There's been an effort in recent months to argue that
Washington Post employees have something of a responsibility to speak out against George Will's consistent lies and misrepresentations on climate change. Today,
Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan do exactly that. Towards the end of a
piece on the unexpectedly rapid decline in arctic sea levels, they write:
The new evidence—including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s—contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979.
As Dave Roberts
says, it's "hard to read it as anything but a rebuke from the news team to
Post editor Fred Hiatt and his editorial page." And it's not the only one. Andrew Freedman took to the
Post's weather blog to
debunk Will.As a former fact-checker, I'm sympathetic to the difficulty of verifying opinion pieces. Someone can argue, for instance, that the uncertainty level in climate science is high enough that we shouldn't act, and though I don't think that's an appropriate read of the data, it's not
falsifiable. Will's recent untruths, conversely, have been simply wrong. He said something was "X" when it was "Y." I did the same thing in an
op-ed this morning. I wrote that our health care system "costs more than twice as much per person as that of any other country." I was wrong about that. I should have written that our system costs more than twice as much as
the OECD average. So I sent the
Los Angeles Times an e-mail and tomorrow they will run a correction. By contrast, Will has been doubling down on the original claim in
subsequently published columns. That removed it from the realm of individual error and rendered it a threat to the institution's credibility. And the institution, it seems, is noticing.
