Even saying this, however, brings up other reasons why I'm not going to read too much in to two little lines, one in a print story, one on a blog, calling what Will did "misrepresentation". Will's challenged ethics go back nearly a generation, when he first gained national attention. Even as he sat as an op-ed columnist for the Post, he was also serving as debate coach for then candidate Ronald Reagan, without ever revealing the connection. Now, I realize this might not seem to be that big a deal; yet, it does reveal a conflict of interest, or at least full disclosure on Will's part at the time might have been in order.
Now, it has gone beyond merely moonlighting for a Republican candidate without letting his readers know he was doing so. The gross mishandling of scientific data, with the full intent to distort various bits of data to serve narrow, political purposes, has not been challenged forcefully enough. Even the Post's Ombudsman has seemed a bit skittish in calling this kind of thing what it is. Even Somerby's take on Will leaves a bit to be desired:
Will’s two columns about climate change did gain wide circulation. Unfortunately, both columns seemed quite shaky; the second was quite disingenuous. (In responding to criticism, Will omitted the largest errors he had apparently made.) After several weeks, the Post published this excellent bit of rebuttal, an op-ed by science writer Chris Mooney. But Will’s columns appear in hundreds of papers. We’ll assume that Mooney’s did not.
Both Will’s columns seemed under-informed; his second column seemed disingenuous. Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander soon stepped in to opine; his piece was weak and disingenuous too. (Why disingenuous? Because he seemed to understate what he’d said in an earlier e-mail, in which he seemed to support Will’s first column.) Meanwhile, we thought some liberals misstated the problem; they seemed to say that no one has the right to interpret scientific data except the scientists who first presented it. (In this case, those at the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center.) Clearly, that just isn’t the case. Clarity itself melted down.
What was the fundamental problem with Will’s columns? Just this: Almost surely, Will doesn’t know enough about the science of climate change to be writing interpretive columns about it. (Neither do we; neither do you.) We’ll assume he believes what he seemed to suggest—that the scientific world has gotten conned by a gang of global warming alarmists. But it seemed that Will himself got conned, by the type of misleading, cherry-picked data the fixers are constantly churning. You can always find a fact or three which seem to suggest the conclusion you like. Almost surely, the Post was unwise to give Will license to rummage around among millions of facts and select those which struck him as most relevant. Simply put, Mooney knows much more science than Will. And unless an editor proceeds which a great deal of care, this topic calls for a specialist.
The last part of the very last sentence is, for all intents and purposes, wrong. It doesn't take a specialist to write about science. It takes someone willing to report science as science to write about science. When approaching an issue as artificially politicized as climate science, the editors should have done the simplest thing in the world - taken an hour or two to check the data Will reported, then taken it back to him and said, "Either change your column, or write on something else." It's really that simple.
Except, Will has pull. He's syndicated. His mug is on ABC every Sunday, looking self-satisfied even as he gets all sorts of things wrong (he has managed in the past to mangle everything from the political philosophy of Edmund Burke to the unfounded allegations that Bill Clinton raped a Miss USA contestant in the back of a limo when he was governor of Arkansas, with impunity) with no repercussions.
In the current political and economic climate, however, the Post can ill-afford to continue their laissez-faire attitude toward Will's blase attitude toward factual matters. It is one thing to defend his right to say whatever he wants. It is quite another thing to say that right includes lying about all sorts of things on the op-ed page of one of the most important newspaper's in the country.
He should have been gone a long time ago. That he isn't shows how broken (a) editorial power is in this country; and (b) how much the simple fact of name-recognition can overcome the fact that a person is a serial liar of near- pathological proportions. One hopes that someone at the Post wises up and realizes that Will's continued presence is a hindrance, not a help, to the reputation of the newspaper.
