Whatever the WSJ may have been in pre-Murdoch days, it's now apparently the Journal of Wall Street Bullshit

If there was ever really a truth-telling Dr. Jekyll component of the supposedly Jekyll-and-Hyde-like Wall Street Journal holed up in the newsroom, it seems to have passed safely into oblivion.

by Ken

Admirers of the pre-Murdoch Wall Street Journal always claimed that the paper had to be thought of as two fundamentally different entities. Yes, they acknowledged, the editorial pages were as shamelessly propagandistic as anyone with eyes could tell. However, they insisted, the news pages were strictly legit, and one of the journalistic world's great reportorial sources.

Since I avoided the paper like the plague, I was never in a position to judge. Certainly the filth spewed out daily on those editorial pages was so egregious, and lent such unwarranted respectability to heaps of the most vicious lies and obfuscations to be found in print, that I considered mere possession of the rag a mark of intellectual squalor.

Of course I was aware that the paper employed actual journalists who at least occasionally produced actual journalism, and even journalism of high quality. I know too that even the paper's staunchest defenders worried openly about the future of actual journalism following the News Corp takeover. I go into this background by way of explaining that I have no way of judging whether the monumental fraud the Journal has just perpetrated in its propaganda war against the reality of global warming is a product of the paper's News Corp-ification.

As it happens, the story, as reported by Media Matters (here courtesy of Nation of Change: "Wall Street Journal Downplays Study Confirming Global Warming"), concerns one that we took note of: "Climate-change deniers have never cared about 'truth'; they merely demand the right to vilify honest people with their lies and delusions." It concerns a study by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, spearheaded by physicist Richard Muller, who had long argued that the data on which other scientists based their theories of climate change couldn't be trusted without verification. The story was, essentially, that the Berkeley project's exhaustive study confirmed the data.

To say that this hasn't gone over well among right-wing counterscientific thugs is an understatement. Ironically, the project was funded in part by the Charles Koch Foundation, which I think it's safe to say -- although Richard Muller denies it -- was clearly expecting a very different result.

Muller was careful to note in the op-ed piece he wrote when the project's basic findings were released that the study did not take any position on whether the clearly measurable global warming was man-made. But he made it clear that where climate-change skeptics had previously had grounds for skepticism, they no longer did. In a phrase that has been widely picked up -- though not at the Wall Street Journal -- he argued, "You should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer."

As Media Matters notes, though, there was one curious thing about the Muller op-ed. It was published -- on October 21, "the same day the preliminary reports from the BEST study were released" -- in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal and on the paper's website, but not in the U.S. print edition.

A Factiva search of the Wall Street Journal shows that the Journal's U.S. paper did not mention the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study for over two weeks after the results were published. The Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media noted that the Journal published an editorial in the following days titled "The Post-Global Warming World" that was "dismissive of climate change" and had not "a word about the BEST study." [Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, 11/1/11]

And when the Journal broke its mysterious silence on the subject? As Media Matters' headline puts it: "WSJ Eventually Prints Article About Study -- Only To Downplay It." In a November 5 article, "Global Temperatures: All Over The Map," Carl Bialik (billed by the paper as "The Numbers Guy") reports it as a story about the "uncertain nature of tracking global temperature." What he's actually assembled, the MediaMatters report suggests, is an orgy of obfuscations if not outright lies.

I get the feeling reading Bialik that he knows less about climate science than I do, which isn't much, but he's clearly good at searching out people with the slant he wants on the story and then performing tricks with numbers. Given enough prompting from the scientific peanut gallery, he had what he needed to be able to throw bunches of numbers up in the air and have them land as superbly adulterated right-wing bullshit.

Naturally this all gets kind of technical, though again my impression is that Bialik hasn't a clue what the discussion is actually about. He makes a federal case, for example, of supposedly expert allegations that the BEST study ignores satellite temperature readings in favor of allegedly much inferior ground readings, but NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt (in an e-mail to Media Matters via the Climate Science Rapid Response Team) notes that "the satellites and the ground stations are measuring different things, and it isn't obvious that they should be the same," and insists that the "factor of two difference" claimed by Bialik "is not supportable from the data." (Richard Muller points out in an e-mail to Media Matters that the article's claim "is misleading because he doesn't point out that satellite measurements do not give ground measurements, but only temperatures up higher in the atmosphere. Also the satellite measurements he is referring to are, I believe, global and not land only.") Media Matters cites other scientists saying that the satellite data in fact accord quite well with the ground data.

But perhaps the best indicator of the quality of Bialik's "reporting" is this claim:

This sort of messy hashing-out of the global climate record is happening in the open because the Berkeley Earth team chose to release its data, and its papers, before undergoing peer review by scientific journals. Already some feedback has led to updates and corrections to the research. Berkeley Earth plans other work, including adding ocean temperature trends to the land records and fixing errors in its database.

He does actually quote Richard Muller on the subject of peer review. He ends his piece:

"Some people mistakenly think peer review means secret review by anonymous referees at journals," Mr. Muller says. "We're getting wonderful peer review, from McIntyre, from Briggs, from other people. That's the process of science."

However, it seems most unlikely that Bialik, when he got this quote from Muller, mentioned the use he planned to make of the peer-review issue, which is to blatantly imply, without a ghost of a whisper of a hint of substantiation, that those "updates and corrections to the research" in any way alter the study's findings or the report's conclusions. And we can be pretty sure that Bialik never said anything to Muller about Berkeley Earth planning on "fixing errors in its database." How can we be sure? Because Media Matters quotes Muller again via e-mail:

In response to that passage, Richard Muller wrote: "I can't imagine what he is referring to." Muller noted that his team had updated data from NASA in a chart, not their own results.

I would suggest that it's hopelessly naive Bialik has any interest at all in the truth. It's all about furthering the mission of the Wall Street Journal as the prime propaganda outlet for the 1%. As some guy once said, "Climate-change deniers have never cared about 'truth'; they merely demand the right to vilify honest people with their lies and delusions." Media Matters reminds us about the September 2009 WSJ editorial, "Rigging a Climate 'Consensus,'" which extrapolated from the famous stolen e-mails between scientists at the University of East Anglia that climate-change data could no longer be trusted, now that it was revealed as possibly rigged, which the BEST report clearly indicates was not the case.

Of course that was the WSJ's editorial side, the universally acknowledged Mr. Hyde of the supposedly Jekyll-and-Hyde operation. If there ever was a truth-telling Dr. Jekyll component holed up in the newsroom, it seems to have passed safely into oblivion.

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