This morning I opened up my twitter account and the “while
you were away” feature had an interesting tweet highlighted. It was from the National Observer which reports
itself to be:
“a new
publication founded by the Vancouver Observer's award-winning team of
journalists. The National Observer focuses on news through the lens of energy,
environment and federal politics.”
The tweet said:
Needless to say I was intrigued: the government was
paying a PR company to lie about the toxicity of oil sands, which we all know
are very toxic? and so I clicked on the link which brought me to story at the
National Observer called: Time
for honest talk and messy solutions in the oil sands and authored by a very
respected name in the environmental industry: Tzeporah Berman. I have been
following Dr. Berman’s career since the 1990’s and when she speaks it carries a
lot of weight. Her National
Observer blogger page describes her as:
Tzeporah
Berman BA, MES, LLD (honoris causa), Adjunct Professor York University Faculty
of Environmental Studies is author of This
Crazy Time: Living Our Environmental Challenge, Knopf Canada.
The combination of the tweet and the author made me
even more interested and so I started reading the story and there was the claim
right there in the first paragraph of the story:
The debate
over energy, oil sands and pipelines in Canada is at best dysfunctional and at
worst a twisted game that is making public relations professionals and
consultants on all sides enormous amounts of money. Documents obtained through Freedom of Information routinely show
our own government hiding scientific reports, meeting secretly to craft PR
strategies and even policy with the companies they are supposed to regulate and
millions of dollars are spent on ads trying to convince Canadians that the
oil sands are as toxic as peanut butter [emphasis mine] and that without
them our hospitals will close.
Unfortunately, the story didn’t contain any references
to the source of the claim that “millions of dollars are spent on ads trying
to convince Canadians that the oil sands are as toxic as peanut butter“. Now as regular readers of my blog
know, I have written a lot about both the topics of toxicology and oil sands so
I was very interested in this claim because if an ad campaign has said something
of the sort, I would have expected to have noticed it, especially if they spent
millions of dollars on the campaign. I did a cursory web search and could find
nothing on the topic. So I decided to tweet back to the Observer and asked a
quick question:
.@NatObserver
can you link to the ad you claim says "oil sands are as toxic as peanut
butter" @NoTarSands @Tzeporah I can't find it anywhere
While waiting I re-read the article and noticed that
it was a re-print of a commentary printed in the Toronto Star. So I went to the
Star’s web site and found the commentary article titled: It's
time to talk about the oilsands. The article contained an almost identical
paragraph:
Documents
obtained through Freedom of Information routinely show our own government
hiding scientific reports or meeting secretly to craft
PR strategies with the companies they are supposed to regulate, while millions of dollars are spent on ads
trying to convince Canadians that the oilsands are as toxic as peanut butter
[emphasis mine].
Happily the article contained an embedded link to
another National Observer story:
Harper Conservatives' secret tactics to protect oil sands: FOI details
which contained a lot of links to Freedom of Information (FOI) results. I
scanned the released FOI documents and was unable to find the information so I
decided to try a different approach. I did a Google search for the words “oil
sands” “toxic” and “peanut butter” and was only partially successful. I did
find a useful link except it was to a story in The Tyee: Gooey Oil Sands Lies PR
Flacks Tell: Call BS! The article described a plan to compare the viscosity
of bitumen to peanut butter. The critical line from the story was:
One cheery
communication compared the viscosity of
bitumen, an ultra heavy crude, to
peanut butter [emphasis mine]. Bitumen definitely looks, feels and behaves
like asphalt but it sure as hell doesn't taste like peanut butter.
Using this information, I did another search and found
many hits where the viscosity (consistency to the non-chemist) of oil sands and
bitumen were compared to peanut butter. Now this made a lot of sense to me.
Most people don’t understand what bitumen is like in real life and a PR program
to make it sound more friendly by comparing its viscosity and consistency to
peanut butter might both allows readers to gain some understanding of the
substance and maybe get some positive spin.
The problem with this discovery is that it was utterly
harmless and completely inconsistent with the Berman articles. The PR campaign
was designed to provide factually correct information: that bitumen has a
similar consistency to peanut butter. It certainly did not include any
suggestion that they would try and convince the public that oil sands were “as toxic as peanut butter”. Now some of
you might call me a bit of a pedant but let’s put this into perspective. We
know as a matter of fact that oil sands are very toxic and should not be
ingested. If the government was spending “millions” to try and convince us that
oil sands were not toxic that would be a fantastically important story. Governments
aren’t supposed to lie to the public and when they are caught doing so, they
need to be held to account. So a headline saying that the government was spending
“millions of dollars” to trying to “convince
Canadians that the oilsands are as toxic as peanut butter” which they know
is an outright lie, well that would be an important story as well as the first
question in Question Period the next day.
