Tierney to write for the Times Op-Ed pages

I know the announcement of this is old, but I really didn't know much about Tierney... well, it seems like he is a real winner:

Tierney has a tendency to support his point of view using sources with a clear ideological or special interest agenda, without properly identifying them. In a 2000 column Tierney attacked CBS for an old report in which it had suggested that apples treated with the pesticide Alar carried a cancer risk. He wrote that the American Council on Science and Health, which he identified as "a consumer education group in New York," had demanded a correction and an apology from CBS. But Tierney left out the fact that ACSH is funded by major corporations -- including McDonalds, Pfizer, Kraft Foods, ExxonMobil, and Anheuser Busch -- all with stakes in the issues it focuses on. And one of those corporate funders, Uniroyal Chemical Company, is the manufacturer of Alar.

Tierney used the same sleight-of-hand again recently, when he argued in the Times' "Week in Review" section that today's children are overly coddled in school, leaving them ill-prepared for adult life. He quoted a scholar with the John Templeton Foundation to that effect. But as CJR Daily noted, Tierney never told readers that the foundation subscribes to an explicitly traditionalist, conservative view of education. One education project that it supports, for instance, aims "to encourage a greater appreciation of the importance of the free enterprise system and the values that enable it to flourish." No surprise, then, that such an outfit would take the position it does on the coddling issue.

Tierney's attack on recycling was written for the Times magazine in 1996. He claimed that recycling consumes more resources than it conserves, and in fact does little to save energy, or trees, or other natural resources. In addition, he wrote, landfill space in the United States is abundant, and poses little danger of leakage. Not a single representative of the recycling industry was quoted in the extensive piece.

There is a lot more in the post where that came from.

As CJR points out, the Times gives their columnists on the Op-Ed page a really free hand... that's fine, but why allow them to stoop to piss-poor journalism? Opinions are one thing, but when someone writes things that are a bunch of crap (like Safire's constant assertations that nobody disputes the alleged and repeatedly debuked meeting between Iraq and al-Qaeda in Prague) then the entire enterprise gets degraded.

Sigh.