I was wondering how the pro-drilling group CARE and its executive director, Marita K. Noon, would react to the Deepwater Horizon blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico. Thanks to the Albuquerque Journal, that question has now been answered.

Noon has had a month to watch the beyond-control oil geyser as it pollutes the waters of the gulf, killing spawning fish, shrimp and other wildlife and threatening the coastal economies of several states. This, after the initial explosion killed 11 men.

In a column on the Journal’s Monday Op-Ed page, entitled “Stopping Exploration Costly,” Noon reacts by blasting President Obama for suspending work on 33 other exploratory wells in the Gulf, revoking a proposed lease sale off the coast of Virginia and halting exploration off the coast of Alaska, among other cautionary measures, and then she weighs in with these thoughts:

. . .to halt all exploration and potential new resources is like a frost killing an entire crop in one region. We still have lettuce, for example, but what we can get from other sources — both American and foreign — is suddenly more expensive because there is less to go around and it will be months before the damage to the supply chain can be bolstered. We can keep using it, but it will not be replaced.

The frost is an act of God. The announcement Thursday is from someone who thinks he’s God.

While most people are worried about damage to the environment and the billions of dollars in damage to the fishing industry and tourist economy of the Gulf states – and the potential damages looming as we enter hurricane season – Noon is worried about “damage to the (gas) supply chain.”  I won’t comment on her claim to knowing the president’s thoughts.

While acknowledging that the Deepwater explosion and oil leak is a “disaster of epic proportions,” Noon’s always-helpful suggestions are to offer “prayers” to those affected and rally for “all hands” to “get on deck to help clean up this catastrophic mess and get the population and ecosystems back on their feet.”

She makes it sound so simple.

But she draws the line at proceeding cautiously on further exploration and – heaven forbid – doesn’t even mention that better regulatory oversight and safety requirements might have prevented this disaster and, just as importantly, is needed to prevent future ones.

As executive director of CARE (Citizens’ Alliance for Responsible Energy), Noon’s columns in fact have advocated elimination of New Mexico’s oil and gas regulatory body, the Oil Conservation Division, and elimination of one of New Mexico’s regulatory protection measures, known as the pit rule. Her group continues to claim that regulations are crippling the oil industry.

Yet, in March, the State Land Office reported that oil and gas lease sales during the third quarter generated $20 million in revenue, bringing earnings for the year to $51 million. The Journal Business page story reporting this added:

With three months remaining, the agency says it’s only $6.4 million short of beating the all-time record for lease sale earnings during any fiscal year.

And on May 14, the Journal Business page ran a story headlined, “Controversial Pit Rule Wins Plaudits,” which reported that pit rule regulating disposal of drilling waste, enacted in 2008, “has resulted in zero reports of groundwater contamination from operations permitted under the regulation.” Quoting Oil Conservation Division Director Mark Fesmire, the story said his agency is developing guidelines that will make it easier for producers to understand the regulations and make them less time-consuming and less expensive to follow, but that the rule would not be changed, basically because it’s working to protect the environment, and in turn, public health.

Meanwhile, Noon, who twice in Monday’s article calls the president’s actions to hold off on more drilling “political posturing,” says:

Obama’s political posturing hurts more than it helps.

It hurts, she says, because the actions will result in that ever-present threat – job loss — and for those of you not in the oil industry, something else that “will come as a shock to the pocketbook of every American.”

She is, of course, talking about gas prices:

Just as we head into the summer driving season, gas prices — which before the cessation proclamation had been pleasantly low — are predicted to top those of the summer of 2008.

She adds that:

The disaster itself did not adversely impact prices, as that well was exploratory. It was not yet a part of the fuel supply.

But says halting exploration is like a “frost” . . . well, you’ve read that part already.

Nowhere does she acknowledge the cost BP has incurred in what it will have to pay in reparations and in lost product, as oil continues to gush into the sea.

