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Recycling Old News at the Christian Science Monitor

Lots of media critics -- at times unfairly I might add -- like to accuse reporters of being lazy when they cover the nuclear energy industry. Plenty of folks like to recycle the same old stories laden with interviews with the same old anti-nuclear activists over and over again.

We see it all the time here at NEI Nuclear Notes. But what we've never seen before is the same article, almost word for word, being recycled for audiences in the hopes that nobody notices what's really going on.

Case in point: Susan Sachs at the Christian Science Monitor. Back in July, the newspaper ran the following story with a European dateline:
Summer is exposing the chinks in Europe's nuclear power networks.

The extended heat wave in July aggravated drought conditions across much of Europe, lowering water levels in the lakes and rivers that many nuclear plants depend on to cool their reactors.

As a result, utility companies in France, Spain, and Germany were forced to take some plants offline and reduce operations at others. Across Western Europe, nuclear plants also had to secure exemptions from regulations in order to discharge overheated water into the environment.
I'm sure plenty of our readers remember the story, as my colleague Lisa Stiles-Shell debunked a few days after it appeared. For another take, click here.

But I guess once wasn't enough for Sachs and the Monitor, because at the end of last week, the following ran on the paper's newswire around the world:
Summer exposed the chinks in Europe's nuclear power networks.

The extended heat wave in July aggravated drought conditions across much of Europe, lowering water levels in the lakes and rivers that many nuclear plants depend on to cool their reactors.

As a result, utility companies in France, Spain and Germany were forced to take some plants offline and reduce operations at others.

Across Western Europe, nuclear plants also had to secure exemptions from regulations in order to discharge overheated water into the environment.
I know it isn't plagiarism if you're plagiarising your own work, but this is ridiculous. Does the paper actually think that because they changed verb tenses in the first paragraph that this isn't simply a 100% cut and paste job? Again, here's Sachs from the Monitor on August 10:
The troubles of the nuclear industry did not end there. Sweden shut four of its 10 nuclear reactors after a short-circuit cut power at one plant on July 26, raising fears of a dangerous design flaw. One week later, Czech utility officials shut down one of the country's six nuclear reactors because of what they described as a serious mechanical problem that led to the leak of radioactive water.
And now again, from November 11:
The troubles of the nuclear industry did not end there. Sweden shut four of its 10 nuclear reactors after a short- circuit cut power at one plant on July 26, raising fears of a dangerous design flaw. One week later, Czech utility officials shut down one of the country's six nuclear reactors because of what they described as a serious mechanical problem that led to the leak of radioactive water.
I guess I could go through both pieces paragraph by paragraph, but that would be a waste of time. Just go take a look yourself and gaze in awe at the Monitor's nervy performance.

The next question we need to ask is why this happened. Are the editors at the paper so arrogant that they think their readers wouldn't notice? Or were they disappointed that their incomplete story, one without a rejoinder from the nuclear industry, didn't get as much attention as they would have hoped in a late-Summer news cycle?

Even better, since the Monitor likes to recycle old news, we're going to recycle some of our own: A report from a Department of Energy engineer who found that California's wind turbines failed miserably during the state's Summer heat wave.

I wonder why the Monitor failed to pick up on that news? Then again, some questions answer themselves, don't they?

UPDATE: Over at NEI's media relations desk, my colleague Steve Kerekes passed the following along to me:
Just spoke w/ an editor from CSM's int'l desk; this is a case of an outlet (I don't know which, sorry, unless and until Scott Peters can find what triggered the Google pull) publishing the old article.

CSM did not re-issue the Aug. 10 piece.
Thanks to Steve for the followup (Scott Peters handles our news clips). That would mean that the Hamilton Spectator, the paper that picked up the piece, was responsible for editing in the time shift. Why in the world would anybody pick up a story off the wire that was 3 months old?

TUESDAY UPDATE: The Hamilton Spectator has removed the above referenced article from its Web site. Nothing to see here...

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Comments

Anonymous said…
Good job on calling foul on this one! Make sure to follow the Hamilton Spectator links below!

I have a feeling that the article was reprinted in the context of some discussion of Ontario's future electrical needs.

The Ontario Power Authority (OPA) plans to release a report [hasn't been posted yet - scheduled for early November] that will recommend technical improvements to the transmission line from the Bruce nuclear plant to Toronto to handle more power, and also may recommend that the province consider a few different nuclear alternatives.

One of the alternatives would be to build a nuclear generating station in Nanticoke on the shores of Lake Erie, which would replace a coal-fired plant that may be closed in a few years. The report will probably mention more likely choices of constructing new facilities at the established nuclear energy sites at Bruce on Lake Huron and/or Darlington on Lake Ontario.

There's some resistance to closing the coal-fired power plant at Nanticoke.

Obviously, giving the context doesn't make it right for the CSM or the Hamilton Spectator to rehash biased articles that have long since gone to the recycle bin, or have been disposed of weeks ago as kitty litter box liners. However, it does give the general source of the discussion that led to the cop-out.
Rod Adams said…
One of the great strengths of electronic publishing is that there is no need for news to be thought of as a temporary, disposable product that ends up lining kitty litter boxes or wrapping crabs. (In Annapolis, the local paper is nicknamed "The Crab Wrapper".)

I see no real problem in linking to archived news articles or even republishing them (properly dated and attributed, of course) so that people remember events that are important. I agree that the particular article referenced in this case was not very balanced - all steam plants need lots and lots of cooling water; it makes no real difference whether the steam is created by burning coal or by fissioning uranium.

IMHO the reuse of news has the potential for increasing our collective memory and for improving the quality of the original articles - if media outlets realize just how valuable their archived content can be, perhaps they will take just a little more care when creating it.

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