The New York Times’ way of reporting the disappearance of most of the brown/grizzly bears in Alaska?
Media credibility in this country is at an all-time low not so much because of big media biases but because of the little errors that make it appear old media doesn’t care about basic facts much more than social media no matter how much the former professes otherwise.
This is what might be described as an arguably factual statement gone badly wrong. It all depends on what the meaning of more is. It is like reporting that “currently, there are more than 600,000 people in New York City.”
Indeed there are. There are more than 15 times that many or almost 9 million. There also happen to be about 15 times as many grizzly bears in Alaska alone than the 1,900 the Times reported “in the lower 48 states and Alaska.”
This is not difficult information to obtain. If you can spell “Google,” you can type into its search engine this simple question: “How many grizzly bears are there in Alaska?”
- Alaska, 30,000
- Montana, 1,800 – 2,000
- Wyoming, 600
- Washington (state), 500
- Idaho, 80-100
By that count, there are a minimum of 2,980 grizzly bears in the Lower 48 states alone or already “more than 1,900” – well more than 1,900.
Death by 1,000 cuts
How what was once considered the country’s newspaper of record came up with a figure so far from reality is impossible to know, but the number appears in a story reporting on a proposal to remove grizzly bears from the endangered species list in the Lower 48 states – a change which many American environmentalists do not like.
The Times quotes spokesmen for two environmental groups in the story.
“We think this step toward delisting is a step toward potential catastrophe for grizzlies in the northern Rockies,” says Joe Bushyhead, a lawyer for WildEarth Guardians, which the Times describes as a “conservation group” that successfully sued to prevent delisting the grizzly in 2018.
On its website, WildEarth describes itself not as a “conservation group,” however, but as an “environmental justice” organization, which is similar but different. Conservation groups, in general, support the wise use of natural resources. The National Wildlife Federation, the largest of these groups, describes its goal as “increasing America’s fish and wildlife populations and enhancing their capacity to thrive in a rapidly changing world….
“Protecting these natural resources is a cause that has long united Americans from all walks of life and political stripes. To hunters, anglers, hikers, birders, wildlife watchers, boaters, climbers, campers, cyclists, gardeners, farmers, forest stewards, and other outdoor enthusiasts, this conservation ethic represents a sacred duty and obligation to protect and build upon our conservation heritage for the sake of wildlife, ourselves, our neighbors, and—most of all—for future generations.”
WildEarth is coming from a somewhat different place.
It views the conservation groups that trace their roots back to the beginning of the scientific understanding of ecology in the 1800s and the development of the natural-resource management concepts that followed as vestiges of “settler colonialism.
“We have always centered our work on defending the rights of nature by protecting the vulnerable and voiceless and confronting the powerful people and unjust systems that stand in the way,” WildEarth says. Philosophically, it is more closely aligned with the Center for Biological Diversity than traditional conservation groups.
Big agendas
There is a general consensus that ordering such an immediate shift to non-fossil fuel sources would cause economic chaos as Samantha Gross, the director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at Brookings has explained. Recognizing this, conservation groups such as the NWF have said they are working toward lowering greenhouse gas emissions “while safeguarding communities, creating jobs and supporting sustainable economic growth.”
If the Times approached the NWF for a comment on the renewed consideration being given delisting, it didn’t report what was said, but it did report the Center for Biological Diversity’s view:
“…Removing the protections for the grizzly bear would allow states ‘to greenlight trophy hunting’ of the animals.
“‘It’s disheartening that the federal government may strip protections from these treasured animals to appease trophy hunters and the livestock industry,” Andrea Zaccardi, a lawyer for the center, said in a statement on Friday. “Grizzly bears have come back from the brink since receiving federal protection in 1975, but the recovery of these imperiled bears still has a long way to go.”
The Times’ pitting of these views against those of Western, “red state” governors who asked for a review of delisting, coupled with the significant reporting error as to the number of grizzly bears in the U.S., immediately makes any Times reader West of the Mississippi – except for those living in California, Portland Seattle – think the worst of the newspaper.
In simple language, this one misstatement of fact leaves it looking like the newspaper is trying to slant the story to support the view of environmental groups that a mere handful of surviving bears are in danger of being wiped out if their endangered species status is lifted.
Such a desired slant could be the case, but one should never assume conspiracy when incompetence offers a likely explanation.
I don’t know Johnny Diaz, the reporter who wrote the story, from Adam, but his bio reflects someone unlikely to know much about grizzly bears, the American West or the difficulties of balancing human and bear lives in the West where it is sometimes necessary to kill some of the latter to protect the lives of the former.