And what of the loss of lives? Well, Noon seems to think that’s part of the equation and we should honor those “many great Americans (who) have died in their efforts to provide us with all-important energy.” She stops short of calling them “fallen heroes,” but says this:

While the best brains in America are working to increase safety, improve efficiency and discover additional resources, those workers did not die in vain. They are as important to everything that is America as are our troops fighting overseas.

It appears that the Journal runs Noon’s articles as they receive them, without editing, as we’ve noted about the Journal’s handling of columns in general. Monday’s column appears to have received the same lack of treatment, as editors left a “par-for-the-course” phrase in the first paragraph unnecessarily hyphenated, which would have been corrected in a staff-written column.

At this point, even though Noon’s columns have received much negative attention, the Journal almost is obligated to run them. I’m perhaps not the only one who wondered whether CARE would continue to advocate for at-any-cost drilling in light of this disastrous blowout/spill.

To its credit, the Journal did post at the column’s end a description of CARE, calling it an organization “operating from the platform of ‘Energy Makes America Great’ and supporting all domestic energy development.”

I would add, “at any cost.”

If it weren’t for the glut of photos that accompanied it, one might have thought that governor’s race was over, judging from the literally over-the-top play a candidate-poll story received on the front page of this week’s Sunday Journal.

Splayed across the entire top half of the front-page news hole – above 72-point headline type normally reserved for only the biggest of stories – were the photos of the five Republican gubernatorial candidates and their popularity rankings as captured by a recent poll.

Granted, Democratic candidate Diane Denish has no opposition in the fast-approaching June primary, but she is nowhere to be found on this front-page GOP-fest. An out-of-town visitor reading the Journal would have to wonder until the story jumps to page A-8 whether a Democratic candidate was in the race.

And while it’s interesting to see how the chips have fallen so far among the five Republicans running for governor, the play of the Journal-commissioned poll’s results also points up something about how New Mexico’s only statewide daily generally has framed this race. That is, polls and sound bites get space and attention, rather than the candidates’ individual policies and platforms.

Journal coverage leans heavily on numbers – both poll and fundraising. And yes, the candidates are trotted out for sound bites on pressing issues. Last month, all six candidates were queried for their views on the controversial immigration law recently passed in Arizona. In February, they were asked whether, if elected, they would sign a domestic partnership bill. (No link could be found for their answers to that last question, which ran Feb. 4.) In both cases, Denish was included for comments, and listed last.

But what about their platforms? Back in March, Heath Haussamen posted on NMpolitics.net a story saying Denish had released a comprehensive gubernatorial platform she claimed would save New Mexico taxpayers $450 million over the next five years. Haussamen not only reported the platform’s release, but included a link to the initiative as posted on Denish’s Web site.

Perhaps political coverage policy has changed in recent years in light of the Journal’s smaller staff. But when candidate Bill Richardson, accompanied by Rick Homans, visited the Journal Editorial Board on September 3, 2002 — an inch-thick book entitled “Bill Richardson’s Plan To Save Taxpayers $90 Million” in tow — a story with an almost identical headline ran in the Journal the next day. (The link to that 2002 story appears missing, but the headline “Richardson Pushes $90 Million in Savings” appears in the Campaign Trail section of the story list for that day.

This is not to say that Denish in any way is copying Richardson. (In fact, when detractors try to characterize Denish as a potential repeat of the Richardson administration, one could point out at least one time when she was acting governor and Richardson hadn’t even informed her he was leaving the state.)

The point is that the Journal has covered campaign platforms in the past, but has yet to do so in this election.

Not only did the Journal refrain from running Denish’s platform, the day the story conceivably would have run (March 24) the Journal instead ran a story headlined, “Weh Sues State Over Redacted Denish Files.” That story, which to the casual reader might seem negative in terms of Denish, is actually an account of GOP candidate Allen Weh claiming the state Department of Finance and Administration (not Denish) was illegally altering or leaving out records he had requested relating to Denish’s office.

Perhaps the Journal is waiting until the run-up to the general election in November to start running candidate platforms. Let’s hope it does. No doubt the candidates will post platforms on their Web sites, as Denish has done. But platforms deserve news coverage so that they can be critiqued and discussed. Voters need more than “he said-she said” scandal allegations, poll scores, fundraising numbers and sound bites on which to make an educated choice.

