The Great Journalism Swindle

What nobody ever tells you is that journalism is not a profession you can learn. You either have the knack or you do not. Of course you can go to school, and there are several good ones, where former journalists teach principle and technique. Classes busily analyse who was successful and why. You learn the structure of newspapers, magazines, and television stations, and how they are staffed. You learn copy editing, editing editing, and how to write a lead. But the profession is so competitive that there is no way learning the ropes guarantees you a career. 

Without the knack, you’re toast in a year. The knack is largely a product of a voracious mind unafraid of complexity and eager to tweak the powerful. This is why new media are like a river full of leaping fish at spawning season. Old carcasses in the shallows twitch in their death throes, their meaty carcasses already turning grey. New media break one story after another, all pink and new and leading the charge. Consider Andrew Breibart in the U.S., easily the journo-success story of the new millennium. Breitbart, at 40 with a stable of unknowns he pays next to nothing, breaks almost every story worth talking about.

Old media began to die the minute they became assets rather than businesses. Advertisers demand a lack of hotness. Lack of hotness puts off customers. Boards of directors?  Even worse. No controversy, too much to lose, no lawsuits, we own the media; we don’t want to be in the media. Be meek, bland, just the facts we are comfortable with, ma’am. The bloated multinational is a sleek shark sliding in the shadows. Secrecy is all.

Thereby, cutting the customers out of the equation, who began to snore, then drop their subscriptions, and find another source. Who needs more worshipping of the status quo and the endless celebration of ghastly Hollywood cadavers? 

Which brings me to Torontonian Donna Laframboise. Recently, she did something that the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star should have done three years ago, which was ground-truth the 2007 IPCC Report, upon which senior governments all over the world have made multi-billion dollar decisions, which affect the lives of everyone on earth. 

Readers of Laframboise’s blog, noconsensus.org, volunteered for the task. Forty citizen-auditors from 12 countries examined the 18,000 citations, all of which were guaranteed by the head of the U.N.’s climate unit to be peer reviewed. For accuracy, each of the 44 chapters was reviewed by three separate committees of three.

Let’s give the floor to Donna: “The focus was extremely tight. The entire exercise was a truth-in-advertising evaluation: Is it true – as the IPCC chairman and the media have repeatedly claimed – that the report is based solely on peer-reviewed journal articles?

“It was incredibly straightforward for lay people to read through the references, sort the scientific journals from the other kinds of sources, and then count everything up.”

What were the results? Almost one-third of the supposedly peer-reviewed citations were no such thing. They were “grey” literature, which is to say newspaper pieces, magazine articles published by the World Wildlife Fund, Audubon, Greenpeace, etc., all of whom publish advocacy magazines for their membership, all filled with wild accusations of ecosystem melt-down. Working papers, position papers, and opinion pieces all made it into the report.

So let’s be exact.  What were Donna’s results? 

“As the citizen audit results I released...reveal, the 18,531 references cited by the IPCC are so far from being 99 per cent peer-reviewed it’s laughable. A full 30 per cent of them (5,587) were not published in peer-reviewed academic journals.

“Moreover, in 21 out of 44 chapters (48 per cent) the level of peer-reviewed references was so low the chapter received an ‘F’ on our report card.
“Let’s restate this: the rate of non-peer-reviewed source material cited by the IPCC is thirty times larger than what the British government suggested would be acceptable a mere 12 weeks ago.”

Why didn’t the CBC do this work? There are hundreds of contract workers at the corporation who sit around filing their nails and arranging their vacation time. Where was the National Post? Where were the Star, the Globe, Macleans and the Citizen? Doing the lazy.

In mid-May, the U.N. released their report on biodiversity, claiming that one-third of the planet’s species are going extinct, including 90 per cent of the grasslands of North America, an assertion so stupid that anyone driving across the northern prairies or through the intermountain West would be able to disprove. Nonetheless, Time Magazine threw the story onto its cover that very week. This, despite the fact that the annually published Index of Leading Environmental Indicators puts species loss around 2.7 per cent, then points to recoveries of many. Even the alarmists at the Heinz Foundation put species loss nowhere near 1/3. So here we go again, lies dressed up as truth, which trigger regulation that damages the financial health of hundreds of thousands of families.

Note: Laframboise is a former Post, Star, and Globe journalist who left the profession seven years ago out of disgust.  We can see why her despair is so well founded.  For some real journalism,  try NoConsensus.