Gand Canyon Retraction

I received this today and am passing it along to you. It concerns the article I did on the Grand Canyon and it's management!

One of the drawbacks to information on the Internet is that facts and conjecture are not constrained with the same caution that reporting by commercial news sources are.

This has the effect of playing loose with the truth at times and we as bloggers are more likely to get caught in plots to advance certain points of view or ideologies.

With that in mind I will pass along this retraction verbatim!

Some of you may remember the flap from a short while back resulting from a report issued by PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) claiming that Grand Canyon staff were no longer allowed, under pressure from the Bush administration, to take an official position on the age of the canyon when questioned by visitors.

The story ran in last week's issue of eSkeptic, though it had already hit the blogosphere more than a week prior.

This week, things have changed. Michael Shermer, in yesterday's edition, published a retraction, saying:

Unfortunately, in our eagerness to find additional examples of the inappropriate intrusion of religion in American public life (as if we actually needed more), we accepted this claim by PEER without calling the National Park Service (NPS) or the Grand Canyon National Park (GCNP) to check it.

As a testimony to the quality of our readers, however, dozens immediately phoned both NPS and GCNP, only to discover that the claim is absolutely false.

Callers were told that the Grand Canyon is millions of years old, that no one is being pressured from Bush administration appointees — or by anyone else — to withhold scientific information, and all were referred to a statement by David Barna, Chief of Public Affairs, National Park Service as to the park’s official position.

Understandably embarrassed and angry, Shermer contacted PEER and ended up getting the run-around for a while. After all was said and done, he had this to say:

Then why did PEER issue that statement in the first place? In my opinion, this is why:

PEER is an anti-Bush, anti-religion liberal activist watchdog group in search of demons to exorcise and dragons to slay. On one level, that's how the system works in a free society, and there are plenty of pro-Bush, pro-religion conservative activist watchdog groups who do the same thing on the other side.

Maybe in a Hegelian process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis we find truth that way; at least at the level of talk radio.

But, journalistic standards and scholarly ethics still hold sway at all levels of discourse that matter, and to that end I believe we were duped by an activist group who at the very least exaggerated a claim and published it in order to gain notoriety for itself, or worse, simply made it up.

To that end I apologize to all of our readers for not fact checking this story before publishing it on eSkeptic and www.skeptic.com.

Shame on us. But shame on you too, Mr. Ruch, and shame on PEER, for this egregious display of poor judgment and unethical behavior.

Much the same can be said for "Let's get things back into perspective here!" I am as much at fault for just passing along a piece without checking the facts first and would urge all readers to remember this as an example of how easy it is to get the wrong information on the Internet. Whether it's inadvertent, or not!

Your "set the record straight" scribe;
Allan W Janssen