The word “venerable” traditionally has been ascribed to the Associated Press.

Yet, that’s not what comes to mind when reading the front page of today’s Albuquerque Journal.

In an “Analysis” piece on Page One this morning, an AP writer stretches to make a case for criticizing the Obama administration’s response to the Gulf Coast oil catastrophe, saying administration officials “invite judgment” when claiming they responded 100 percent from Day One. The piece says the administration’s recent “rhetoric” reflects its “determination to be seen as responsive from the get-go and to squelch comparisons to the Bush administration’s slow-footed response to Hurricane Katrina.”

News flash to the Albuquerque Journal: Being slow on rhetoric does not in any way approach the life-and-death seriousness of being slow in responding to the needs of homeless hurricane victims stranded for days in a sports stadium without water and basic toilet facilities.

Yet, that’s how the Albuquerque Journal plays this piece by Erica Werner, which you can read here as an Atlanta Journal Constitution “Spin Meter” feature. Rather than running the piece on an inside page as a sidebar to a legitimate news follow-up on the spill, the Albuquerque Journal diverts its most valuable real estate – the front page — to this “analysis,” and caps with this sensational headline: “Was the Administration There From day One? Maybe Not.”

While the “analysis” focuses on the Obama administration, it does contain a nugget of important information: That is, that the federal Oil Pollution Act, enacted 20 years ago in the wake of the Exxon Valdez tanker spill, makes the oil company BP responsible for clean-up costs related to the current catastrophe, but caps its liability in terms of the lost wages, shortened fishing season and tourism setbacks caused by the spill.

It’s possible this information is what led Journal editors to decide the piece worthy of Page One. But the liability issue plays a supporting role to the lead focus on Obama “rhetoric.” Because of the story’s focus, it was a poor placement choice on the part of the Journal, and an even worse headline choice.

After years of carrying water for the oil industry in both editorials and flawed opinion pieces, it is too much to expect the Journal to run a front-page analysis critical of the industry.

Yet that would be more appropriate in this instance.

The outrage – and there should be outrage by the Journal on behalf of its readers– should not be over whether the Obama Administration is massaging its message, but rather over the oil-industry friendliness by Congress and previous administrations that led us to this catastrope. The focus now should be on what is being done to revise the federal Oil Pollution Act, enacted in 1990 after Valdez, in order to remove the cap that makes polluters like BP responsible for the devastating effects the spill has inflicted on the Gulf Coast economy.

The Obama administration should be fully engaged in ensuring taxpayers won’t foot the bill for this, as Werner’s article implies, and that means revising this act. And the Journal should editorialize its support for such revision if and when any obstructionists in Congress try to impede efforts to raise the liability cap. Already, a bill to raise the cap to $10 billion has been proposed by three Democratic senators and, according to Werner, has the president’s support.

If greater liability provisions had been in the 1990 law, perhaps BP would have thought it prudent to install a $500,000 shut-off valve upfront rather than face the catastrophic costs of negligence later.

The Journal should try harder to keep the focus of the outrage – and of its front page – on what really matters.

It seems almost too easy to criticize the Albuquerque Journal for running yet another Marita K. Noon column, because we’ve pointed out her errors,  simplistic assertions and lack of expert credentials in the past.

But the Journal’s Op-Ed (opposite editorial) page carries her again today, this time with a convoluted essay headlined “Carbon Tax Honest; Cap and Trade Isn’t” (subscription required), which leads with an unsubstantiated anecdote about health care.

I won’t even attempt to sort out her stream of attempted logic, other than to point out some of the column’s myriad unsubstantiated claims. It’s another example of a column thrown at the public without any kind of vetting, fact-checking or even editing.

Some of the assertions from her column:

Those responsible for getting the hospitals paid for the services acknowledge that getting money from the private insurance companies is much easier than from the companies getting funded through government.

Never mind the mangled English, who is saying this? Noon doesn’t say.

How does this connect to cap and trade?

