Second NYT Reporter Faces Allegations of Serious Misconduct
Does the New York Times have yet another Jayson Blair problem?
Patrick Richardson has kept us all up to date on the battle between the NYT‘s Eric Lichtblau and Rep. Darrel Issa over an error-filled hit piece Lichtblau launched at Issa. Now it looks like the Times will have to answer for yet another deceiving reporter on its payroll. The Franklin Center today launched a broadside against NYT reporter Ian Urbina for his work on “fracking,” work that had a tremendous and negative impact on the natural gas industry. The Franklin Center’s letter alleges that Urbina engaged in a great deal of wrongdoing in his reporting:
The letter raises a number of difficult-to-answer questions surrounding Times standards that appear to have been violated by reporter Ian Urbina in two recent articles on shale gas (‘Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush,’ June 25 and ‘Behind Veneer, Doubt of Future of Natural Gas,’ June 26). The reports, which relied heavily on anonymous sourcing, rattled energy markets and raised the ire of federal regulators by suggesting the gas industry and the government were grossly exaggerating shale gas reserves for the purposes of maximizing short-term investment.
The reports relied heavily on several industry critics whose credentials appear now to have been described in a misleading and inaccurate manner. Furthermore, Urbina left the impression with readers that a much broader cross section of government officials and experts were sourced in the report, when in fact his reports were based primarily on the opinions of three critics whose motivations and biases raise serious questions about their credibility.
Urbina’s reporting errors have already been the subject of the Times’ Public Editor’s scrutiny on three separate occasions (July 16, July 31 and August 6); however, our letter calls on the Times’ Standards Editor to launch a formal inquiry into whether standards established in the wake of the infamous 2003 Jayson Blair affair were violated. It focuses specifically on Urbina’s apparent violations of standards around his three key sources – Deborah Rogers, Art Berman and C. Hobson Bryan III.
The letter points out that a litany of Times’ standards were violated by Urbina, including failure to “distinguish conscientiously between high-level and lower level executives or officials” and a prohibition against dissembling about sources. In the case of C. Hobson Bryan III, Urbina sources him as “one official,” an “energy analyst,” and “one federal analyst,” without disclosing that these three sources are one in the same. Nor does Urbina inform readers that Bryan held two low-level positions with the Department of Energy – intern and, later, Junior Engineer; instead, he gives the impression that Bryan was a qualified official in a position to know.
In another instance, Urbina failed to disclose that one of his sources, Art Berman, is a paid consultant to numerous companies and interests that are in direct competition with the shale gas industry. He was identified by Urbina as an industry insider.
Deborah Rogers was presented as a financial industry professional. In fact, she’s an organic goat farmer involved in a bitter dispute with the natural gas industry.
If the Franklin Center is right then pattern here is obvious; in each case, Urbina inflated his source’s credentials to enhance their credibility. That obviously gave his story weight it did not deserve. It’s not quite fabricating sources as Jayson Blair did, but it’s not far from it.
The Franklin Center’s nine-page letter is here. The NYT has much to answer for.
There’s no penalty for being wrong so the NYT and the other Democrat mouthpieces just make stuff up. If somebody catches on, they print a retraction on the obituary page. In the meantime, it’s “All the ‘news’ Pinch Sulzberger really wants to be true.”
Only the second?
I believe this is referring to the number of times that the NYT has been CAUGHT.
Recently.
Far from it. NYT reporters buried Stalin’s crimes and invented stories about torture and jail conditions in Nicaragua and Salvadoran soldiers throwing prisoners out of helicopters during the civil war there.
Concurrently, & currently.
And they wonder why they can’t even give away free umbrellas and tote bags?
Talk about unclear on the concept…
After all of the liberally biased media suffers it’s well deserved slow death, perhaps we will all enjoy watching our “higher” education system suffer the same fate. It is time that these institutions pay for the harm that they have done to the US!
I keep saying this, but it looks it is really true. The Times’ new logo should be: All the fictions that fits our views, that what we print as news.
C’mon, guys, how could the NYT make an error in a story? After all, don’t they have–what is it, three layers of editors? or was it “layer upon layer” of editors–to check facts?
Unlike right-wing bloggers, who don’t have a single soul checking their stories to see if they’re true. Yep, wingnut bloggers can just print anything they want, whereas the *Times*–um…well, we work in a LOT bigger building. So *there*.
True. Actually bloggers have a far better fact checker than the NYT, other bloggers and blog comenters. And since those blog fact checkers usually respond, and are responded to by the bolgger, almost immediately, the corrections come out much quicker.
The NYT has been so horrendously wrong, so often, that one has to wonder why they are still regarded as a credible source by anybody. If the rest of the MSM stopped following their lead on everything, they would dry up and blow away.
All the organic goat farmers I know are financial industry professionals.
