To Tell the Truth

As of February 19, 2009, it is acceptable to lie in the pages of the Washington Post. There is no other way to interpret the e-mail that the paper’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, sent to reporter Pat Johnson that day, excusing a blatantly error-riddled column on global warming by George Will that the Post had published earlier in the week.

Will’s piece is beyond factual defense. The problem is not that he opposes
policies to fight climate change. The problem is that, again and again, the piece makes factual statements that are plainly false. Will states that there was a “global cooling” consensus in the 1970s; there was not. Will asserts that there has been no global warming in the past 10 years, citing the World Meteorological Organization; the WMO actually says that the world has been warming since 1998. Will claims that the University of Illinois’s Arctic Climate Research Center has said that global sea levels are at the same level as in 1979; the center quickly responded, clarifying that they had claimed no such thing. These are only three examples; the full list of the piece’s distortions is much longer.

Despite these lies and mischaracterizations, Alexander, in his e-mail, refused to censure Will for the piece. Not only that, he echoed approvingly the Post editorial board’s statement that it “checks facts to the fullest extent possible” and even defended one of Will’s more egregious lies from the column.

The message was clear. Not only would Will and his editors at the editorial page not apologize for misleading their readers, but the ombudsman, supposedly the readers’ voice at the paper, would defend the distortions. At every level, the Washington Post is prepared to support writers who lie in its pages.

The obvious defense—that Will’s is an opinion piece—strains credulity. The objection to Will’s piece is not ideological; indeed, it is highly doubtful that an intellectually honest column arguing against a cap-and-trade system or carbon tax would have provoked a similar uproar. The objection is rather to Will’s repeated mischaracterization of his sources in support of assertions that are simply erroneous. The piece’s presence on the op-ed page does not excuse the editors of the Post’s decision not to pull a column they know is full of errors or penalize Will in any way.

While obviously reflecting badly on Will, this incident also concerns the staff of the Post. The value of an established institution like the Washington Post is the trust its readers place in it. When someone reads an issue of the Post, they expect that the factual assertions contained therein are correct because of the Post’s reputation. By printing a column that the most rudimentary fact-checking would have exposed as fatally flawed, the Post has broken that trust.

This should trouble everyone publishing in the Post’s pages, from its metro reporters to its style editors. The decision to run Will’s piece has instilled in the public considerable doubt about the publication’s veracity as a whole. If a reader cannot trust that the facts cited on the Post’s op-ed page are true—and, after the Will incident, she cannot—why should she trust the facts in its news coverage or its investigative journalism?

Obviously, newspapers should strive for intellectual diversity on their opinion pages. But the old Pat Moynihan quote, “Everyone is entitled to his opinion, but not his own facts,” is a cliché for good reason. By printing and defending George Will’s lies about climate science, the Washington Post has deceived its readers, and undermined its credibility as a journalistic enterprise.


Dylan R. Matthews ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Wigglesworth Hall.