Andy writes, breathlessly:

Vice President Dick Cheney’s office was involved in removing statements on health risks posed by global warming from a draft of a health official’s Senate testimony last year, a former senior government environmental official said on Tuesday.

Watergate this is not. In fact, the editing of testimony probably occurs just about every time that an employee of the executive branch is set to testify before Congress, and this has been standard operating procedure for decades. The more significant the issue the higher up the chain of command the review takes place. The procedure is clearly outlined in OMB Circular-21 (PDF):

Unless a specific exemption is approved by OMB, materials subject to OMB clearance include:

• All budget justifications and budget-related oversight materials;
• Testimony before and letters to congressional committees;
• Written responses to congressional inquiries or other materials for the record; . . .

Now if you or I were in a decision making position in the Executive Branch we might make decisions about what to allow in testimony differently than those in the current administration. But make no mistake, such decisions are under the discretion of the administration. Federal employees who don’t like those decisions are free to go public or even resign (both occurred in this case).

A spat between elected and career officials may or may not be significant, as they happen all the time. My problem with the track record of coverage of such disputes on climate change by the NYT is that it they have been very misleading about what the news is in such situations. The headline reads: “Cheney’s Office Said to Edit Draft Testimony” suggesting that there is something improper or perhaps even illegal about the editing of testimony in the Executive Office of the President. There is not.

Revkin and I have disagreed on this same issue before. At the time I called the NYT coverage of Bush officials editing Bush Administration documents a “manufactured controversy” and I think that statement applies to today’s revelations as well.

Here are the comments I left on Andy’s blog, to which, perhaps understandably, he reacted a bit snippily:

Andy-

This is a “dog bites man” story in the form of “pit bull bites man”. It is red meat for those who do not like pit bulls, but at the same time, everyone knows that pit bulls bite.

Can you name a presidential administration in which senior officials did not play a role in shaping testimony on important issues? This is a loaded question, because of course you cannot.

I’m no fan of Bush or Cheney, or their approach to climate, but at the same time I think that it is only appropriate to present to your readers an accurate sense of how policy making actually works. In this case, Marburger’s explanation [cited on Andy's blog] is exactly correct.

It is perfectly fair for people to disagree with the actions taken by the Bush Administration on this testimony, but was it improper or even illegal? No, not even close.

Science does not dictate particular policies, and presidential administration’s have wide latitude in what information they present and how they present it. This is spelled out in OMB Circular 22:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/circulars/a11/current_yea r/s22.pdf

Dog bites man is not news.

[ANDY REVKIN says: Roger, maybe you forgot to read the entire 2004 story, which made the points you’re making now.]

— Posted by Roger Pielke, Jr.

First, there are a wide range of explanations for the differences in media coverage of the two papers. Here is a summary of what I heard (warning: not all explanations are consistent with each other):

*The media is biased toward sensational stories, and Vecchi/Soden was not sensational.

*The relevant media was distracted by the Bali climate meeting.

*The relevant media was distracted by the AGU meeting.

*The relevant media had an interest in stories that added to pressure to act on climate change in Bali.

*The media has (recently) begun to downplay research that suggests uncertainty in climate science.

*Nature did not promote the Vecchi/Soden paper, whereas NCAR aggressively promoted Webster/Holland.

*Vecchi/Soden buried their main message, so the news value was hard to see.

*The hurricane/climate change issue is “s/he said-s/he said” and not interesting.

*Hurricane season is over.

One question I asked of several people is the apparent paradox between the recent “balance as bias” thesis which holds that skeptical voices are given too much play in debate over climate change with the claims from several people I spoke to that the media tends to favor alarming stories in the climate debate. The best answer I got to this came from a reporter:

In general, news coverage favors the sensational rather than the mundane. For example, there were tons of stories this year on the arctic sea ice extent. Next year, if the sea ice doesn’t set a record, the coverage will be less by orders of magnitude.

However, within stories on global warming, there is a great pressure to be balanced. So if we have scientists saying human activity is causing the melting, there’s a desire to represent another viewpoint, no matter how much in the minority it may be.

So there’s an overall bias for sensationalism (or alarmism, when it comes to global warming). The simple reason is this attracts eyeballs. But within stories there’s an effort for balance.

To test this out the hypothesis of a general bias against skeptical voices I searched Google News for references (2004 to present) to “climate change” and “hurricanes” for both “William Gray” who advocates no discernible effect of global warming on hurricanes and “Kerry Emanuel” who advocates a very strong effect. There were 268 stories quoting Emanuel and 297 quoting Gray. This would suggest that, on the hurricane issue at least, there is no indication that the media has disfavored skeptical voices. These data don’t say much about the media favoring the sensational, as Gray’s presence in news stories might just be “balance” in a sensationalized story. More work would need to be done to say anything on that.

Looking to the academic literature Mullainathan and Shleifer (2002, full cite and link below) provide the best piece of research that I have seen on media bias. They focus on ideological biases and also what they call “spin.” which is the same thing as favoring (or creating) sensational stories as suggested above. They suggest that (emphasis added):

. . . competition is an important argument for free press: despite the ideological biases of individual news suppliers, the truth comes out through competition. We show that, with Bayesian readers, this is indeed the case: competition undoes the biases from ideology. With readers who are categorical thinkers, however, the consequences of competition are more complex. We show that, in the absence of ideology, competition actually reinforces the adverse effects of spin on accuracy. Not only do the media outlets bias news reporting, but the stories reinforce each other. As each paper spins stories, it increases the incentives of later outlets to spin. This piling on of stories means non-ideological competition worsens the bias of spin. Moreover, spin can exacerbate the influence of one-sided ideology. When the first news outlet that uncovers the story is ideological and later ones are not, the first one sets the tone and later ones reinforce this spin. This can explain why and how inside sources leak information to news outlets: their principal motivation is to control how the story is eventually spun.