…and the author lists in his credentials that he has a jouralism degree from MSU….. Making Stuff Up
An organic goat farmer as a source? The mighty New York Times could only get an organic goat farmer as a source? The mind reels at how low the NYT has sunk. Ian would have gotten more readership if he would have written about organic goat farming than about natural gas problems.
Very frankly, I am now very interested about Ms. Rogers and her organic goats. I am actually quite turned on by Ms. Rogers and her organic goats. I wanna help Ms. Rogers milk her organic goats at 4:30 in the morning.
This is very good for you as Mr. Rogers and her organic boutique farm colleagues don’t do the actual work of farming. If interested you should inquire with her as this is the work americans typically won’t do.
It’s as if the NYT is bringing a new definition to the term Scandal Sheet, as in, “Creating scandals for itself.”
Remember that scene from Men In Black where Tommy Lee tells Will Smith that the reporting in the Enquirer and the other “tabloids” was the best investigative journalism out there and how funny that joke was? Now we find out it wasn’t written as a joke. We got the Enquirer nominated for a Pulitzer for investigative journalism, while the NYT should take the Enquirer’s place in the grocery checkout lane next to the paper with a headline about Elvis and UFO’s.
Several ice ages ago when Doonsebury was still funny, Zonker Harris and other residents at Walden Farm convinced “Roland Burton Hedly Jr., tough, cynical reporter just back from Vietnam” that hippies still existed, free love was still rampant and etc. Zonker was astonished and chagrined, “I didn’t think they’d publish it!”. In his defense when asked if he checked out the sources, “Roland Burton Hedly Jr., tough, cynical reporter just back from Vietnam” replied, “I didn’t need to, they assured me it was true.” Asked what he covered in Vietnam, “Roland Burton Hedly Jr., tough, cynical reporter just back from Vietnam” replied “Sports”.
Blau that Mister Licht. At the Dinosaur Media, the top masts are on fire, and may they burn to the waterline!
Is anyone in the family going to send Pinch Christmas cards any more? Talk about pi**ing away value. NYT stock is going to be harder to sell than AOL at this rate. I predict a day where we see a sale of the NYT on the same terms as the Newsweek sale.
All I can say is, “Liar, liar, pants on fire!”
This is what I love about blogs. A real reporter whose work is scrutinized and fact-checked by a multiple levels of editors at his newspaper has a story published, and then the blogger gets to throw around unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing and make his own factual errors!
Urbina’s reporting has upset the natural gas industry, but not because it’s wrong. All of the criticism leveled against him has been about where he got his information. Can you find a single error in the facts that he reported? Has anyone? No. Every assertion that he made has held up to scrutiny.
Stop coddling a giant, wealthy industry. This guy is out there working his behind off to call it like it is.
O rly? From the letter:
“Mr. Berman is eventually quoted by name in the June 25 story and identified as “one of the most vocal skeptics of shale gas economics.” While this is true, the story fails to mention that Mr. Berman makes his living promoting this view and providing investment advice to Canadian companies who invest in or produce oil and gas from so-called tar sands, and therefore compete with the US shale gas industry. The story also did not disclose that Mr. Berman worked as an expert witness for Gasification LLC (a unit of Leucadia National Corp.), which invests in a competing technology known as coal gasification. Like tar sands, coal gasification only makes economic sense if shale gas can be discredited as a source. The information about Mr. Berman’s ties to the coal industry can be found on the Internet with the help of Google.”
So, shale gas is bad because…it’s not tar-sand or coal gasification. Whatever.
Hudy said: Stop coddling a giant, wealthy industry.
What you talking about? I’ve read every comment and not one person has been coddling the NY Times or national print journalism. They are speaking truth to power, man!
So what you are saying is… The NYT’s reporting is “fake but accurate”?
My parrot refuses to poop on the NYT. I have to use the WaPo.
Your parrot uses the WaPoo?
Good.
Just what is an inorganic goat, anyway?
Do these liars at the NYTimes ever get “fired”? It doesn’t seem so.
I think that most financial industry professionals should be organic goat farmers. It would improve the public opinion of that profession. Of course, it might well lower the quality of the organic goat industry.
Doesn’t the front page of the NYT clearly state:
“What ever news fits, we print!”
And it is true. For example, American or Israeli soldiers
committing war crimes WOULD be news. Because time and time
and time again, detailed investigations show those initial
“stories” to be false.
On the other hand, Muslim extremists murdering innocents
isn’t news. That would be simple factual reporting. Something
that the NYT never seemed to do. (But I think their fonts are
really hot!)
Apparently, Senor Carlos Slim, the mysterious crony capitalist Mexican magnate who actually owns most of the NYT apparently, has economic interests that might lose value if this Western gas came online.
That’s the only explanation that makes any kind of sense to me.