There is nothing in that bio to indicate he knows anything about science or the environment, let alone the management of large omnivores; his main interests appear to be writing and cultural affairs. The Times describes his position today as that of “a general assignment reporter covering breaking news,” meaning that his job in today’s media world is whatever an editor tells him to do on any given day.
Guaranteeing mistakes
Here’s how that generally works:
The Times gets a press release saying the federal government is going to again initiate a review of grizzly bear “status in the Northern Continental Divide and Greater Yellowstone ecosystems.” An editor tells Diaz to write a story and to “make sure to get the other view.” Diaz fairly summarizes the views of the Western governors who have asked for a review of the grizzly’s status as an endangered species.
Then he goes looking for that “other view.” Who knows what help he gets in finding it given the other view can comprise almost anything. I remember asking editors at the old Anchorage Daily News which “other view” they wanted, given that a reporter can rustle up just about any version desired.
Diaz could have found Montana rancher Trina Jo Bradley who is already on record saying the failure to delist the bears is “a straight punch in the face to every producer who has ever lost livestock to grizzlies, to every parent that can’t let their kids adventure outside for fear they’ll have a run-in with a grizzly, and to every scientist who has worked to recover the population of grizzly bears in the lower 48.”
But that probably wouldn’t have fit the Times’ preconceived notion of what constitutes the “other side” here.
Not Diaz’s fault. Not even the Times’ fault, really.
From the perspective of most people living in the states of the overcrowded Northeast – where most big predators were long ago exterminated and have never been allowed to return – grizzlies, cougars and wolves are persecuted species, and humans should be more tolerant even of them even when their behavior threatens or kills people.
This view is, of course, starkly different from the view of the resident problem animal in New York – the rat. The city is now searching for a “rat czar” to marshall its forces for a new “war” on rats, according to the Washington Post.
And you can bet your last dollar that no reporter writing about that war is being told to make sure to get the “other side” from Defenders of Rats or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the only organization apparently willing to support the big rodents.
It has protested the use of glue traps in the city to catch rodents claiming they “cause immense suffering, as panicked victims struggle mightily, tearing their flesh and even chewing off their own limbs in their frantic attempts to escape,” and it claimed credit for getting the New York City Health Department to stop a man from ridding the city of rats in a more humane way than glue traps by flattening them with the quick blow of a bat.
Give PETA credit for its consistency to the philosophy of “animals good; humans bad.” Not so the mainstream media.
Therein views shift as constantly as the “good guys” and the “bad guys” change hats. And the problem with reporting – all reporting – lies in these shifting perspectives. We all harbor preconceived notions through which we view the world, and it’s hard for most people to make the necessary effort to identify them and at least try to push them aside when analyzing anything.
When a reporter takes his or her unrecognized perspective into a story – then compounds it by making gross, factual errors because he or she was too lazy to check the information for accuracy, too ignorant of the issue to recognize a claim too good to be true, or unable to accept that most interest groups (even the well-meaning ones) are in the business of playing reporters and thus cannot be trusted to provide good numbers – a story can come out looking badly slanted even if that wasn’t the intent.
These kinds of mistakes have sadly become a journalistic norm, and one all too easily dismissed within the business.
Thirty-three thousand grizzly bears are “more than 1,900” right? What’s the problem?
Or looked at another way, as one young reporter at the Anchorage Daily News explained after being told one of the sources quoted in her story was making things up, “It might not be my your truth, and it might not be my truth, but it’s his truth.”
The U.S. might have a healthy population of more than 30,000 of the big bears, but if Bushyhead and Zaccardi, or whoever else supplied Diaz the number believe the country is down to less than 2,000, it’s their truth, and a reporter shouldn’t question that. Doing so might hurt someone’s feelings.
All of which helps to explain how we entered into the post-truth world of today. One can blame a lot of people for this, starting with a long list of politicians both right and left, but one cannot ignore the role of the media in helping to get us here by making minor but sometimes hugely meaningful factual errors the norm.
As has many times been said, the devil lives in the details. And in this case, we have met the devil, and he is us.
Categories: Commentary, Media, Outdoors
BTW Craig, Please take a deep dive into the subject of Artificial Intelligence and the predictions of our outcome. Would love to read your take.
“Developed in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morse and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations. In addition to helping invent the telegraph, the Morse code assigned a set of dots and dashes to each letter of the English alphabet and allowed for the simple transmission of complex messages across telegraph lines. In 1844, Morse sent his first telegraph message, from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland; by 1866, a telegraph line had been laid across the Atlantic Ocean from the United States to Europe. The telegraph had fallen out of widespread use by the 20th century, replaced by the telephone, fax machine and Internet.”