Our theory of news reporting falls between two extremes. The traditional view is that readers demand, and media outlets supply, pure information about political and economic markets, and thereby facilitate better consumer and voter choice (Coase 1974, Besley and Burgess 2001, Besley and Prat 2002, Djankov et al. 2002, Stromberg 2001, Dyck and Zingales 2002). The opposite but also plausible view, pursued by Mencken (1920) and Jensen (1976), sees the media as entertainment, with no obvious grounding in reality. The perspective of this paper is that media outlets provide neither unadulterated information, nor pure entertainment. News outlets may be biased for ideological reasons. And consumers, while not desiring pure entertainment as might be the case with sensational or human interest stories, do indirectly affect news content because of how they process information. So for reasons of ideology news outlets may bias information to please their owners, and for reasons of consumer psychology they may bias the information to please their readers.

These results have significant implications for media accuracy. They explain, in particular, how the media in the aggregate are likely to get to the bottom of a news story with significant ideological dimension. Ideological diversity serves as a safeguard against spin. Our results are consistent with Richard Posner’s (1999) highly favorable assessment of the press in the coverage of the Clinton affair. Our results also show why media bias is most severe in the cases where no or little ideological diversity bears on the story, such as the investigation of Wen Ho Lee. In this case, the bias comes from spin, and spin causes the followers to pile on. Competition among media outlets is not a solution to the problem of spin – indeed, it makes the problem worse. Our paper makes the case for extreme ideological diversity in the media – in such diversity lies the best hope against spin.

If these findings are anywhere close to the mark, then they offer a powerful counterargument to the “balance as bias” thesis. The climate issue is characterized by a wide range of ideological perspectives, and it seems hard to justify why any of those perspectives should not be represented by the media. That means reporting on a wide range of political perspectives and the justifications for those views offered by those holding those perspectives, even if the reporter, or the vast majority of scientists or other groups, happens to disagree with either the politics or justifications. Where there is diversity balance is not bias, but bias is bias.

S. Mullainathan and A. Shleifer. 2002. Media Bias, NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES, Working Paper 9295 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, October 2002, © 2002 by Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer. http://www.nber.org/papers/w9295

For further reading, see this New York Times book review on media bias by Richard Posner.

Nature magazine, arguably the leading scientific journal in the world, published a paper this week by two widely-respected scholars — Gabriel Vecchi and Brian Soden — suggesting that global warming may have a minimal effect on hurricanes. Over two days the media — as measured by Google News — published a grand total of 3 news stories on this paper. Now contrast this with a paper published in July in a fairly obscure journal by two other respected scholars — Peter Webster and Greg Holland — suggesting that global warming has a huge effect on hurricanes. That paper resulted in 79 news stories stories over two days.

What accounts for the 26 to 1 ratio in news stories?

In his 20/20 segment, Stossel copied and pasted the usual exhausted arguments about global warming, including that old one about atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide rising hundreds of years after temperatures began to increase when the Earth was emerging from past ice ages. I guess he was trying to convince viewers that greenhouse gases don’t actually warm the planet, almost putting him in the same company as flat Earthers.

Of course he is either willfully ignorant or willfully misleading. At risk of annoying those Prometheus readers who generally don’t want to waste time on issues like this… Scientists have long known that CO2 and other greenhouse gases lag climate change in the ice core record, and they offer a widely accepted explanation. Changes in Earth’s orientation to the sun are believed to initiate the rise in temperature that heralds the end of an ice age. This rise in temperature, in turn, causes greenhouse gases to be emitted into the atmosphere — for example, as permafrost melts, methane is released. And this accentuates the warming. (For an excellent explanation of this idea, see this RealClimate post.)

I have no problem with Stossel pointing out uncertainties in our understanding of climate, or even arguing in an opinion piece that “the debate is not over.” But I’m not at all certain his viewers understood that his “Give Me a Break” segment on global warming was not actually journalism but straight up bloviation. Stossel is clearly motivated less by a desire to follow the truth than by blind allegiance to a laissez-faire ideology. Since the free market alone probably cannot solve global warming, Stossel’s ideology likely will prevent him from ever acknolwedging even the possibility of a threat from anthropogenic climate change. He is therefore disqualified from covering this issue as a journalist.

I have to say that I was skeptical when I sat down to watch the first segment of “Planet in Peril” on CNN. The title itself seemed to promise the typical sensationalized fare. But I found it to be remarkably well reported. CNN pulled out all the stops on this one, sending Cooper, Corwin and Gupta around the world to report on biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change. They were even unafraid to include science in their reporting. Imagine that! We’ve now gone from not having a single full-time environmental reporter or producer in all of broadcast and cable news just a few years ago, to four hours of gorgeous high definition imagery and solid television journalism on the fate of the planet. Unbelievable.

I know some critics will say that Cooper, Corwin and Gupta were just as biased in their treatment of this material as I maintain Stossel was in his. But I’m not buying it. Whereas Stossel simply rehashed the same old tired arguments, twisting the truth along the way, “Planet in Peril” was notable for its originality and in-depth reporting. One of my favorite segments was on pollution spewing from a Chinese mine into a river used by a local village for irrigation and drinking water. People in the village are getting sick, but little is being done to clean things up. In the great tradition of television investigative reporting, Sanjay Gupta literally walked right in to the mine offices with a camera crew to conduct an interview of the unsuspecting mine manager. In China! It was stunning.

But the very best environmental coverage of the last couple of weeks came on the Colbert Report. Stephen asked Anderson Cooper how people can help the environment without any inconvenience…