She answers with:

First, understand that cap and trade is a government plan to deal with so-called man-made global warming.

Love that use of “so-called,” and then she asserts:

While the entire climate change issue is challenged due to the acknowledged data forgeries and plummeting public concern over climate, governments are still moving forward with cap and trade plans.

With this sentence, she asserts that the entire issue is challenged, and offers as evidence unsubstantiated “acknowledged” information, this time in the form of “data forgeries”. And then she declares public concern over climate is “plummeting.” If that’s true, why do climate stories run on the news and Op Ed pages nearly every day?

In fact, just the day before, The Sunday Journal ran a column by a Santa Fe writer whose credentials include a post-graduate degree in climate change and carbon management. In it, Mark Giorgetti asserts that a disinformation campaign is being put out by “promoters of the fossil fuel industries and unregulated corporate expansion.” He doesn’t name them, but this is an apt description of CARE, the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy of which Noon is executive director, which claims to support citizens’ rights but is an unabashed supporter of extractive industries like oil and gas.

Unfortunately, the way the Journal packaged Giorgetti’s column can leave the erroneous impression its content comes from yet another climate change naysayer.

The headline, “Climate Controversy a Hoax,” technically is an accurate reflection of Giorgetti’s position (it’s the controversy that’s a hoax, not the science). But those who scan headlines could interpret it to mean climate change is a hoax. And to further cement that impression, the column ran with a cartoon showing a dinosaur holding up a sign that says “Climate Change is a Hoax.” Again, the cartoon actually supports what the column says – the dinosaur who holds up the “hoax” sign is calmly standing while his frightened fellow dinosaurs run to escape the obvious change in their midst: an erupting volcano.

Considering Girogetti’s credentials, his take on global warming deserves to be read, but likely will be dismissed as yet another of the unsubstantiated, agenda-driven opinions the Journal runs with annoying frequency, such as those written by Noon.

Giorgetti makes the case that yes, it does snow even in times of global warming, and says those denying climate change have an agenda – to block movement toward a clean energy economy in order to preserve that of fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, Noon, a so-called expert on climate change, helpfully offers that if there is climate change, “there is nothing humans can do to change what has been going on for millions of years,” so why inconvenience the oil and gas industry with cap and trade and other regulations?

In conclusion, she says cap and trade is nothing more than a tax, so:

. . . support the idea of a carbon tax. It is more honest. And no one wants more taxes.

Simplistic? Yes.

Honest? Not even the Journal seems to know what that means anymore.

Before we take a two-week hiatus for the holidays, I’d like to commend the Albuquerque Journal for recently publishing articles that atone somewhat for its running – just before the Copenhagen summit – the alleged climate change exposé now known as “Climate-Gate”.

Last month, the Journal was among more than 325 American newspapers that ran (in the Journal’s case, in the “A” section) a wire story about hacked emails, which cast climate scientists in a political light and gave credence to those who say global warming is a “fiction.”

Considering its scope and resources, the Journal couldn’t be expected to independently assess and counter reports about the information allegedly found in thousands of emails hacked from a top climate research center in the United Kingdom and dumped on a Russian Web server.

But to its credit, it did run this month a body of reportage casting doubt on the impression left by the original story it had carried, variations of which ran worldwide. (Sorry, no link seems to be available of what the Journal ran last month.)

The progressive group Think Progress says conservatives hijacked the climate change issue with that story, and it posts a detailed account of the hacking saga in an article called “A Case of Classic SwiftBoating: How the Right-Wing Noise Machine Manufactured ‘Climategate’.” That article contends that:

Polluter-funded climate skeptics, along with their allies in conservative media and the Republican Party, sifted through the e-mails, and quickly cherry picked quotes to falsely accuse climate scientists of concocting climate change science out of whole cloth.

The site adds that the coverage given the contrived email story reveals a troubling and “increasing willingness for traditional media outlets, from the Evening News to the Washington Post, to largely reprint unfounded right-wing smears without context or critical reporting.” (Links are theirs.)

