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One of the aside comments written by many amid The Will Affair is that perhaps George would better serve his readership by spending his time writing about baseball, his true love. Now, I don’t know the real quality of George’s writing and understanding of the sport, but we have to imagine that he does a better job discussing batting averages than he does in (deceptive) discussion of temperature, ice coverage, and other elements of climate change data and science.

This is an odd issue. It is hard to imagine any traditional media outlet allowing the sort of deceptive, error-filled reporting on the Super Bowl or Wimbledon as occurred in Will’s outright dishonesty on climate science. And, it is even harder to imagine that editors would rise to the defense of published stories on baseball for which readers and baseball experts have provided, with substantive documentation, multiple examples of how a reporter simply got the facts wrong (let alone purposefully distorted them).

Why the sports analogy? Because, the past several days have seen another two cases where sports-focused authors have reported on energy and climate science … and simply blew the story, catastrophically.

• As discussed in these pages yesterday, The New Yorker‘s Talk of the Town published “Economy vs The Environment“, a false talking point after false talking point travesty of shallow and incorrect discussion of the interaction of climate and economic issues. The author, David Owen, a golf journalist and contributing editor to Golf Digest.
• The New York Times Magazine is publishing a hagiography of global warming skeptic (and delayer) Freeman Dyson (dissected, mercilessly, by Joe Romm). The author, Nicholas Dawidoff, specializes in baseball.

Now, we won’t get into the culinary sports, with the Wall Street Journal‘s “Deputy Taste Editor” screwing the pooch in reporting on a major study on environmental and economic inequality demographics.

To be clear, the issue is not that sports writers are now writing on the interplay of economic, energy, and environmental issues. Actually, that trend is somewhat welcome. While there is a feared decline in science reporting, most reporters are ‘generalists’ and it is a good sign that the ‘journalistic generalists’ see a need (a value?) to focus reporting on these domains. What is distressing is the utter failure of these sports writers to do decent reporting. And, the utter failure of the editors to hold them to any reasonable standard of journalistic ‘excellence’ (actually, of even journalistic mediocrity).

Let’s try to flip the situation. Imagine a climate scientist writing an article for the New York Times Magazine on Hank Aaron, who confused home runs with touchdowns and quotes Aaron critiquing, as some form of specialist, Joe Namath’s qualities and decision-making as a quarterback. Would this get published? Of course not.

Evidently, the standards for journalistic excellence are higher for the sports pages than they are for the most critical issue of the 21st century: the interplay of economic, energy, and environmental (climate) issues.