WILLfully Ignorant

Benen: MAKING GEORGE WILL LOOK WORSE....

The Washington Post had a good item today on the increasingly dire outlook on Arctic sea ice. Near the end of the piece, the Post's Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan added:

The new evidence -- including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s -- contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979.

That's a pretty sharp rebuke for a news story about a claim made by one of the paper's own high-profile columnists. Indeed, David Roberts added, "I can't think of another instance when a news story at a newspaper explicitly called out an op-ed writer in the same paper for lying, by name. It's pretty extraordinary."

But it gets better. Let's not forget that the Washington Post's Andrew Freeman also fact-checked Will's work on climate change and found the columnist to be wrong, and the Washington Post also recently published a piece from Chris Mooney scrutinizing Will's analysis and Mooney, too, concluded that Will was wrong.

It's safe to assume Will is furious to be exposed this way, but more to the point, it seems the Post is well aware that one of its highest-profile voices has published several columns with demonstrably false claims. Why, I wonder, hasn't the paper run any Will-related corrections?

For that matter, perhaps now would be a good time to start giving Will's work added scrutiny before it's published?

• Think Progress adds: The Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang Blog also takes on Will today. Surveying Will's recent writing, Andrew Freedman concludes, "George Will's recent columns demonstrate a very troubling pattern of misrepresentation of climate science."
• Matthew Yglesias adds: Why did they do that if they intend to keep using their brand to enhance the credibility of Will’s misrepresentations? It’s unfathomable. Why would you expect anyone to pay money to read a newspaper that publishes willfully misleading information?
• Ezra Klein adds: As a former fact-checker, I'm sympathetic to the difficulty of verifying opinion pieces. Someone can argue, for instance, that the uncertainty level in climate science is high enough that we shouldn't act, and though I don't think that's an appropriate read of the data, it's not falsifiable. Will's recent untruths, conversely, have been simply wrong. He said something was "X" when it was "Y." I did the same thing in an op-ed this morning. I wrote that our health care system "costs more than twice as much per person as that of any other country." I was wrong about that. I should have written that our system costs more than twice as much as the OECD average. So I sent the Los Angeles Times an e-mail and tomorrow they will run a correction. By contrast, Will has been doubling down on the original claim in subsequently published columns. That removed it from the realm of individual error and rendered it a threat to the institution's credibility. And the institution, it seems, is noticing.