The Journal, however, after printing the original report has since provided some critical reporting and/or context (along with columns, both local and national, and letters to the editor championing both “sides”). Among the articles of substance: a Washington Post analysis that ran Dec. 8, a McClatchy Newspapers Q&A report the Journal ran on its Sunday Dimension cover Dec. 13, an Associated Press self-described “exhaustive review” of the emails that ran on A-11 that same Sunday and, most importantly, the UpFront column by John Fleck Dec. 15.

The Post analysis that ran on Page One Dec. 8 (one criticism: it was not labeled as analysis), summarized the email controversy by saying the original stories cast climate scientists in a political light and gave ammunition to those who think climate change is overblown. But it stated that the emails “don’t provide proof that human-caused climate change is a lie or a swindle.”

The informative McClatchy report that ran Dec. 13 included, among other things, an explanation of scientists’ use of the word “trick” in talking about research data, which the early reports had used pejoratively as evidence scientists were trying to manipulate data. The McClatchy summary says the “trick” alluded to in the email “meant using two sets of data together to show temperature trends,” which was publicly discussed in an article in Nature and not nefarious, as the original story had implied.

The AP account in the Journal was headlined “Climate Scientists Expressed Doubts, But E-mails Show No Signs Data Was Fudged,” the content of which can be read here.

Fleck expands on the email conversations in his column, noting that more than a thousand scientific emails are “now available for all to read on the Internet.”  He adds:

In a world where we must depend on the integrity of scientists to help guide societal decisions, some of the e-mails are troubling, showing some researchers trying to spin the data to win arguments with their political opponents. . . .

But he directs the conversation back to local data:

Here in the Southwest, the question of whether we can trust climate science – not the few scientists involved in the e-mails but the enterprise as a whole – matters a great deal because of what the science’s leading practitioners have been telling us in recent years.

Among those practitioners are authors of a Bureau of Reclamation report, released last month, which Fleck says shows the ‘00s to be the driest 10-year stretch in the Colorado River Basin since record-keeping began more than 100 years ago.

He also talks with University of New Mexico professor Dave Gutzler, whom he describes as “annoyingly cautious” when it comes to research on southwestern climate, which, as Fleck says, is “what you want in a scientist.”

Gutzler (whom Fleck says was not among the hacked e-mail correspondents) would tell you that the dwindling Colorado and melting arctic ice are not proof of climate change, Fleck says, adding:

The natural ups and downs of climate from year to year and decade to decade make it genuinely difficult to tease out long-term trends and determine their cause, (Gutzler) said in an interview.

But taken together, he says rising CO2 from the coal, oil and gasoline we burn to fuel our lives is the most likely explanation for the all those changes in climate we are now seeing, from the shrinking arctic sea ice to the drying Colorado.

“Observations of CO2 concentrations, solar variability, laboratory measurements of the greenhouse effect, measurements of heat storage in the oceans, observations of glacier retreat and polar icecaps, modeling studies of paleoclimate and the 20th century, etc. etc., all taken together, support the general consensus that climate is warming, and will continue to get warmer, as greenhouse gas concentrations increase,” Gutzler wrote.

“Nothing in the hacked e-mails, Gutzler said, has changed any of that,” Fleck wrote.

We can only hope these follow-ups helped change any public misconceptions created by the first stories to emerge from those hacked e-mail accounts.

The “To Our readers” note on A-2 of Saturday’s Albuquerque Journal wasn’t kidding when it brightly announced that the Entertainer TV schedule in the day’s paper was sporting a “new look.”

For the first time in its history, the Entertainer cover carried advertising. Three ads bordering two sides made up nearly 45 percent of the cover page.

It was a surprise, but made perfect sense: The Entertainer, after all, isn’t a news tab – its cover ads don’t seem as out of place as those at the bottom of the “sacrosanct” front page – and for advertisers, it’s a promising outlet, as people tend to keep the television guide around the house for week. I was actually thinking how much unsold ad space had been wasted on Entertainer covers of the past.

But I’ve also been wondering this past week: How far will the Journal venture in its search for lifesaving infusions of cash to support its news side?

