Grist Does the Right Thing

Grist Magazine has done exactly the right thing in responding to the questions raised here and elsewhere about the quote Glenn Scherer attributed to James Watt in an October column for that magazine. The column no longer includes the offending paragraphs in its main text, but at the end of the article this note appears,

*[Correction, 04 Feb 2005: The asterisked section of the article, above, originally read:

But a scripture-based justification for anti-environmentalism — when was the last time you heard a conservative politician talk about that?

Odds are it was in 1981, when President Reagan’s first secretary of the interior, James Watt, told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. “God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back,” Watt said in public testimony that helped get him fired.

Today’s Christian fundamentalist politicians are more politically savvy than Reagan’s interior secretary was; you’re unlikely to catch them overtly attributing public-policy decisions to private religious views. But their words and actions suggest that many share Watt’s beliefs. Like him, many Christian fundamentalists feel that concern for the future of our planet is irrelevant, because it has no future.

In fact, Watt did not make such a statement to Congress. The quotation is attributed to Watt in the book Setting the Captives Free by Austin Miles, but Miles does not write that it was made before Congress. Grist regrets this reporting error and is aggressively looking into the accuracy of this quotation.]

Very nice and effective way to handle this.

I spent about an hour talking this weekened with a gentleman who is doing a story on the whole Watt/Scherer/Moyers fiasco.

One of the things I emphasized is that I would hope that newspapers, both online and off, would learn from this lesson and others and realize that bogus quotes that end up getting recycled, reused and embellished generally share similar features, including bogus or completley lacking attribution, and that quotes that are really outrageous and just fit someone’s preconceptions too snugly need to be fact -checked.

It’s not like it takes a lot of time to plug a quote into Lexis-Nexis and see if it’s ever been referenced before, and quickly look at those references to see if they’re credible.

I think there also needs to be a much better vetting process for op-eds. I’ve found 8 or 9 major blunders of bogus quotes like this over the past couple years, and they’ve all been in op-eds. Op-eds are like a massive backdoor to slip in bougus materials in an otherwise well-run news organization.

MSM Picks Up On James Watt Story

Over the past couple days I’ve talked to a couple reporters about the bogus James Watt quote, so there will probably be several stories on this in the mainstream media next week.

I also had a nice conversation with a member of Watt’s family. Apparently Watt has also been contacted by reporters and is being given the opportunity to rebut the bogus quote in the pages of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune which published Bill Moyers’ speech that widely distributed the quote (though, apparently Moyers has been using the bogus quote in his speeches for months — he really owes Watt an apology).

The interesting thing was that apparently Watt was pleasantly surprised that anyone would have the interest or integrity to go to the lengths that I and other bloggers did to try to determine if this quote was, in fact, bogus or not.

Hey, we might just be bloggers, but we’re no Bill Moyers.

Follow-Up On Bogus Watt Quote

It turns out I wasn’t the only person who was immediately suspicious of that apparently bogus quote from James Watt that Bill Moyer used in a recent speech. A Little Reason and Stark Raving Sane were also on top of this.

I just have a couple of things to add.

First, it turns out that August Miles, who is the original source for this quote attributed to Watt, is also extremely careless about attribution. Theron Mann notes,

First, Loren emails to say that he has written to Austin Miles, the earliest published source of Watt’s alleged “last tree” quote, and Miles told Loren that he personally remembered Watt making the statement on a PTL broadcast. (Miles was unable to remember the date of the broadcast). I’m still sceptical, but it’s hard to prove or disprove without Watt, Bakker or someone else coming forward.

Obviously its difficult to obtain certainty, but we have another clue about whether the quote is genuine or not. Miles claims that, Watt “is a born-again evangelical who sat on the board of directors of the scandalous PTL Club ministry while serving as our Secretary of Interior.” That also turns out to be false. Watt was added to the PTL Club board of directors in 1987, about four years after he was forced out as Secretary of the Interior.

