by extension what those deaths might mean for modern genocides).
The sad fact of the matter is that until we are a century hence and it has become apparent that climate change is just as lethal, none of these journalists will feel any differently.
Nice guys to make the NYT a paper not so must to read. All other topics edited in the same fashion? of course.
Joe,
I found your contribution to this discussion extremely valuable. There is a Nietzchean quality to the way Garfield and Dawidoff discuss journalism in this: that it is “beyond good and evil”. For Dawidoff, this is all about the aesthetics of writing and personal description. It’s kind of like fiddling while Rome (no pun intended) burns.
I think the Times as do some other news sources don’t want to become activist journalists but instead want to treat action on global warming as just one of the flavors of human experience. They want the reader not to feel too uncomfortable or in some way called to action.
Thomas: people like you are a mystery. Do you go to have a cure by a charlatan, while we have solid professional doctors?
I don’t like to get into comment wars, but I really do not think Jorleh’s reply makes any sense or is relevant at all.
I am not saying we need to LISTEN to Dyson, I am saying that we should not call for the silencing of those who challenge our views or ridicule those who publish their views. (Never in my post did I say Dyson was right at all, I think his opinion is absurd.)
To connect it to the doctor bit, I personally follow mainstream medicine and go to normal doctors and listen to them. However, I don’t think it should be frowned upon if some alternative medicine nut gets featured in the news.
For what it’s worth, I think global warming is the greatest issue facing humanity and should be the priority of the entire world (since that is what’s at stake). That said, I don’t think to accomplish these goals we need to resort to trying to suppress alternative viewpoints. Just like I don’t think to stop terrorist attacks we should sacrifice our rights and liberties. It doesn’t work and it doesn’t help.
Like I said: Diversity makes us stronger.
Thomas are you suggesting that an opposing view of say, two plus two is twelve, should be given airtime and column inches in a public forum people turn to for objective fact?
One used to turn to the news to get the facts behind opposing opinions. If someone claims two plus two is four and another claims two plus two is twelve one could turn to some news outlet to find out what IN FACT the answer is.
The press with regards to AGW has simply reported there is a disagreement without slightest regard to who IN FACT is correct.
They simply report there is a disagreement. The public is left to decide what the facts are.
The call and it is a correct one is for the public to be able once again to turn to the media as a source of fact.
Keep in mind, it’s conceivable that Dawidoff is not a volunteer.
(I have no knowledge one way or the other on this, but when I put on my “threatened trillion dollar industry” thinking cap, all sorts of weird things come floating up.)
Don’t feel too bad about Bob Garfield–he doesn’t get climate change, he didn’t get Stephen Colbert’s brilliant satire in front of Bush at the National Press Club dinner (Garfield followed the mainstream herd–thought it was rude and “not funny”), and if you listen closely, you’ll find most weeks he exclusively inhabits the upper, superficial layers of discourse, cloaking his conventional “wisdom” in the habit of supercilious snark. His relentless assault on your position was just a cover for his ignorance. Ironically, I used to think On The Media was such a great show (and it IS well-written–and Brook is much smarter than Bob), but since they don’t have Bush to bash, the thinness is showing through.