The impetus for this thought was the appearance of what can only be described as a “life is better with electricity” ad that appeared on the Op-Ed page in the form of a column by renewable-energy critic Marita K. Noon, coupled with the previous week’s appearance of a news story about a drop in oil and gas production and the Journal’s editorial reaction on Dec. 1. Disturbingly, the editorial dovetails with what Noon has advocated in her unenlightened promotions of the extractive industries – that the state and counties should just get rid of those pesky regulations designed to protect citizen health and the environment, water supplies, wildlife and archeology of New Mexico.

I was out of the country when Noon’s “Energy Use Makes Holidays Go ‘Round” appeared, but it was emailed to me and I reacted exactly as my colleague Tracy Dingmann did. Noon’s simplistic essay extolling overuse of electricity as a basic American right was, as Tracy pointed out, a hopelessly outdated throwback. (It took me back: Before I even read Tracy’s post it triggered memories of attending a Reddy Kilowatt cooking class in the summer of 1963. We soon-to-be fifth graders were told – I kid you not – that electric stoves were better than gas because electric heat comes on immediately and quits as soon as the knob is turned off.  I knew better, and was appalled that adults could get away with saying such things.)

I won’t say I’m appalled, but I’m disappointed that the Journal’s editorial board would shrug off health and environment protections for the potential royalties increased oil and gas production might bring to New Mexico.

I say “might” because the major Sunday story by Winthrop Quigley on which the editorial was based acknowledges that part of the reason oil and gas royalties are down is the fact that many New Mexico wells are “mature” and not producing as much. The story (“New Mexico’s Oil, Gas Revenues Shrinking Due To Tougher Regulations, Supply Glut,” Nov. 29),  says the San Juan and Permian Basins still have reserves, according to geologists. But there are no guarantees.

In its editorial entitled “State Needs Revenue From Oil and Gas”, the Journal notes that oil production has dropped and says:

Not surprisingly, state regulators and the industry disagree on what’s causing the drop.

Producers say an unfriendly business climate in New Mexico has helped drive them to other states. New state environmental regulations on drilling-site waste disposal and the intrusion of county governments into the permit process have made it easy for them to take their money — and jobs — elsewhere.

What’s interesting is that the editorial writer follows this by lifting a line from the news story, then changing its attribution, apparently to further widen the he said/she said gap between producers vs. regulators. The editorial version of the line is:

Regulators say (emphasis added) the more likely reasons for the decline are a global glut of natural gas, a decline in oil and gas prices and fields in New Mexico that have less oil and gas to recover than in other places.

But the news story attributed those reasons to “experts” on both sides of the aisle, an important distinction the editorial chose to ignore. Here’s the line from the news story:

Experts agree New Mexico’s oil and gas industry is also suffering from a global glut of natural gas, weaker prices and oil and gas fields that are less productive than some other places.

Ignoring weaker prices and tapped-out fields, the editorial’s simplistic conclusion is that:

Not much can be done about a worldwide glut, but a reputation as a bad place to do business will only drive investors away.

State leaders and the industry need to work to implement reasonable regulations that take cost of business into account. That’s just dealing with reality.

Trouble is, the Journal is ignoring another reality, the ones regulators address when they come up with rules to protect the rich archeological resources of Galisteo Basin, as Santa Fe County did, and when they (in this case, the state) introduce “pit rules,” the main culprit cited in Quigley’s article as driving producers to other states.

As he is a Journal Business Writer, Quigley approached his story from a business angle and did not get into the intricacies of the “pit rules”, other than to say they regulate the disposal of drilling waste.

But as a former Journal Environment Writer who covered this issue, I’ve seen first-hand the reality regulators face in dealing with drilling waste. Past regulatory laxity has left New Mexico a legacy of contamination one could characterize as the equivalent of a massive oil spill – one that’s on land instead of the sea. Nearly every pump jack in New Mexico is situated next to a brine pit that routinely draws unwitting migratory birds to their deaths (they think it’s potable water). Expanses of rangeland grasses contaminated by brine look scorched, as if by a fire. Ask any rancher who shares a land lease with a driller; it’s rarely a copacetic relationship. The threat to the state’s underground aquifers is always a concern. (To read the 14 pages of pit rules, visit the Oil Conservation Division Web site and click on “Current Rules, PDF format,” then scroll down the pdf file to Part 17 PITS, CLOSED-LOOP SYSTEMS, BELOW-GRADE TANKS AND SUMPS under Chapter 15 Oil and Gas.)

