Do our newspaper opinion writers serve us well?

Is adequate regard being given by local columnists to facts, fairness and balance?

Last month, heated debate broke out over a column by George Will in The Washington Post.

Will does not believe that global warming may have catastrophic consequences, mentions other predictions by scientists of circumstances that did not eventuate, and quotes a couple of supporting "facts" about his opinion:

• global sea ice cover levels are "now equal those of 1979";
• there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.

The first in particular resulted in a torrent of objections. The debate raises questions, especially for Australian newspapers of record:

• should opinion writers be required to be sure of their facts?
• if they misstate a fact, must they publish a correction?

The sole correction I recall recently was one in The Age on 18 February.

Washington Post Ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, bought into the George Will brawl. He confirmed that the source of Will's claim about sea ice cover, University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, had stated what Will claimed, and that the column had been fact checked by others before publication. However the facts are that Northern Hemisphere sea ice cover is almost one million sq km below 1979 level, with a similar Antarctic increase. This hardly suggests a stable climate regime. Alexander thought that the Post should have immediately commissioned an explanatory column from a Climate Research Center scientist, instead of letting uproar continue.

This does, however, highlight the slipperiness of what is a "fact". Respected Climate Research Unit, at University of East Anglia, UK, proves this chart of global air temperature over the past 160 years:

Will is right. There has been no overall increase in temperature since the unusually high reading in 1998, but to say that "there has been no recorded global warming…" is not the full story.

New York Times Public Editor (a position akin to that of the Post's Ombudsman) has addressed the question several times. (This position was set up by the Times as one measure after the scandal of Jayson Blair, a former reporter caught plagiarising reports from other publications and on occasion, simply making things up.)

In March 2004, then Public Editor Daniel Okrent noted that while the Times has a policy of prompt and prominent correction of all errors in its news pages, "on the page where The Times's seven Op-Ed columnists roam, there has long been no rule at all, or at least not one clearly elucidated and publicly promulgated". He was promptly hit with an email from editorial page editor Gail Collins (who is now an op-ed columnist on the paper), and wrote:

Less a formal statute than an explanation and justification of practice, the document lays out the position of both Collins and her boss, [publisher Arther O] Sulzberger, who bears ultimate responsibility for hiring and firing columnists. Collins explains why columnists must be allowed the freedom of their opinions, but insists that they ''are obviously required to be factually accurate. If one of them makes an error, he or she is expected to promptly correct it in the column.'' Corrections, under this new rule, are to be placed at the end of a subsequent column, ''to maximize the chance that they will be seen by all their readers, everywhere,'' a reference to the wide syndication many of the columnists enjoy.

But who is to say what is factually accurate? Or whether a quotation is misrepresented? Or whether facts are used or misused in such a fashion as to render a columnist's opinion unfair? Or even whether fairness has anything to do with opinion in the first place?

Last June the issue surfaced again in the Times over a column that military historian Edward N Luttwak wrote, claiming that Barak Obama had committed apostasy, a capital offence in Muslim eyes, by abandoning Islam (Obama's father's faith) for Christianity; therefore it would be unrealistic to expect an Obama Administration to ever improve relations with Muslim countries. Current Public Editor Clark Hoyt took up the issue:

[…] The Times Op-Ed page, quite properly, is home to a lot of provocative opinions. But all are supposed to be grounded on the bedrock of fact. Op-Ed writers are entitled to emphasize facts that support their arguments and minimize others that don't. But they are not entitled to get the facts wrong or to so mangle them that they present a false picture. […]

With a subject this charged, readers would have been far better served with more than a single, extreme point of view. When writers purport to educate readers about complex matters, and they are arguably wrong, I think The Times cannot label it opinion and let it go at that.

Arguments about Australian newspaper columnists frequently rage in the blogosphere (News Corp's writers are a particular target amongst the left) but recall no discussion in newspaper opinion pages themselves. Australian newspapers do not have the financial resources nor do they publish the volume of material of the Post and the Times.

But is adequate regard being given by local columnists to facts, fairness and balance?

Without being grounded in facts, even a "fair and balanced" report may be misleading. As Times columnist Paul Krugman acerbicly observed during the last Bush administration, if the White House issued a report saying that the Earth was flat it would be reported as, "parties disagree on the shape of the Earth".