31 July 2011

Distrust NYT Redactions NYT Says

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/opinion/sunday/why-redacting-e-mails-is-a-bad-idea.html

The Public Editor

Why Redacting E-Mails Is a Bad Idea

By ARTHUR S. BRISBANE

Published: July 30, 2011

TWO weeks ago, I raised questions about a New York Times article that warned of a bubble or Ponzi scheme in the development of shale gas energy. Today I want to look closely at the front page shale gas article that appeared one day later, which relied heavily on documentation with sections blacked out to shield its anonymous provider.

Published on June 27, the second piece reported that e-mail conversations inside the Energy Information Administration revealed that some staff members there doubted the optimistic shale gas projections published by their unit of the Department of Energy.

The e-mails, quoted extensively in the article and published in a document “viewer” on nytimes.com, captured conversations between summer 2009 and April 2011. The Times redacted all the names, substantial sections of the e-mails and even whole e-mails.

The doubts highlighted in the e-mails left a cloud over the E.I.A., which policymakers rely on for information. E.I.A.’s acting administrator, Howard K. Gruenspecht, called before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee, said the e-mails were “largely to and from a person who was hired by E.I.A. in 2009 as an intern and later developed into an entry-level position.”

“The e-mails as posted on The Times Web site were heavily redacted and redacted in ways that I think provide misleading information on their context,” Mr. Gruenspecht added.

My assistant, Joseph Burgess, obtained unredacted copies of the e-mails from Republican energy committee staff. A comparison of the versions reveals some of the classic problems associated with anonymous sourcing.

In the article and in the document viewer, readers never learn the actual positions or identities of the e-mail senders, who are characterized using descriptors like “official,” “energy analyst,” “federal analyst,” “senior adviser” or “senior official.” Nowhere is an e-mailer characterized as an “intern.”

Without ample descriptions of the unnamed sources, readers couldn’t know who was speaking and could not judge for themselves the merits of what was said. In the case of the redacted e-mails, the descriptors tended to obscure how many E.I.A. staffers were involved and when an intern was the e-mailer.

The “intern” was C. Hobson Bryan, a 2009 college physics-engineering graduate who E.I.A. said was hired as an intern in summer 2009 and upgraded to general engineer in March 2011. One of his e-mails was attributed to “one official” who said the shale industry may be “set up for failure.” Later, he was an “energy analyst” wondering, “Am I just totally crazy, or does it seem like everyone and their mothers are endorsing shale gas without getting a really good understanding of the economics at the business level?” Next he was “one federal analyst” who said, “It seems that science is pointing in one direction and industry PR is pointing in another.”

At the time of the first two e-mails, Mr. Bryan was a general engineer; at the time of the third, he was an intern. The document viewer included three other e-mails dating to his internship period in which Mr. Bryan was referred to as an “official.”

Can an intern be an “official”? It doesn’t sound right to me.

In addition to the redactions and use of confusing, multiple descriptors, in four e-mails references to interns were blacked out to protect sources.

In response to my questions, reporter Ian Urbina and his editors — national editor Richard L. Berke and Adam Bryant, a deputy national editor — said the majority of the quotes published in the article came from multiple senior energy officials, whose concerns were echoed in an internal E.I.A. presentation and in interviews with nearly a dozen federal energy officials.

“Our goal is to publish as much information for readers as possible, redacted or not, and we intend to keep pursuing that goal,” Mr. Bryant said.

They also noted that of the 25 pages of e-mails posted online, part of a much larger collection, only 11 of them include e-mails from the period when Mr. Bryan was an intern and that, in the article itself, only one Bryan quote came from that period.

Indeed, all of that is true. One of the quoted senior staffers was Charles Whitmore, who the E.I.A. said is a senior market analyst. As highlighted in the article and document viewer, Mr. Whitmore engaged in a lengthy 2011 e-mail dialogue with Mr. Bryan about the uncertainties surrounding shale gas, predicting some bankruptcies and warning of “irrational exuberance.” I don’t feel the redactions in this group of e-mails distorted their meaning.

However, redactions of an earlier 2009 e-mail from Mr. Whitmore to an NPR reporter did create uncertainties. In the e-mail, Mr. Whitmore pointed to three sources of possible research value. One of them, the Department of Energy’s Shale Gas Primer, he described as “perhaps a bit on the rosy side” — a quote The Times used. The references to the other two research sources, which were outside organizations, were redacted, leaving the reader to wonder why.

Mr. Whitmore also told the NPR journalist in the e-mail that he believed shale gas to be “the big energy story of the last couple of years,” a segment that was blacked out.

The editors told me all the redactions were made to conceal sources, and that “none of the redacted material contradicts the points made in the story.”

The matter, though, is moot because on Wednesday The Times decided to post the unredacted e-mails, a move editors said could be made because E.I.A. had put them in the public domain.

During an interview on Tuesday, they told me they would have published the unredacted set in the first place if open records requests for them had been honored by the agency.

The fact is, The Times decided to go with the redacted documents and, in doing so, placed the serious shortcomings of anonymous sourcing on display.

When I asked Bob Steele, a DePauw University journalism ethics expert, he agreed that the redacted e-mails failed to provide information that readers needed to assess them. “When one reads government documents that have information blacked out, as a reader one almost inevitably starts wondering: ‘Why don’t we get to see these names? What is going on here?’ ” he said.

Anonymous material says to the reader: Trust us. But if the reader ends up feeling burned — if, for example, an “official” proves to be an intern — the trust won’t be there the next time.