My natural impression was that this line represented a
simple mistake, a typo, some bad typesetting and so I politely contacted the
National Observer which tweeted back the following:
@martynschmoll
@BlairKing_ca @edwiebe This is an op-ed and, indeed, the phrase is a metaphor
on the first paragraph http://bit.ly/natobstzp1
Now remember this was in the same discussion thread
that started with a tweet where the National Observer declared: “#Oilsands as toxic as peanut butter? That's what govt's PR
campaigns say”. Even if the original use in
the story was as a metaphor, the tweet, by the National Observer, was anything
but: it was a statement of fact. In this case however, it is equally clear that
in the form presented in the Op-Ed it was not presented as a metaphor. I’m not
sure how the sentence: “millions of
dollars are spent on ads trying to convince Canadians that the oil sands are as
toxic as peanut butter” can be
read as anything but a statement of fact. A further concern was the fact that a
National news service has editors who cannot distinguish between a metaphor and
a direct statement of fact? Also there is a second subtext to their tweet.
Essentially they are saying that since it is an Op-Ed the article doesn’t have
to be factual? I thought news services were supposed to correct errors, not
promulgate them.
Having received that disappointing response I tried
Dr. Berman. When I contacted Dr. Berman her response was:
@BlairKing_ca
@edwiebe @NatObserver are u kidding me?! the point clearly is that the ads are
meant to assure people that all is well.
Now remember, Dr. Berman notes on every platform I
have been able to locate that she is an “Adjunct
Professor York University Faculty of Environmental Studies.” When an
academic is shown to have made an error of fact, the typical approach is to
quickly correct the error and thank the person who pointed it out, not
double-down on the proposition? Dr. Berman may feel that the point of her various
articles was to indicate that the “ads were meant to assure people that all is
well”, but in the process she made a statement of fact (millions of dollars are spent on
ads trying to convince Canadians that the oil sands are as toxic as peanut
butter) that cannot be verified with the information provided.
Admittedly she may have additional data confirming her statement but she
certainly hasn’t presented it for review. As it stands she has made a statement
of fact that the government was spending millions on a disinformation program? The
documentation I have been able to find suggests that the government spent an
undisclosed amount of money providing factually correct information with a government-friendly
spin.
I have been asked by a couple people on-line about why
I am once again banging on my drum? There is an oft misused term out there: “factoid”.
Most people, when asked, think that it refers to a small interesting and (most importantly)
true fact but factoid is actually defined as “an invented fact
believed to be true because it appears in print”. Another closely related
term was coined by Stephen Colbert: truthiness which
is defined as “the quality of seeming to
be true according to one's intuition, opinion, or perception without regard to
logic, factual evidence, or the like”. In the process of looking up
information for this blog posting I found over a dozen different sources
already repeating the factoid that millions of dollars are/were spent on ads
trying to convince Canadians that the oil sands are as toxic as peanut butter. A
few months ago I tracked down a similar piece of misinformation on the attribution
of avian deaths to nuclear facilities that had been given time to fester. I
wrote about it in a blog post (On
estimates of avian deaths attributable to coal and nuclear facilities) where
I showed how the data was clearly in error but I was too late, that misinformation
now has a life of its own. It shows up in sources as varied as Wikipedia and US
World and National Report. Maybe if someone had pointed out the issues with the
information on the day it was released that factoid would not be the number one
talking point on the topic to this day.
Whether you like our government or not, in this case,
they appear to have not done what they are reported to have done. The factoid presented
has a ring of truthiness that will appeal to their opponents and, as
demonstrated, is already running rampant on the internet. The best way to fight
a factoid is with facts. As I wrote earlier, I welcome anyone presenting a
document which shows that the government was paying PR people to run a disinformation
campaign on this topic, but that is not what I have uncovered in this case. The
individuals responsible for promulgating this factoid have a responsibility, if
they determine it to be incorrect, to correct the record. I look forward to
their doing so shortly.
For those who like the visuals:
Author's Note:
2015-07-23 The National Observer
has quietly adjusted their text to remove the words "as toxic as" and replace
them with the word "like".
Believe it or not, that makes all the difference. The change does little to
tone down the article but that minor change addresses all my concerns about
spreading misinformation. While the change is not noted anywhere, it represents
a great first start. Thank-you Dr. Berman.
2015-07-23: DeSmog blog has now fixed their post and included a correction notice. A great presentation of how a correction should be done to avoid what one commenter calls "zombie evidence". Great work DeSmog!
Now only the Toronto Star has the incorrect data....
Interesting. I don't see much difference between some environmental activists and the Bush team during the propaganda campaign prior to Iraq 03.
ReplyDeleteTzeporah Berman isn't exactly wrong about the government's objective about making the public feel comfortable about the oil sands by often using emotional arguments. So I guess she objects to the emotional miasma produced by the government around the public tar sands issue (the government's enbracing of the ethical oil argument, for example).
ReplyDeleteBut she, and other environmentalist also often use appeals to emotion (anger, fear) in tar sands and other campaigns (Anti-GMO, anti-nuclear, Anti-pesticide).
This is a bad form of public engagement.
And two wrongs don't make a right. The facts always should matter most.
Is peanut butter an emotional point? I used frozen honey, candle wax, and molasses when I tried to explain heavy oil viscosity to people...I think my analogues are all better than peanut butter. But I never thought this conveyed the idea that heavy oil was edible. I don't want to criticize the lady too hard, but the comment was a bit overdone.
DeleteLet me ask you. I assume you understand heavy oil viscosity ranges. What would you use in a communication to the public at large? Something they can grasp, and they see in their daily lives?
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