The new website of the West Marin Citizen is at www.westmarincitizen.com for content after 2/22/2010.
Recent additional letters and editorials from The West Marin Citizen on the Oysters in Drakes Bay
Precautionary principle in the parks (1/28/2010)
Dear Editor,
The Jan. 21 West Marin Citizen article on the Marine Mammal Commission claimed, “even with the recent violation with DBOC clams in a harbor seal protected zone, the seals…according to NPS officials, remain unharmed.”
But DBOC bags were placed on one of the three pupping areas for over a month when the mother seals were in what amounts to their third trimester. Contrary to the article, that these pregnant seals were unable to rest in their preferred location could well have harmful consequences…such as greater stress on mothers, premature pupping, lower birth weights for pups, and thus higher chance of mortality.
But it is impossible to know the consequences of this disturbance for certain because, as the National Academy of Science noted, the research needed is functionally impossible to conduct. Such research would require intrusive lifetime monitoring of the disturbed individual seals and pups and comparing them to similarly monitored but undisturbed seals and pups…all the while keeping all other life variables the same. Such research is logistically almost impossible and would cost millions using sophisticated monitoring equipment, but if we want to have seals around in the future, we have to manage and protect them even in the absence of such research.
That is the “precautionary principle” followed by NPS, by the Marine Mammal Commission, and recognized in the National Academy of Sciences Report“visits to these areas (within 500 m of seal haulouts) by oyster farm workers can be expected to lead to the short-term disturbance of any seals… No studies have determined whether short-term responses to disturbance have long-term population consequences for harbor seals, but if the disturbance affects behavior during the breeding season, a precautionary approach to management would seek to reduce these types of disturbance.”
To put that Precautionary Principle in a human perspective, it is also impossible to know the consequences of conducting bomb squad exercises in Marin General’s maternity ward every day for over a month. But the fact that those mothers may make it through the exercises “unharmed” would not likely be used, as The Citizen article implies, to dismiss potential impacts. Similarly while an NPS official may have told The Citizen that it was not known whether DBOC’s bags harmed the pregnant seals, it is simply incorrect for The Citizen to translate that to an unequivocal statement that the seals “remain unharmed.”
In fact, for generations prior to DBOC’s placement of bags there, mother seals have used that nursery haulout, but did not use the haulout while the bags where there and have so far failed to return even though the bags have been removed. It is too early to tell whether DBOC has caused a permanent abandonment of one of the three pupping sites in the Estero, but it is critical that we find ways to eliminate such disturbances in the future even if we can’t prove the consequences.
Gordon Bennett, Sierra Club Marin Group Parks Chair
Horses impacting Drakes Estero (1/28/2010)
Dear Editor,
Regarding the recent study of “potential human factors,” including horseback riding, that might disturb the harbor seals in Drakes Bay, the last I heard, equestrians don’t take their horses for a swim in Drake’s Estero, (“Another study rains on Drakes Estero,” Jan. 21.)
Nor, according to several UC Davis research papers dated 2002 through 2007, do waterborne oocysts from agricultural, cattle, or equine runoff with adequate surrounding vegetation in place.
These papers contain the good news that a vegetated buffer strip of as little as three meters will filter out 99% of any possible pathogens in grassland watersheds. Rest assured that Marin equestrians will be watchful for any unsubstantiated allegations about the impact of horses riding in West Marin.
Connie Berto, Director, Marin Horse
Defining misconduct (1/28/2010)
Dear Editor,
It is with some interest that I read your article on the upcoming Marine Mammal Commission efforts to review conditions in Drakes Estero.
I must, however, correct several errors in the sidebar. There has, indeed, been clear scientific misconduct in the efforts of the National Park Service to paint the local oyster farm with adverse environmental impacts, if “misconduct” means misrepresenting the facts, altering evidence, and presenting conclusions that are not supported by science. That was the conclusion of the National Academy of Sciences report. And Dr. Corey Goodman’s independent reviews of the so-called science coming from the NPS have been clear and compelling in their identification of serious and fatal flaws. I am also a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and I’ve independently reviewed Dr. Goodman’s findings. You quote the Assistant Inspector General of the Department of Interior as saying they completed an inquiry and found no evidence. In fact, their effort did not look into the specific allegations of scientific misconduct. Could the oyster farm be hurting, or even helping, the Estero? Perhaps. But not based on the data available, presented, and analyzed to date.
Dr. Peter Gleick, President, Pacific Institute
To the editor/from the editor (1/28/2010)
To a putative editor
Dear Editor,
Having spent 40+ years working in almost every branch of media I have witnessed almost every abuse of journalism imaginable. I am thus hard to shock. But that unsigned sidebar injected into Andrea Blum’s otherwise excellent article about the Marine Mammal Commission, without her knowledge and permission, is shocking by any standard. A reader of the Citizen would be right to assume that Andrea reported and wrote it, when in fact she filed her story, went home and woke up the next day to find an insulting, unchecked, ad-hominem attack on a personal friend appearing under her byline.
