More about the WP coverage of Copenhagen

The other day I posted on James Fallows damning article on the failure of The Washington Post to debunk the right wing interpretation of the leaked emails from the East Anglia Climate Change center; The New York Times did its duty and let its readers know that the right wing charges were inflated and contradicted the consensus of the scientific community.

Following my posting (and without doubt in complete ignorance of my opinions, not that they would have mattered anyway) The Washington Post published an opinion piece by Sarah Palin that followed the line of the climate change deniers.

Now Mark Ambinder has used The Atlantic to publish a rebuttal, point by point, of the Palin piece. Good for him!

Information Literacy

With the Internet, especially, we now have access to lots of sources of information. "Information literacy" is in part the ability to evaluate the information we receive to make informed decisions as to its credibility. Certainly an indicator of the credibility of information is the credibility of its source. Newspaper editors should work very hard to protect the credibility of their papers.

I still attach strong credibility to the reporting of The New York Times, tho less than I once did. I find the credibility I attach to the reporting of The Washington Post is diving.

Of course, the source is only one factor. Another is the process by which information is generated. The process used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which involved review of the scientific literature and development of consensus among many hundreds of distinguished scientists, seems especially worthy of respect. Indeed, as I have associated with one of the principals of the study and have great respect for him, I tend to believe even more in the work of the IPCC.

As many postings have shown in the past, I found the environmental assertions of the Bush administration to be suspect. That judgment leads me also to distrust the assertions of Sarah Palin, the Republican successor to George Bush as the spokesperson for a wing of the Republican party.

Of course when I am faced with two diametrically opposed pieces of information, the fact that one is more credible than the other leads me to further downgrade the confidence I place on the source of the less credible assertions.