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.