Earlier this week, THE WORLDWIDE STANDARD exposed the numerous factual errors in an article by Barry Sanders at the Huffington Post titled "The Military's Addiction to Oil." The author was clearly out of his depth--he knows nothing about the military, and even less about global warming. But that didn't stop the Huffington Post from inviting him to run a weeklong series on the subject. Still, credit where credit is due. The WWS may rarely see eye to eye with Arianna Huffington, but she could give remedial training to her fellow travelers at the New Republic and the Los Angeles Times in how to issue corrections and retractions when faced with obvious error. Arianna's response to what surely was an unprecedented display of ignorance from one of her contributors impresses us greatly.
The Huffington Post has canceled the series. Here's their repudiation of author Barry Sanders in the form of an editor's note:
After this post was published, some commenters and bloggers, especially Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard raised a number of questions about its accuracy. As is our policy, we asked Mr. Sanders to either provide backup for his factual claims or retract them. His response follows. In it, he acknowledges three "flat-out" inaccuracies: Apache helicopters fall under the auspices of the Army not the Air Force; the USS Independence was not, as claimed, headed to the Persian Gulf in 2002 (it was decommissioned in 1998); and Sanders left out the word "battalion" in the sentence, "a pair of Apache helicopter battalions can devour more than 60,000 gallons of fuel in a single night's attack." These have been corrected in the post.
Sanders also raises the issue of jet exhaust that results when "a squadron of F-22s, say, fly sortie after sortie, at fairly low elevations, over a crowded neighborhood in Baghdad." Goldfarb says "an F-22 has never, ever, flown a sortie over Baghdad, let alone at low altitude and in squadron formation." In his response, Sanders disputes this, but Air Force spokesperson Maj. Kristin Marposon told HuffPost that F-22s have not been used in Iraq.
As for the other facts in dispute -- namely the number of jets stationed on aircraft-carrier groups in the Gulf, the number of stealth bombers and US planes in Saudi Arabia, and the number of aircraft carrier task forces stationed in the Gulf -- Sanders offers a detailed explanation of how he arrived at his figures. We'll leave it to you to decide the persuasiveness of his explanation. For us, it confuses as much as it clarifies.
Mr. Sanders feels that the dispute over these details obscures the larger point of his argument. Maybe so, but we are committed to maintaining the highest possible standards of accuracy and transparency. Accordingly, we will not be running the remaining parts of his Green Zone series.
You can read Sanders's defense here as well, and it doesn't amount to much. As the Huffington Post generously states, the explanation confuses as much as it clarifies. But the Huffington Post has corrected its mistake and, in fact, demonstrated a laudable commitment to accuracy and transparency. Professional journalists--you know who you are--could learn a thing or two about journalism from Arianna Huffington.
And a special hat tip to Op-For and Murdoc who also chipped in on this effort.