The oil and gas industry is using a budget crisis as an excuse to gut regulation. And the Journal is buying into it.

Which takes me back to Noon’s latest column on the joys of energy consumption. The column was an ad – pure and simple.  If a public relations agency had had such luck in having a piece like that printed, it would consider it a coup – the kind of advertising money can’t buy. Or can it?

In my experience, a newspaper normally would be embarrassed to run an advertorial on an opinion page and allow itself to be so used, even if it has decided to cheerlead the industry editorially.

Considering this, and considering the Journal’s financial straits, one might be led to wonder whether the Journal was paid by Noon’s pro-extractive industries organization, CARE, to run the brightly titled “Energy Use Makes Holidays Go ‘Round.” Or to wonder if the paper might have promised (wink, wink) to run Noon’s columns with the understanding the oil and gas producers would take out full-page Journal ads. (Have you noticed those full-page ads?)

Several years ago, a now-defunct New Mexico periodical operated that way – it would run a story about a business if the owners would take out an ad – and this was looked upon with disfavor by traditional journalists.

I’m not saying this is what the Journal has done. But sadly, it has opened the door to that impression.

To piggyback on Tracy’s latest post just before this one:

This morning’s Mountain View Telegraph (sister paper to the Journal) carries yet another Marita Noon column, this one entitled “Climate Change Is Obama’s Iraq.”

The Telegraph is running her column with eyes wide open. In other words, it is well aware of the problems with her columns: On August 27, it ran a Noon column (“Energy Wrongfully Blamed[”) after that same column was pulled from Heath Hausseman’s nmpolitics.net and the Farmington Daily Times .

Reacting to criticism about running that already-discredited column, the Telegraph ran on Sept. 17 “Many Errors Found in Column,”  a response piece by New Mexico Wildlife Federation Director Jeremy Vesbach. At the end of his piece, Vesbach wrote, and – to its credit — the Telegraph printed:

I appreciate the opportunity provided by Telegraph Editor (Rory) McClannahan to present the facts on where NMWF stands on the San Juan River.

However, I also feel obligated to warn Telegraph readers that McClannahan said flatly that he is not interested in fact-checking opinion pieces and does not always print corrections or retractions for verifiably false information that appears on the Telegraph opinion page. This isn’t the way most news organizations work, and I believe this lackadaisical approach is a disservice to readers. But until something changes, Telegraph readers should realize that it is apparently up to us to fact-check opinion pieces we read in the Telegraph.

Having once been in the situation of finding columns and sorting through letters to fill the space on the editorial pages of the Mountain View Telegraph and the zoned editions of the Journal (the Rio Rancho and West Side), I have to say I understand McClannahan’s point that there is little time to fact-check the items that come in. And, believe it or not, it’s often difficult to get columns to put on those pages. When I had time, I would call presidents of neighborhood associations and other involved citizens asking them to write about what was going on in their part of the community so I wouldn’t be caught short on deadline day. And sometimes that was like pulling teeth and I’d still be scrambling to fill the space.

That said, I would be hard-pressed to use a column by someone who has been problematic.

On deadline, lacking anything else to run, one might consider running such a columnist only in conjunction with some clear disclaimers about the writer’s background.

Which brings me to my point: If the Telegraph is going to continue running Noon’s columns (as it obviously has decided to do), it should write its own end-note describing the columnist’s background.

The end-graph as it now routinely is run (or not) describes the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy (CARE), of which Noon is executive director, as an advocate for “citizens rights to energy freedom.” What the heck is a citizen’s right to energy freedom?