Miles claim is especially egregious — and he owes Watt a major apology on this issue — because Watt was brought into the PTL after the scandal erupted. When it was clear the PTL was in serious trouble, James Bakker turned over the keys to Jerry Falwell who then set up a board of directors including Watt to oversee the ministry while Falwell undertook auditing the PTL which turned out to be over $60 million in debt.

Miles clearly wants the reader to think that Watt was somehow associated with the scandal itself. This is outrageous and probably libelous if Watt wanted to pursue the matter.

So Miles can’t even get publicly verifiable information right, and we’re supposed to just trust his memory of an unspecified PTL broadcast? I think not. The burden is on those claiming that the quote is accurate, and every time we turn around we see that every other part of the story is false. There is simply no reason to believe that the quote is true. Treat it as bogus until one of these jokers — Moyers, Scherer or Miles — actually does his job and provides corroboration.

The second issue which I’m certain some people must wonder is why get so damned worked up over a single misquote? Because this is typical of how bogus claims and quotes are manufactured and occasionally enter the mainstream.

Look, when you come across an outlandish quote — especially one that puts your opponents in a very bad light — its incumbent on those repeating the quote to do a bit of fact checking.

I do a lot of writing about the animal rights movement. But when I read in a book or see someone post on a newsgroup that Ingrid Newkirk made some outrageous statement that I’ve never heard before, I don’t rush off to publish it on my blog. I check and doublecheck the quote. A lot of people don’t. Newkirk has a reputation for saying outlandish things, so some people think if they see an outlandish claim attached to Newkirk’s name they can just assume she must have said it. Just as, in this case, Moyers and Scherer simply assumed that since Watt had a reputation for making outlandish statements, that they were safe in assuming this statement was also accurate without bothering to do even a minimum of fact checking.

Scherer is especially guilty in this case. I would never write an op-ed in which I repeated a quote from a single source without any sort of reference or footnote that could be checked. Scherer was reckless and stupid in simply repeating Miles claim without trying to corroborate it.

A good rule of thumb is to treat such material as if it came from someone you don’t have a very good opinion of. Would Scherer have repeated an outlandish, unsourced quote attributed to Bill Clinton in a book by Rush Limbaugh without first corroborating it? Doubtful. But because Miles’ view of religion is similar to Scherers’, he apparently just drop his critical reasoning and went with it.

Just because people agree with us, however, doesn’t mean they aren’t also full of shit.

One final thought. I had never heard of August Miles before this, but as an atheist I found the portions of his book that I read pretty much disgusting and worthless. He seemed cut in the mold of the American Atheists, wherein atheism is mistaken for open hatred of religion.

In some respects, I agreed with Scherer, but every single item he complains about religious right extremists is also present in religious and secular left wing extremists.

Belief that we are in an end times when the entire world is on the verge of a global apocalypse? The Left’s got that in spades. Their morality all over my life? Don’t even get me started about all the Lefties I know who think that Jesus’ message is all the justification they need for redistributive tax policies and, in some cases, outright socialism.

Scherer thinks he and the religious right are nothing alike. But from my vantage point, they seem all but indistinguishable — just different sides of the same pain-in-the-ass control freak mentality, warning me I have to place my life in their hands if I don’t want the world to end. And in this case, with the same exacting standards of scholarship.

Bill Moyers, James Watt and the Creation of Media Myths

Given his position as a sometimes-media critic, Bill Moyers recently provided an excellent example of how myths are perpetuated in the media. The short version is that even journalists tend to simply believe what other people tell them without every bothering to do any sort of fact checking. Its an odd problem in an age when so much information is at our fingertips.

In op-ed, Bill Moyers writes (emphasis added),

Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, “after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.”

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn’t know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true — one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index.

In fact, there is no evidence at all that James Watt made this rather bizarre statement as part of any testimony to Congress. In fact, there’s scant evidence that Watt said it at all, under any circumstance. The quote doesn’t show up in a Lexis-Nexis search, and reporters at the time had a field day reporting Watt’s regular gaffes. If he said it at the time, it is genuinely surprising that no one else reported this statement.

