Flagged. The Washington Times is not a reputable source. If people want to discuss this, please replace the article with one that isn't a dumpster fire of deliberately misleading information.
Would people consider it a conflict of interest if someone was paid by a liberal think tank for years and published research in line with that viewpoint?
The question should be weather the research is replicable, not who funded it.
> Critics point out that none of Crockford's claims regarding the effects of climate change on polar bears has undergone peer review, nor has she ever published any peer-reviewed articles whose main focus is polar bears.
Keep in mind that peer review is the lowest bar for academic quality. It's barely table stakes.
Peer review usually means people tried to replicate it. Lack thereof usually means most reputable scientists won't even give it the light of day because it's not based in reality.
Peer Review is basically just gate-keeping for journals. It has nothing to do with replicating the research, just with verifying that the person submitting the paper crossed their Ts and dotted their Is rigorously enough.
It's not even research, the skeptics community gave her a thrashing for her "work" here is a deep dive on her "research" and why its all bullshit:
https://www.desmogblog.com/susan-crockford
Thank you for flagging. They are one notch away from the ilk of InfoWars (Alex Jones) and Danger & Play (Mike Cernovich). What sucks is that HN publishes to the feed APIs before flagging/moderation happens, polluting aggregators and other media sources with phony news.
Is somebody automatically disreputable based upon their political affiliation? If so, perhaps MacCarthyism is alive and well! It would be fair game, of course to analyze the article and list the reasons it is or isn't accurate.
The reason the article isn't accurate is that it (deliberately) fails to mention the actual reason she was fired: failure to disclose a financial conflict of interest, along with failure of any of her academic work to meet the lowest bar of academic quality after fifteen years.
This is the problem with most publications. It's get the news out first, rather than research and try to be unbiased. Bias is unfortunately what our news is today.
The problem you described is real, and is visible to some degree at all publications. But you're either misinformed or are being disingenuous if you think you can credibly claim that the Washington Times is in any way comparable to other more reputable publications in this regard. They are a clear outlier with a motivated bias.
The Washington Times does not skip research to get their publication out first, they deliberately craft misleading and false stories in order to serve their conservative narrative.
Do you have some personal insider knowledge to substantiate this with? I mean I have some pretty heavy personal bias about the Washington Post being pro Amazon, and I would totally understand it if it was. But even then, I can't make a claim that they are deliberately making false stories. That's a level of knowledge I can't claim to have. That's also potential libel on your part.
You can't credibly make those comments about the Washington Post because they aren't true, and most educated people know that. Legally though, you're welcome to say (almost) whatever you want about them.
Sibling comments are correct:
The Washington Post is a reputable newspaper with a slight liberal skew.
It sounds like you're not very familiar with the media landscape in the US, or with how libel laws work here (hint: there is no potential libel on my part, that's ridiculous).
What you just said is totally acceptable as opinion. But claiming "they deliberately craft misleading and false stories" is not provable by your person, since you do not yourself work there. There are people who really believe their drivel is true. I don't claim to know why this is, but flat-earthers seem to exist, even today, just as a side example.
There is a baseline standard of quality in journalism that a majority of the educated public still requires, populist Newspeak notwithstanding. If you read news without scrutinizing it, and without holding it to such a standard, you are guaranteed to read and accept things that aren't true.
When you publish a story about someone that fails to mention a relevant detail that is present on that person's Wikipedia page, that is not an accident, that is a deliberate omission. In this case, the relevant section was highly visible, and was five sentences long. Nobody writing this article could have missed this.
Then there's the detail itself. When the detail undermines the author's argument, or changes the narrative of the story they're trying to tell, the author needs to address this. They need to mention the detail, and if they have other evidence that might move me to put less weight in that detail, then they can present it here. But to leave the detail out entirely, and hope that I don't google the person is dishonest, and assumes that their readers are stupid and uncritical.
When the editors at a publication exhibit a pattern of such sloppy, deliberately misleading journalism, and when that pattern happens to perfectly fit a specific political narrative, then the educated public is more than justified writing off the publication in the manner that I have done.
tl;dr: Google stuff. Look for problems with the way the argument is presented, not for things you disagree with. If it doesn't pass the sniff test, you're allowed to write it off. If there's a pattern of not passing the sniff test in a particular way, you're allowed to call bullshit. I can't believe I have to fucking spell this out, but here we are.
Another thing you should note is even though The New York Times is "the newspaper of record" there are tons of things they get consistently wrong, and seldom ever retract an iota as far as I've seen.
You also have in the news industry what is acceptable fact. There are facts, which if any one party find them negative to anyone reported, simply won't be reported. This is why the ideologies of China (blocking or discrediting news) fit so well with the US right now - we're already basically doing this.
Washington post is a left-leaning news paper, but actually reputable as news can be in USA. Washington Times is basically another Breitbart or Infowars.
Very true, the problem is removing the Fairness doctrine. Which required that all 'news' had equal airtime between different sides of an issue. Since that went away the news has become just all opeds all the time... Just listen to whichever echo chamber fits your political ideology best instead of getting all the facts.
Moderation does not unbiased news make. Everything is biased. What you have is the news you are already biased towards - your own personal echo chamber.
I'm not claiming that it's unbiased, just that I'm getting much more relevant information from the comments than on any other news site/forum that I know.
Just not having jokes/clickbait allowed makes HN special.