At the least, those words should be put in quotes. Better still, instead of this squishy description crafted for general audiences, the Telegraph should lift from CARE’s Web site the words it uses when addressing its member audience, which are that:

. . . Marita has moved CARE toward specifically advocating for oil, gas, nuclear and coal. . .

Caveat emptor.

This letter to the editor that appeared in Wednesday’s Albuquerque Journal is so interesting, I’m just going to reproduce it in full here.
The letter, from Journal reader Terry Goldman of Los Alamos, ran under the headline “Energy Claim Doesn’t Add Up:”

Marita K. Noon either made a serious writing error in her column, “Target Redundant Costs First to Trim State Budget,” (subscription required)  or else she needs a substantive remedial course in elementary mathematics.
She quotes Oil Conservation Director Mark Fesmire as “sputtering” that “… the OCD annual budget was only about 4 percent of the state’s budget problems (emphasis added).” Earlier in the column, however, she elevated this amount to 4 percent of the state’s entire budget, claiming that eliminating the duplication represented by the OCD would reduce the need to cut the state budget by 10 percent to a cut of only 6 percent. If the quote of Fesmire is accurate, the savings amount to 4 percent of 10 percent, otherwise known as 0.4% of the total state budget.
While this is not to be ignored, and while we are all undoubtedly sympathetic to eliminating duplication in government (although I don’t favor dumping state costs on counties) and while it is clear that her organization (Citizens’ Alliance for Responsible Energy) has much to gain by eliminating state oversight of oil and gas regulation in favor of more easily manipulated local governments, Noon does neither her organization nor her argument any good with what is either a blatant misrepresentation of the facts or an astounding display of mathematical ignorance.
On the contrary, she leaves the impression that none of her or CARE’s arguments should be considered accurate or trustworthy, let alone viewed as having been considered carefully and without bias.
TERRY GOLDMAN
Los Alamos

Hmm. That’s not the first time Noon, an oil and gas industry booster who the Journal features regularly as a guest columnist on its editorial page, has been shot down for making factual errors. We’ve written about it here and here.

Differences of opinion are one thing – but out and out errors made by a writer are another.

When is the Journal going to get the message?

The Journal’s done it again.

The Albuquerque Journal ran on today’s Op-Ed page a column by discredited columnist Marita K. Noon. This one’s entitled, “Target Redundant Costs First To Trim State Budget (subscription required).”

If you’re not familiar with Noon, you won’t get much help from the Journal in learning more about her. All that accompanied this column was the identifier under her byline, which said: “Executive Director, CARE.”

Which might make you think it was written by someone from the international humanitarian group, CARE.

No, it’s not that one.

This “CARE” is a New Mexico pro-energy group, Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy, the Web site of which says this about Noon:

Since wind and solar are the darlings of the energy world, Marita has moved CARE toward specifically advocating for oil, gas, nuclear and coal and has pushed CARE onto a national platform.

Why is this important? Because Noon’s column in today’s Journal advocates elimination of the Oil Conservation Division – the state group created by the State Legislature to manage and regulate oil and gas development in New Mexico.

Her point is that the state could start tackling the yeoman’s task of cutting the state budget by eliminating redundancy. It’s hard for anyone to argue with that, but she’s saying the OCD is redundant because a few counties have tried to impose even more rigorous rules on the oil and gas industry.

The way Noon puts it, these counties are “usurping the authority given to the division” and therefore there’s no reason to have an OCD. Yet, truth be told, counties are hiring consultants and creating their own regulations because they don’t think the OCD is doing enough to protect their interests, not because they would rather being doing the job themselves.

But Noon cheerfully suggests that by taking over the OCD’s duties, counties will have to hire more people, which she says is a “win-win” because that will create county jobs. “Certainly ‘job creation’ has become a buzzword,” she helpfully adds.

The Journal has done its readers a grave disservice by failing to run an explanatory bio on Noon at the end of this column.

The editors probably didn’t have the space, but interestingly, all they would have had to do to make enough room would have been to edit out some of the redundancy in her column.

But frankly, considering her track record as a columnist and the flawed logic of this anti-regulatory piece, it shouldn’t have been run at all.