The Observatory
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May 17, 2012 06:50 AM
USA Today’s oily, gassy rainbow
Detailed cover story a bit too rosy about ‘energy independence’
USA Today sees an oily, gassy rainbow on America’s energy horizon.
“Energy independence isn’t just a pipe dream,” read a large, bold headline on Wednesday’s front. It was draped over an image of oil drums stamped “Made in USA,” laid out like bowling pins in front the US flag.
The nearly 2,000-word cover story, by Tim Mullaney,...
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May 15, 2012 02:15 PM
Attachment parenting, detached debate
Time’s titillating cover overshadows article’s substance
Time touched a nerve this week with its provocative cover photo of 26-year-old Jamie Lynne Grumet and her 3-year-old son standing on a chair next to her, nursing her left breast while both stare directly (and unapologetically) at readers.
The underlying story focused on the “attachment parenting” method developed by Dr. William Sears, which...
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May 11, 2012 03:45 PM
The ice melt cometh
But flawless coverage about happenings in Antarctica has been rare
A variety of news outlets has covered two papers published this week indicating that the Weddell Sea area of Antarctica might be susceptible to faster-than-expected ice loss, but most went astray in one way or another.
The most troublesome of the bunch was the piece from Reuters whose lede reads:
Scientists are predicting the disappearance of another vast...
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May 9, 2012 02:30 PM
Biotech bogeymen
The San Francisco Chronicle’s muddled swipe at GE crops
If you’re worried about pesticides, then the San Francisco Chronicle has a sweeping indictment of genetically engineered (GE) crops to sell you.
At the end of April, the paper published an article by its Washington correspondent, Carolyn Lochhead, on its front page that used narrowly defined concerns about a new type of GE corn to mount a weakly...
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May 3, 2012 12:35 PM
Mad cow, sane coverage
Most media treat BSE discovery with appropriate concern
A few days after the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) announcement last month that it had discovered a case of “mad cow disease” in California—the first in the US since 2006—its media liaison took a swipe reporters, says the website Food Safety News. According to its report:
On the same day it promised to make the findings of...
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May 1, 2012 12:13 PM
Brain waves
Articles about neuroscience push ideology, inflame divisions, study says
From advice about “exercising your mind” to treatises on “the gay brain,” media coverage of neuroscience in the UK often pushes “thinly disguised ideological arguments” and reinforces artificial divisions between social groups, according to a new study.
A team of researchers at University College in London reviewed 2,931 articles published between 2000-2010 in the three best-selling British broadsheets and tabloids—the...
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April 26, 2012 05:26 PM
Obama promises climate talk
But reporters will probably have to keep asking
Three cheers to Rolling Stone cofounder Jann S. Wenner for getting President Barack Obama to utter the words “climate change” for the first time in a long time.
In a wide-ranging interview published Wednesday, Obama used the term six times in responses to three different questions, surprising many pundits and environmentalists who’d come to believe that...
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April 25, 2012 06:59 AM
NYT Obscures Wal-Mart, EDF Link
Article overlooks green group’s close ties to Walton Family Foundation
A recent New York Times article about the Environmental Defense Fund’s efforts to help Wal-Mart “cut waste” painted an incomplete picture of the group’s relationship with the retail giant, offering an instructive lesson in “green business” coverage in the process.
The article, which ran on the front of the paper’s business section on April 13, described Wal-Mart’s “mixed degree of...
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April 18, 2012 12:30 PM
Equivocal Efficiency?
Some articles fail to stress bottom line of electric-vehicles report
A new report outlining regional differences in electric cars’ contribution to climate change is drawing a lot of media attention, but a few articles have overlooked some important context about how the electric cars compare to all-gas vehicles.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, a research and advocacy organization, released the results of a nine-month analysis last...
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April 16, 2012 03:00 PM
Titanic Proportions
The 100th anniversary of one of the world’s most-covered stories
You can’t sink a good story.
The past few months have produced countless articles, columns, photo galleries, videos, and sundry media clips about the 100th anniversary of the RMS Titanic striking an iceberg and foundering in the frigid North Atlantic in the early hours of April 15, 1912.
The Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach reported that the president of...
