More of the Same From Tom Wilber: All News Must Be Spun, Rather than Reported

Former Binghamton Press reporter Tom Wilber is back in the public eye — with a book engaging in the Northeast's Shale Gas Spinfest (to be put out this Spring by none other than Cornell University Press), and a blog called Shale Gas Review.

Though I don't know why I bother anymore, I wasn't able to get all the way through what's currently his second-most-recent blog item — before finding myself transported to kill what was left of a remarkably sunny Friday afternoon in February, drafting an ever-lengthening comment. 

Due apparently to some Blogspot-related flakiness — or possibly due to Wilber not wanting to leave his posts open to comments — I'm pretty sure whatever I had to say didn't go through.  It just sort of sat there blankly.  Anyway, though I'd like to stick this where the sun don't shine, I guess I'll have to settle, for the time-being, sticking it here.

...

"The federal EPA has determined that drilling chemicals found in some wells pose a public heath threat."  [In a paragraph touching on the latest from the Dimock, PA, situation.]

Tom, taking a look at your blog for the first time today — this sentence is only as far as I got before I skipped directly to the comments button.  I might read some more another day — but, I've got to tell you, I will be returning with a skepticism even more heightened than before.

I challenge you to double-check reality here — much, much, much more closely — and to in fact correct your description of the EPA's "determination" connecting "drilling chemicals" with any "public health threat" in Dimock, PA, water wells.

You link to the EPA's statement, but this cagily does not say what you said it said, nor does any of the (precious-little) precise reporting out there on the Dimock case.  In fact, no journalist could possibly state any such conclusion as fact — except by doing the usual thing of quoting unsupported accusations from anti-drilling sources, or by repeating without question much of the similarly gullible or sloppy reportorial work that has gone on before.  (As you well know, there is no shortage of either sort of material available.)

But even going to the original data — the water test results alone, already publicly available — the facts are miles away from any such smoking gun.  Like tests of water anywhere across rural PA (or rural NY), some from Dimock show the heightened, aesthetically-less-than-desirable presence of naturally occurring minerals.  But no violations of any health-related standards (except possibly for one case of high sodium, which turns out to have come from a sample taken downstream of a water softener).

I grant you that it is possible the DEP-established, gas-well-casing-failure-caused, shallower-than-Marcellus methane migration issue may have spiked the presence of these minerals in some Dimock water wells (and in water wells near similar cases in PA).  But that's a far cry from a government "determination" connecting "drilling chemicals" with a "public health threat."

Whether due to natural conditions, or exacerbated by drilling mishaps, both minerals and methane in water are also completely treatable situations.  And, in this case, that offer has already been repeatedly made by Cabot, under its settlement with PA — but refused by those who are angry, transformed into activism, and committed to suing for more.

Possibly without realizing the hornet's nest such a conclusion would cause, the EPA has already innocently interpreted existing tests as showing the Dimock water is safe to drink and use — in a very short and to-the-point email sent to residents, and intercepted by the pro-drilling side.  This triggered a firestorm of protest from anti-drilling activists (and plaintiffs' attorneys), who were naturally hoping for much more oomph from the government in support of their respective agendas.

To this pressure, the EPA regional office readily bowed, devising a plan to go back to take their own samples, to see if maybe there might yet be discoverable any there there.  And that's where it stands today.

I had some hopes upon discovering your blog (and your upcoming book) that your work may have matured in the intervening months.  But — like most of your reporting during the years you routinely inflamed this issue for the Binghamton Press, an act for which you and that paper remain unforgiven by thousands of clear-headed Upstate New Yorkers — I find that your version of the facts continues to turn out to be way more hopeful or jaundiced than accurate.

There are facts to be conveyed here, and there are nuances to be explained, and this is unquestionably a conflict that needs continual exposition by professionals.  I would ordinarily be willing to rely on you, or Jon Campbell, or Steve Reilly, to do at least part of this job.

But this one sentence alone shows you're just not going to ever be a credible witness.

If you want to be an anti-drilling activist, or an anti-drilling writer, then that's fine — just say so, and keep writing.  But you're not going to be able to convince me you're a journalist anymore.