An example for the strong bias that I know of is how much HN crowd thought that the iPhone would flop.
Canadian universities have had some questionable incidents around free speech [1]. So I wondered as I was reading this if this is, as the prof says, "cancel culture."
However there's this ...
"Crockford is a signatory of the International Conference on Climate Change's 2008 Manhattan Declaration, which states that "Carbon dioxide and other 'greenhouse gas' emissions from human activity...appear to have only a very small impact on global climate," and "Global cooling has presented serious problems for human society and the environment throughout history while global warming has generally been highly beneficial." Between at least 2011 and 2013, she received payment from The Heartland Institute, in the form of $750 per month" [2]
Washington Times is well known to be far-right. With that being said, I'm confident that a good discussion would prove the worthiness of the article one way or the other.
Because they list and link to the reasoning behind their opinion. You can read the sources and any extra information and form your own. This is not simply "we think it's bad, trust us".
The "Analysis/Bias" section of Washington Times basically boils down to: founded by religious people, uses language and SEO that they don't like, and publishes articles from scientists they don't like. I don't consider Washington Times as a paper of record necessarily, but I do think fact-checking is a much harder problem than people are willing to grant and the evidence listed in that section wasn't very edifying.
> “There is no evidence to suggest that Dr. Crockford’s adjunct appointment was not renewed for ‘telling school kids politically incorrect facts about polar bears,’” said Ms. Parkin. “The University of Victoria, in both word and deed, supports academic freedom and free debate on academic issues.”
vs
> Ms. Crockford accused officials at the Canadian university of bowing to “outside pressure,” the result of her research showing that polar bear populations are stable and even thriving, not plummeting as a result of shrinking Arctic sea ice, defying claims of the climate change movement.
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I guess I was hoping for a better argument given the headline? Is there a strong basis for cause-effect here?
It doesn't seem like Ms. Crockford was a tenured professor either. Her former position was as an "adjunct professor". I admit that I'm ignorant to college-politics, but hopefully someone can fill me in on some of these facts.
At least in my experience with Canadian institutions, an adjunct professorship is largely an honorary title. It is typically unpaid. You can supervise graduate students and apply for some grants, but that is about it. Also it is not meant to be permanent... You receive it for a fixed duration (say 3 years) and have to renew it. Renewal may be based on several factors but certainly may include how well you work with people from the school in question.
I don't know anything about the case being discussed here, but my expectation is that the non-renewal of an adjunct status cannot be compared with getting fired as a tenure or tenure-track professor.
Just so we're clear, this is a Washington Times article. It must be a reflection of a complete shift of internet culture rightwards that this rag has been upvoted here significantly.
The messenger is part of the content. If Alex Jones screams some anti-liberal hate, I can rationally make some assumptions about the quality of his message before even committing time and energy to vetting his statements. This is normal, and vetting all statements would be impossible. This is a useful filter, if applied prudently.
For many people, yes. None of the critics here, for example, has challenged a single element of the article as factually false (let alone providing any supporting data for same).
I'm seeing some warning signs in this article when I dig into the sources:
> University of Victoria economics professor Cornelis van Kooten warned of the threat to free speech on campus. “I think the climate change movement has done extreme harm to academic freedom,” he said, and the movement isn’t alone.
Why are we interviewing economics professors about suppression in the Climate science?
Then we get to Judith Curry[0]:
> Her Polar Bear Science blog came under fire in a 2017 study in the journal BioScience by 14 academics, including Penn State climatologist Michael E. Mann, decrying the influence of “denier blogs,” which Georgia Tech professor emeritus Judith Curry blasted as “absolutely the stupidest paper I have ever seen published.”
On whom Wikipedia says:
> In 2019 she stated that she would not “bother with” peer-reviewed journals, in favor of publishing her own papers so that she could editorialize and write what she wanted “without worrying about the norms and agendas of the ‘establishment.’”[1]
It's very hard for me to find a source here in support of her that isn't spending a lot of time using coded language for, "the establishment is corrupt, you can't trust mainstream scientists, you can only trust this fringe group and the reason no one agrees with us is because they hate us, not because we're wrong." It reminds me a lot of when I was growing up in a Creationist community, and I'd hear regular reports about the 'brave' scientists that would get fired because they rejected fossil record evidence.
I'm not going to outright say bias doesn't exist in climate science, but if a publication like the Washing Times wants to claim it does, I'd expect to see much more compelling evidence than this article provides.
OP, I feel you could find a less biased source to cover this story for the same reason I don't post outrage articles from left-leaning websites despite my being outrageously lefty.
I'm confused by the comments. Is it fake new because WT is the source, or is it fake news because we have a legitimate source (e.g. University's or professor's statements) that actually confirms that it's fake?
I'm not, personally, familiar with WT but seems there are a lot of jumping to conclusions happening here.
I don't wanna say that EVERYONE is bias, just curios about what really happened.
I believe it's the source that is the issue. It's "fake news" in that the source is extremely biased, and therefore untrustworthy. Not that we know the content is strictly composed of lies.
But.. every news outlet is bias and "propagandist", NYT has A LOT of eye rolling, leftist extremism fueling articles, WP as well, even New Yorker is super bias (New Yorker is more fun to read though..) but all of the above also have gems. I still glance through those as it is important for getting a full picture and not just a picture of one of the political bubbles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_J._Crockford
She was paid by a conservative think tank for years and didn't disclose her conflict of interest.