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April 9, 2012 02:30 PM
Nutrition Coverage Under Fire
From red meat to white rice, not enough skepticism of observational studies
The incessant coverage of nutritional studies that make tenuous claims about the harms or benefits of consuming various foods and beverages has come under heavy fire from critics in recent months.
On Thursday, science writer Gary Taubes launched the latest broadside against credulous reporting of flimsy epidemiological research. “The last couple of weeks have witnessed a slightly-greater-than-usual outbreak...
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April 2, 2012 11:00 AM
Q&A: The NYT’s Justin Gillis
The recent Oakes Award winner talks about how to keep climate on the front page
At the end of March, Columbia University awarded the 2011 Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism to New York Times reporter Justin Gillis for his ongoing multimedia series, Temperature Rising, examining the fundamental tenets of manmade climate change. Articles in the series, most of which appear on the front page, provide in-depth, back-to-basics assessments...
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March 27, 2012 05:43 PM
Little Context for Obama Energy Speech in Ohio
Local reports present a war of words without much fact checking
Unchecked accusations about gas prices and oil production defined local coverage of President Barack Obama’s speech at Ohio State University last week, the final stop on a four-state tour promoting his administration’s energy policy.
The president’s address—which followed a visit to the university’s Center for Automotive Research, where he viewed the Buckeye Bullet, the world’s fastest electric car—touted...
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March 22, 2012 02:00 PM
Reporter’s Toolbox: Oil and Gas Prices
Resources to help journalists stop the spin
Every year, news stories about US gasoline prices appear in the early spring and remain popular until the end of the summer driving season in September. But “pain at the pump” takes on special significance during presidential election years, as Republicans and Democrats use gas prices to attack one another’s energy policies and curry favor with voters. This year, the...
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Science Picture of the Day
Mark Theissen/National Geographic via AP
On March 26, filmmaker James Cameron made the first trip to the deepest part of the world's oceans since two explorers visited over 50 years ago, and became the first person to make the journey alone. The historic dive received plenty of media attention.
Riding in a lime-green sub that he helped design, Cameron descended 35,576 feet to Challenger Deep, the deepest section of the Mariana Trench, about 200 miles southwest of the island of Guam. The image above, which accompanied an AP story describing the "desolate, foreboding" landscape he found there, shows Cameron emerging from the sub following a two-and-half-hour descent, three hours along the seafloor, and a 70-minute ascent to the surface.
The trip was part of the Deepsea Challenge project, a partnership with the National Geographic Society and Rolex, to film and collect samples from the trench. Unlike the bathyscaphe used in 1960 by Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard, the first and only other men to reach Challenger Deep (two remotely operated vehicles made the trip after they did), Cameron's sub is equipped with multiple cameras to shoot a feature-length documentary and a mechanical arm for scooping up rocks and animals.
A hydraulic fluid leak cut short the trip and rendered the arm inoperable, but Cameron and "sub co-designer Ron Allum, managing director of the Australia-based Acheron Project research and design company, already have more dives planned in the coming weeks," reported National Geographic News.
In the meantime, the National Geographic Society, where Cameron is an explorer-in-residence, released a two-minute video clip of the footage that he brought back from the Mariana Trench, whose bottom he described as barren, bleak, and lunar. The society also shared a photo gallery of Cameron's sub, including an incredible shot of the steel pilot sphere glowing molten red shortly after it was cast (there's also a short, historical video about how such spheres were developed over time to protect Cameron and other divers).
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The Observatory critiques science, environment, and medical journalism. Our goal is to encourage clarity, accuracy, and accountability in the coverage all things technical and complex.
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Desks
The Audit Business
- A game of telephone fools the Times And the newspaper-of-record short-arms the correction
- Audit notes: Questions for JPMorgan, hindsight journalism, Ticketmaster Jesse Eisinger asks what and when Dimon & Co. knew about the bank’s big loss
The Observatory Science
- USA Today’s oily, gassy rainbow Detailed cover story a bit too rosy about ‘energy independence’
- Attachment parenting, detached debate Time’s titillating cover overshadows article’s substance
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- The entirely predictable failure of Americans Elect A little poli-sci—or just recent history—would have helped pundits avoid the hype
- The Obama camp serves up a Bain story Some local outlets take the bait, while others offer a closer look