So why does Moyer believe Watt did? Because he’s simply passing it along without checking its veracity. In this case he’s simply repeating what Glenn Scherer of Grist Magazine wrote back in November,

Odds are it was in 1981, when President Reagan’s first secretary of the interior, James Watt, told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. “God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back,” Watt said in public testimony that helped get him fired.

This is easily proven false. Watt wasn’t fired until 1983, and he was fired because he told a group of lobbyists that his coal commission’s decisions would be upheld because, “I have a black. I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple.” Watt’s many comments about the environment — many nutty, some not so nutty — played no role at all in his firing.

So why does Scherer think they did? Unlike Moyers, who is simply repeating a false claim, Scherer is simply making stuff up here. This is frequently called lying.

Scherer notes that his source for the Watt quote is Austin Miles’ 1990 book, Setting the Captives Free. But the quote in Miles book is a) problematic, and b) doesn’t say what Scherer reports it does.

Here’s what Miles writes,

Our desperate efforts to protect the environment have been met with opposition from the religious right. James Watt, a born-again evangelical who sat on the board of directors of the scandalous PTL Club ministry while serving as our Secretary of Interior, said this about the environment: “God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.”

That’s all Miles has to say about Watt. It is impossible to check the veracity of this statement since Miles doesn’t bother to give any sort of indication where, when or in what forum Watt supposedly said this. Miles’ book seems positively allergic to footnotes. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to repeat second-hand, unsourced quotes.

Even then, Scherer seems to have simply made up most of the details for his column. As I noted above, Miles doesn’t say when, where or in what forum this was made, so how does Scherer conclude that it was made in 1981 at a Congressional hearing and led, in part, to Watt’s firing? He can’t. So either he has another source for this quote, or he simply made those details up.

And then Moyers bought this nonsense, hook line and sinker and even managed to “remember” the reaction of various people to Watt’s testimony.

Nobody, apparently, gives a damn about actually fact checking and striving for accuracy.

Source:

Bill Moyers: There is no tomorrow. Star Tribune, January 31, 2005.

The godly must be crazy. Glenn Scherer, Grist, November 1, 2004.

Did James Watt Really Say This?

National Review points to this Bill Moyers op-ed which includes this line,

Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, “after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.”

Watt said a lot of stupid things — he was the guy who complained that the Beach Boys would attract “the wrong element” to a planned event. But did he say this line above?

Color me suspicious. The Grist article, which can be found here, gets key details wrong (emphasis added),

Odds are it was in 1981, when President Reagan’s first secretary of the interior, James Watt, told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. “God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back,” Watt said in public testimony that helped get him fired.

Watt was not fired over what he said in testimony to Congress. Watt was fired because he had a breakfast meeting with lobbyists at which he explained that the decisions made by his coal advisory commission would stand because, “I have a black. I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple.” Besides, Watt was fired in 1983, not 1981.

So Grist completely gets the details of Watt’s firing wrong, which raised my spidey sense. Moreover that sentence, “After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back” doesn’t appear at all in Lexis-Nexis. It’s hard to believe that Watt could have said something that silly without anyone quoting it in the intervening 20+ years except Grist.

The statement is also inconsistent with other things Watt said when linking his Christianity with environmentalism. For example, in 1981 Watt testified in Congress,

I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns. Whatever it is, we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.

It’s certainly possible Watt said this — the man said enough wacky things for three lifetimes — but given the poor sourcing and the lack of any corroboration in Lexis, I consider the claim to be suspect.

I’ve e-mailed the author of the Grist piece asking him for a corroborating source on the Watt quote.

Update: The Grist author hasn’t replied personally, but he has provided a source for the Watt quote and it’s not looking good. Where would you go for a quote from James Watt? A book on environmental controversies in the 1980s? Perhaps any number of histories of the Reagan administration?

Nope, the apparent source for the quote is a recently published book about the Catholic church’s sex scandals! My library happens to own a copy so I’m going to check out what sort of sourcing author Austin Miles used later today.