Readers of Canada’s National Post and its business section, Financial Post, will be aware that the paper’s editorial writers aren’t exactly fans of the CBC, the national public broadcaster. But an article in the FP yesterday made note of what is says was an incorrect statement by a source in a recent CBC report on its investigative show, The Fifth Estate. The article:
Tonight
on the fifth estate, CBC Television, 9 p.m. ET: Forget the show, look
for the answer to this question: Will the CBC run a correction of a
major error?
Readers will recall last
week’s episode, a special titled The Denial Machine, starring Vancouver
PR man James Hoggan. Mr. Hoggan made a number of disparaging remarks
about a group of 60 scientists who signed a letter to Prime Minister
Steven Harper urging him to review the science of climate change.
According to Mr. Hoggan, the scientists who signed are not to be
trusted. "We looked into the folks who were on that, and all but 19
were Americans and most of them are kind of infamous characters from
the states who worked for the tobacco industry."
In
fact, only 12 are Americans and at most two have done past science work
on tobacco. About 20 are Canadians, while others are from about a dozen
other countries, including France, Norway, Australia and the
Netherlands. So Mr. Hoggan’s statements on the scientists are dead
wrong.
This is no small matter of
incidental fact. Mr. Hoggan’s statement, along with a few others,
formed the basis for The Denial Machine’s major theme, which was a
claim that scientists who are skeptical of official global warming
theory are part of an oil industry front that is made up of the same
hack scientists who acted in the tobacco industry debacle a decade
earlier…
Mr. Hoggan has yet to personally correct his mistakes. However, on the climate blog run through his office (http://www.desmogblog.com/national-posts-corcoran-pops-his-cork) there’s a dismissive acknowledgement of the error. "Yes," says a posting, "Jim misspoke himself."
Misspoke
himself seems a touch too innocent. How about: Mangled the facts? Got
it all wrong? Warped the truth? Invented information to suit his
message?
One can see where Mr. Hoggan
might not want to publicly confess to having seriously misled the fifth
estate’s audience, and to having misrepresented the reputations of the
scientists who signed the letter. But what about the CBC’s
much-heralded journalistic standards? The network and the fifth estate,
one assumes, will want to uphold the highest standards of accuracy by
running a correction at the earliest opportunity.
That would be tonight at 9 p.m. ET.
Not that the Post gets all of its Hoggan-related reporting correct. There’s this correction and retraction from August 2006:
Regarding Terence Corcoran’s Aug. 23 column, Hockey Sticks and Hatchets: Charles Montgomery says he rents space and telephone service at Emerald City Communications in Vancouver but does not work for Emerald City Communications, and has no relationship with, nor has he completed work for, the David Suzuki Foundation. Also, Mr. Montgomery posted on his Web site a Bloomberg report that claimed Cubans were among the happiest people in the world. He himself did not say Cubans were the happiest people.
Mr. Montgomery also did not say of James Hoggan that Mr. Hoggan is a public relations man who doesn’t believe people have any right to engage in public relations on behalf of views Mr. Hoggan disapproves of. Those are Terence Corcoran’s views.
The National Post and Terence Corcoran wish to retract the assertion that Mr. Montgomery "deliberately" gave wrong information about the hockey stick debate and climate change science. The National Post regrets the errors.
And then the correction (below) published to a column about the CBC program mentioned above. The column is online, but the correction isn’t. It’s the same FP writer as before, in fact. Still, the CBC should follow up with a correction if Hoggan was incorrect. The correction:
In his "Who
is James Hoggan?" column (Nov. 16, 2006), Terence Corcoran said
Vancouver writer Charles Montgomery rents space in the offices of James
Hoggan and Associates. This is not true. Mr. Montgomery rents space in
another office unconnected to Hoggan and Associates. Terence Corcoran
and the Financial Post apologize for the error.