I have to ask you, Jim, how you square the writing of all those sanctimonious editorials about journalistic ethics with doing something like this? And while I have you, did you fact check the piece, authenticate the documents it’s based on, interview any of the parties mentioned, particularly Corey Goodman (as a simple courtesy to someone who is clearly catching heat in the article?) Had you called Pete Peterson I can assure you he would have given you a very different version than the one reported in the sidebar…in less than a minute of your time.
In fact do you have a fucking clue what you’re doing? It’s sloppy, vicious little actions like this that disgrace our profession.
Thanks a lot, Jim,
Mark Dowie, Willow Point, West Shore Tomales Bay
Jim Kravets tries to respond
Mr. Dowie’s letter provided several challenges and several opportunities. The tone was the first challenge, but I’ll address that later.
Despite the tone, Mr. Dowie makes many valid, important points in the letter and I suspect there are others who share his concerns about that article.
Essentially Mr. Dowie’s concerns break down into two categories: The physical appearance of the sidebar and its content.
Sidebars in journalism, loosely defined, are supplementary information printed alongside the main text, graphically separate from the primary story but with contextual connection.
It’s a bit of a catchall. Sidebars may include selections from testimony, historical documents, map legends, anecdotes, book excerpts, recipes, event information – you name it. As such, sidebars don’t carry the same expectation for “completeness” or balance as a full news article. They are, of course, expected to be accurate.
The author of the main article sometimes writes the sidebar, sometimes they’re added by editors. There isn’t a defined convention.
The New York Times and the Marin IJ both had unattributed (unbylined) sidebars on Monday, the day we received Mr. Dowie’s letter.
In the case of The Citizen, our computers say we have printed some 160 items tagged “sidebar.” Less than ten of them were attributed to an actual person.
In the same issue as the Marine Mammal Commission (MMC) story, reporter Andrea Blum’s other Page 1 story also featured an unattributed sidebar. In this same issue there was even a sidebar about Andrea Blum and a benefit she’s planning for earthquake victims in Haiti. In all three cases the sidebars were added by the editor (me) after she filed her story. That’s the way we’ve managed most of The Citizen’s 160 sidebars.
The contextual disconnection to the parent article is regrettable The first paragraph of the sidebar – which introduced the issue of the scientific misconduct charges – was actually part of the reporter’s parent article and occupied the space where the sidebar was ultimately inserted. It was added to the sidebar to make it clearer, but in so doing it strained the connection to the parent article.
The MMC sidebar was poorly demarcated from the main story. The formatting – a slight left indent and non-justified right margin – had some wondering if it was a sidebar at all or just a production error. The formatting was clearer in the MMC article’s .pdf version, which has been circulating online since Saturday.
Some refer to such novel formatting, charitably, as “part of The Citizen’s charm.” Our episodes of novel formatting typically occur when I stick the page designer with 150 percent more editorial content than he can reasonably fit into the paper, and he’s forced to somehow shoehorn it all in.
Was I trying to slip some mischievous passages into the reporter’s story without her knowing? Stick her with the bill? I hope even our fiercest critics give us more credit than that.
In the end, the issue of scientific misconduct as it relates to DBOC-PRNS is too major an issue to put in a 400-word sidebar; it deserves a full news article, if not several. Sidebars help expand understanding, but sometimes not by much. They’re a side dish. Sometimes they leave you wanting more. In this case this sidebar may have left readers wanting a lot more, and that makes a lot of sense to me. I want a lot more, too.
Content
As for Mr. Dowie’s concerns about the sidebar’s content:
By reporting the latest results of inquiries into charges of scientific misconduct, we are doing just that: reporting. There is no commentary associated with the sidebar; there is only factual information provided; none of it out of context and none of it cherry-picked.
We had and still have no reason to question the authenticity of the documents which sourced the sidebar in the MMC story, but if it turns out they are somehow incomplete or misleading we’ll make a thorough correction in accordance with our editorial policies.
Some have asked us to produce the documents, and we did. As there does not seem to be much controversy about the documents themselves, we’re still deciding whether to post them on our website. (One is a 70-page congressional report.) We’d like to strike the right balance of availability, accountability and transparency while steering clear of what could be misconstrued as broadcasting. In the meantime, I am happy to email copies of the documents on request. Just send an email to editor@westmarincitizen.com
Tone
Among our very few contributors’ guidelines are these requirements: No profanity; No personal attacks; No ad hominem arguments; No inciting violence; Civility and decency, as commonly defined in a community. This last one, admittedly, needs some refinement.
As written, Mr. Dowie’s letter ran afoul of four of those five. But in truth we receive letters to the editor with more challenging tones than his, and to date we’ve been able to work with the author to arrive at a version which satisfies both their intent and our publication guidelines.
