Forbes: New York Times Blunders into Advocacy Role on the Fracking Debate -- Children are the Victims

Over the past two years, The New York Times has stumbled badly in its coverage of the natural gas revolution and fracking debate.  Jon Entine, senior fellow at the Center for Health & Risk Communication at George Mason University, reports.

Displaying little of the contextualized reporting that the paper, at its best, is renowned for, theTimes has run numerous articles in its “Drilling Down” series and elsewhere, simplistically framing shale gas extraction as an environmental disaster-in-progress.

Newly-minted natural gas beat reporter Ian Urbina has focused exclusively on the negative—“the risks of natural-gas drilling” the descriptor on the series page notes—rather than examining both the risks and benefits of the shale gas bonanza.

The questionable reporting kicked off in spring 2011 when the Times hyped the research of once obscure Cornell University professor Robert Howarth whose anti-shale gas activism and out-of-the-mainstream findings have been sharply contested by independent researchers, including at environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Fund and the Environmental Defense Council; a research team at MIT; the National Energy Technology Lab, andindependent energy commentators such as Michael Levi at the Council on Foreign Relations.  MORE