Journalists fail in their public duty to inform by focusing on controversy over facts.

I thought I’d write about two articles that caught my attention from the increasingly formulaic and uninformative New York Times.

The first article is about pine forests in Oregon and is relevant to the last installment, How Environmentalism is Ruining Earth1. It is subtitled “Environmentalists Object to Killing of Firs, Healthy or Not, as Climate Muddies Land Management.” As I read the article, a simile dawned on me. Environmentalists are to the political Left as MAGAs are to the political Right. I’m not suggesting equivalence: Each group presents different issues for our system of government. But there are striking similarities. Both groups distrust experts in scientists and governments. Both retreat into simple truths and canonical beliefs when confronted with facts that do not fit their worldview. And both refuse to compromise and protest when others don’t see things their way.

Devout environmentalists should get their own hat:

In this article, the Times again encourages the circular firing squad by highlighting the controversy rather than reporting on the facts. The DC-based freelance reporter, Anna Kramer, is a recent graduate of Brown (International Relations, Class of 2020) who writes a food blog, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that the article is “science light,” focusing on drama.

The scientific facts are summarized nicely by Prof. Rob Jackson, a Stanford ecology professor who studies forest ecosystems and climate change. He is quoted:

The droughts and heat and climate change are killing trees widely, and there’s no clear way to put that genie back in the bottle. We are priming our forests to die.

The stark and observable fact is that Oregon’s evergreen forests (so iconic as to be featured on the state’s license plates) are dying.

What is the response of the environmentalists? Ms. Kramer states they “still harbor long-held suspicions from nearly a century of government-approved forest clearcuts.” [Well? Are the suspicions justified or not? Don’t regurgitate, Anna, investigate!] The rest of the article focuses not on uncovering facts but on flogging this “pro’s-and-con’s” formula, quoting different opinions without reaching a conclusion. Here are two in the “con” camp:

• The (non-scientist) director of a regional conservation group, Luke Ruediger2, “was struck by the forest’s declining health [but] remained concerned that the agency [the Bureau of Land Management] might manipulate the situation to justify selling more wood for commercial purposes.” [Mr. Ruediger objects to selling condemned trees for lumber??! He should search for “beetle kill pine” to see what other affected forest areas are doing about the problem. ]

• Dr. Dominick DellaSala, Chief Scientist of forest preservation non-profit Wild Heritage, said, “What the agencies will do is cherry-pick the science to fit the desired outcome.” [And what science do you pick, Dr. DellaSala?]

The worst possible outcome is to do nothing: Inaction would mean the forest dries out, dies, and probably catches fire, returning decades of captured carbon (and ash) to the atmosphere. And that’s precisely where a circular firing squad leads. It’s journalistic malpractice.

So, is BLM acting suspiciously? Not at all—The paranoid outcome of shadowy “government-approved forest clear-cuts” disappeared half a century ago. Many regulations, including the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), require transparency and thorough analysis of possible ramifications. Before making this move, BLM held regional “field trips” for stakeholders (anyone interested, actually) to the affected area and is preparing a detailed Environmental Assessment (with public comments as required by NEPA) to support their actions. The BLM is following a deliberate, legally-imposed process that has taken years. The interest in “doing something” is summarized nicely in the opening paragraph of the EA:

If you have driven lately in the woods of southwest Oregon, you may have noticed an unnerving number of fir and even pine trees that are dead or have red needles and are dying. Recent local studies3 have shown that in southwest Oregon more Douglas-fir trees died between 2015-2019 than in the previous four decades.

Yes, the die-off is now nearly a decade old and getting worse. It has taken me only a couple of hours to investigate the truth behind Ms. Kramer’s short story, with publicly available information that, had she sought to tell the truth, would have told her which side to support. But the circular firing squad prevails again. It benefits the journalist but not the public.

News Alert: Watch as massive areas of Oregon’s now-dead forests burst into flames, putting firefighters’ lives and our lungs at risk!

Great job, journalists, and great job, environmentalists!

The second scientific headline comes from a series of stories featured on last Sunday’s edition’s cover of the Opinion section. It asks the rhetorical question, “Can we finally have an honest conversation about Covid?” and goes into the origin story of the deadly strain that emerged from China in 2019. The two headlines “Why Covid Probably Started in a Lab” by Alina Chan and “An Object Lesson on How to Destroy Public Trust” (about Dr. Fauci and the fallibility of government science) by Zeynep Tufeki should give you an idea of the thrust.

Dr. Chan is a Scientific Advisor affiliated with the Harvard-MIT Broad Institute. She recently published a book titled “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19,” so you get where she’s coming from. Dr. Tufeki is a Professor of Sociology at Princeton and was an early advocate of masks to slow the spread of the virus.

First, the cover editorial begs the question because it implies that previous conversations about Covid have been purposefully dishonest. While there is damning evidence that individual scientists (including Dr. Fauci) inside the government weren’t completely transparent about what they didn’t know and then succumbed to human temptation to hide their ignorance, I have seen no evidence whatsoever of malicious intent.

The truth is scientists can never know for sure how Covid began. Science rules out alternative explanations only through experimentation, but we can’t go back to Wuhan in 2019 to observe precisely what event led to the pandemic. The philosophical (and time-tested) recourse for scientists is to accept the simplest explanation, which, as 14th-century friar William of Ockham observed4, should be considered correct unless more evidence emerges—Occam’s Razor (as this is known) controls the swirl of potentially complicated explanations. It helps Science progress.

The simplest explanation is that Covid started the way more thoroughly studied viral diseases started: Transmission from other species. Dr. Chan invokes the absence of similar data as “proof,” but that’s shitty Science. The bottom line is that the virus originated in China, a totalitarian state that suffered mightily from Covid’s wrath due in no small part to early obfuscations by public officials. It shouldn’t be surprising that hard evidence of lax government oversight in China is lacking. But the lack of evidence proves nothing. If you want to see what a real epidemiologist thinks of the same article, check out Science-Based Medicine.

This leads me to Dr. Tufeki’s opinion column. She asks for transparency from scientists, and we agree that Science needs openness. In context, the early days of the pandemic were data-poor and deeply political, and as the data emerged, early plausible explanations were disproven. That’s how the scientific process works. But she is more-or-less repeating an OpEd from 2020 where she advocated wearing masks at a time when that was not official guidance. [Good for you, Dr. Tufeki! You guessed right, despite your lack of formal training in infectious diseases!] But, in the 2020 article, she also advocated social distancing, while in this one, she criticized Dr. Fauci for advocating distancing without evidence.

<venting on> The question is not whether or not to trust. It’s who to trust—journalists shouldn’t leave that up to the reader. I’d love for every American to be sufficiently scientifically literate that they can reach conclusions independent of journalistic interference. But that’s not the world we live in. When bothsidesism is the default for “fair and balanced” news coverage, the truth is lost. The only thing that remains is divisive argumentation. And that leads to a circular firing squad, zero progress, and the mindless chatter that characterizes today’s “public square”. <venting off>