We had prepared a sanitized version of the letter for publication, which the author ultimately approved, but in the meantime he emailed his original version to several hundred West Marin acquaintances with the accompanying note:
“Since meeting your guidelines would be virtually impossible I will pass on your offer to refine my language and simply send what I have written to my West Marin list of 644 people. And in the spirit of maintaining my First Amendment right of free profanity, who the fuck are you to be talking about “ad hominem arguments” after publishing that unsigned and clearly ad hominem sidebar, or “civility and decency as defined in a community” after you have so thoroughly fouled the community you work in. I refer, of course, to journalism.”
Curiously, many of those receiving the emailed original advised me that to edit it for publication is to do a disservice to the community. The argument in this case goes that there is as much to be learned about someone from what they say as how they say it, and to sanitize this letter in this case is to misrepresent the author, or at least half of his message.
Understanding
In light of the fact that just about all of the 160 sidebars printed in the history of our newspaper have followed a similar protocol, and the documents that this particular sidebar are based on are authentic, readers might wonder if Mr. Dowie has been as upset about our 150-ish other sidebars. And if he hasn’t, why not? Was there something else about this particular sidebar, which pushed Mr. Dowie to this level of anger?
While you’re pondering that…
We feel that, to whatever extent possible, it is the role of newspapers to make public pertinent behind-the-scenes activities so that readers might have a better understanding of the forces at work which may ultimately affect their lives. In shining a light into the community’s dark alleys, it is also necessary to balance a citizen’s right of privacy. It ultimately falls to the editor to strike the correct balance between “the public’s right to know” and an individual’s privacy rights. It is in this spirit that we include information about other, less public efforts by the letter writer which may help explain, in part, his anger at the news reported.
Something unexpected occurred when Mr. Dowie emailed his original letter to hundreds of citizens
About a half-dozen people who received the email responded to me to let me know that Mr. Dowie’s anger over the sidebar may be related to the fact that he is partnering with Dr. Goodman and others in what was described as a secret negotiations with Robert Plotkin to purchase and operate the Point Reyes Light newspaper.
They told me that a confidentiality agreement exists among those who are involved in the negotiations, and if anyone wanted to know who was involved they should just ask around and see who could not answer.
The volume of unsolicited emails I received informing me of this lends credence to the story, but I have not made any further inquiries. Instead, I invite Mr. Dowie and Dr. Goodman to use our pages to set the record straight about their plans.
Regrettably, the list of those who try to silence others with whom they do not agree is long and still growing. Opponents of free speech be advised: This newspaper will continue to print voices of dissent and perspectives which some readers – and occasionally all readers – will find objectionable. Those who seek to limit diversity of opinions are certain to be unhappy reading The West Marin Citizen.
In the final analysis, we have to accept that The Citizen’s style of reporting will not go over well with those who have already made up their minds on an issue. It’s challenging, because it’s a natural tendency to engage with our critics. We’ll explain ourselves as often as we can and be as transparent as possible. If we remain responsible, respectful and professional, maybe along the way we’ll be able to silence some of our critics, but as journalists we can’t mistake that with our goal.
I expect that good news will come out of this. I genuinely embrace this dictum from Alice Walker: “We must learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.”
On sidebars (2/4/2010)
Dear Editor,
My profane language in a recent letter to the editor led to a focus on the messenger rather than the message. I extend the apology already made to you personally, to your staff, your readers, and any of my friends and neighbors who were offended by my incivility. Regrettably, my language detracted from my message, which should have focused solely on two fundamental problems with an unattributed sidebar suggesting that the claims of scientific misconduct against the National Park Service had been properly considered and dismissed.
First, when a sidebar to an article is unsigned, it seems fair to assume that the author of the sidebar is the author of the article in which it is embedded. I certainly assumed that about the other 150 or so sidebars that have appeared in The Citizen, and about the two that ran in the New York Times the day my original letter was written
If a sidebar is written by someone else, it should at least contain the initials of the author, in this case “JK”, but more importantly, it should only be injected into the original article with the approval of that article’s author, which, according to last week’s editorial, is not this newspaper’s custom. The Citizen might consider adopting what is standard procedure at the New York Times, Harpers, Orion, the Washington Post, The Nation, Mother Jones and every other publication for whom I have ever written.
Second, your sidebar discredited and insulted a member of our community, Corey Goodman, and completely contradicted his posted comments in response to an article on thenation.com last September, comments that were carefully fact checked. I continue to believe that The Citizen owes it to their readers and the community to interview someone a story is about and get their side before publishing something so clearly distorted against them.
Mark Dowie, Willow Point, West Shore Tomales Bay
Mr. Dowie refers to a 400-word sidebar in our Jan. 21 issue consisting of passages taken from three documents now posted at <westmarincitizen.com> Readers are encouraged to see the original documents for themselves. The validity and authenticity of the documents – two obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and one freely available as part of the US Congressional record – remain confirmed. [Editor]
posted February 14, 2010