Today, propaganda and subliminal influencing is transmitted and received instantaneously…it truly is Orwellian.
If you graduated 3 rd grade without bribing the teacher the excuse of incompetence doesn’t work to excuse yourself from lack of journalistic integrity.
In a court of law if you violate the law – lack of knowledge or incompetence is not a valid defense.
Misleading the public and blaming incompetence doesn’t fly in the era of nuclear power.
Currently, knowledge and nuclear catastrophe are similar.
When i am working in an area beyond my expertise, i find someone reputable and knowledgeable.
The headline 1,000 cuts is truly accurate.
Free assange
Let Eduard snowden return to America as a free man
Put the bush’s in prison
Bring honor truth and constitutional justice back to America
“……..How what was once considered the country’s newspaper of record came up with a figure so far from reality is impossible to know, but the number appears in a story reporting on a proposal to remove grizzly bears from the endangered species list in the Lower 48 states……….”
Seems pretty obvious to me. It’s the classic propaganda that we have all come to expect from them.
Jesus, did NYT again turn down your request for employment?
The NYT must have read your post as they issued the following correction:
A correction was made on February 6, 2023: An earlier version of this article misstated the size of the grizzly bear population in the United States. There are more than 1,900 grizzly bears in the lower 48 states, not the lower 48 states and Alaska.
That’s an interesting correction. I wonder why they didn’t go all the way and just state a good Lower 48 minimum. There are good numbers for both the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems, and those two areas alone report 2,183 grizzlies. Greater Yellowstone itself has seen a big increase from 600 grizzlies in the mid-2000s to 1,070 in the latest estimate
Now if only the NYT would correct its past reporting claiming salmon are disappearing in Alaska. The paper seem to be geographically challenged. It’s Canada where the salmon are disappearing.
NYT doesn’t appear to realize there are more than a single salmon species in the Pacific. While salmon numbers are up in AK (mostly hatchery pinks and BB reds), kings statewide aren’t doing all that well, along with everything other than pinks in PWS. But that would take some actual reporting, wouldn’t it? Cheers –
A lot of misleading narratives follow a template that includes: A negative circumstance that has occurred or is getting worse in a place few readers are likely to travel to and/or don’t have the tools to measure of verify. Hang your story on that template and make any claim you want. This template is the go-to template for the purveyors of climate panic. As far as bears are concerned – 10,000 are too few for billions who will never see them and one is too many for a guy cleaning fish on the river bank.
Do you think maybe the New York Times has an agenda? Clearly they do, to make up for past sins of Yankees marching across the Continental United States.
Never mind that Alaska wildlife managers have done a great job of maintaining wild life habitat, and a food source for grizzly/brown bears for at least 100 years. The truth has never stood in the way of preservationists desires to lock up the “crowned jewels of Alaska” – its wealth of intact ecosystems.
In 2015 the National Park Service (NPS) proposed a rule to ban managing wildlife in Alaska. The rule past, 70,000 comments supporting the ban were submitted.
99% of those comments came from outside Alaska generated by Anti-hunting NGOs who didn’t care one bit that Alaska managed its wildlife on a sustained you basis.
NPS lands were supposed to be used to help feed Alaskans who ate wild game as part of their food security, but the national Preservationist NGOs figured the heck with them. The 2015 rule was thrown out by Presidential order in 2020, but now NPS is at it again.
Public comment to ban predator/prey management on 10’s of millions of acres of Alaska is back, open for public comment until March 10th.
Alaskans are out numbered by Outsiders who get their news from New York Times, who are reporting the end of grizzlies in North America.
Alaskan can help turn back the propaganda of Alaska killing off its bear population by saying NO to the NPS proposed rule by commenting through the Federal eRulemaking Portal: http://www.regulations.gov. The identifier number is (RIN) 1024-AE70.
Of course the NYT does not have an agenda. Never mind the fact that the last time they endorsed a Republican for POTUS was 1956.
This above comment displays quite accurately the point Mr.Medred is making. The NPS 2015 proposed rule’s intended effects were not designed or intended as the commenter describes. But that would require a more thorough analysis and discussion. Easier to feed readers the standard, trite, anti-Fed bias regarding Federal subsistence management.
Just search pentagon propaganda…the US gov is spending over $5 Billion a year to influence the public through the AP media alliance…over 27,000 propagandists employed.
Ever think how one story gets coverage from hundreds of sites each day?
Can’t let the sheeple start thinking for themselves.