When a column warrants a warning label

By Denise Tessier

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.

Journal Reader: Noon’s Energy Claim “Doesn’t Add Up”

By Tracy Dingmann

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 Strikes Again: Noon Whistle

By Denise Tessier

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.