Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

The New York Times, which led the fight against fracking in the early years with a series of attacks, has, for all practical purposes, admitted defeat.

Six years ago, the New York Times, America’s newspaper of “thou shalt think thus” instructions for elites, was still deep into a “Drilling Down” series of articles by Ian Urbina intended to trash fracking and elevate phony critics such as Deborah Rogers. Today, it’s a very different story as the Times (via AP) is forced to admit the “Studies Show Groundwater Holding Own Against Drilling Boom.” To paraphrase LBJ’s famous line, when you’ve lost the New York Times, well, you’ve completely lost.

LBJ, of course, was talking about Walter Cronkite and the Vietnam War. The exact quote was “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” Cronkite, of course, was anything but a Middle American. But, he had the right tone of voice to intone authority with a Middle America having but three sources of television news in the age of television. So, he reigned. He turned against the Vietnam War in the middle of a big victory, made it look like a loss and the rest is history. Johnson knew he’d had it. It was the end.

None of this is intended to take a position on the war per se, so no comments on that, please. The relevant point in this instance is that the shoe is now on the other foot. Moreover, there are now so many sources for news it is impossible for the New York Times to exercise the same sway it did then; when all national television news, including Cronkite’s, took its direction from the paper’s pages. That’s still the case, of course, but television news “ain’t what it used to be” with all the competition.

What this means, as a practical matter, is elites no longer completely control the agenda. So, when even they have to admit the fractivist case is, for all intensive purposes, dead in the water, it’s really over. Fractivists haven’t just lost, but have lost completely. And, that’s exactly what’s happened. Here’s the word from the pages of the New York Times itself (emphasis added):

Researchers found that methane spiked in some water wells but attributed rising methane levels to natural variability, not drilling and fracking. Their findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Natural variability “is potentially a lot greater than previously understood,” said Yale University hydrologist James Saiers, a study co-author. That’s important, he said, because residential water wells are typically tested only a few times before and after the start of drilling. “Before-and-after sampling might not be sufficient and might lead to misattribution of sources of methane,” Saiers said…

Penn State University scientists, meanwhile, obtained an enormous trove of data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection — 11,000 groundwater samples collected since 2010 — and, using what they said was a novel data-mining technique, concluded that water quality is either unchanged or even slightly improved for substances like barium, arsenic and iron.

There are the requisite (but, nonetheless, restrained) counters from fractivist experts such as Rob Jackson (who led a deeply flawed Duke University study many years ago). There is, too, a reference to DEP data that has been much exaggerated, manipulated and misused, but the end result is the same. And, this article doesn’t even mention the SRBC water quality study showing “no discernible impact” on water quality, the University of Cincinnati study that so disappointed funders, the NRDC study that went wrong or dozens of other investigations showing the exact opposite of what fractivists have been alleging through anectdotes and/or junk science compendiums.

Yes, when the New York Times decides to publish an AP article countering fractivist spin and even going so far as to title it “Studies Show Groundwater Holding Own Against Drilling Boom.” you know the game is up. The elites have been told it’s a losing battle and they might just as well accept the facts. Fracking is now OK and it’s OK to say so. The Times is telling them “add a caveat or two if you wish, but it doesn’t look good to pretend its dangerous in the face of all the evidence, so cool it a bit. Those are our instructions from here at the New York Times, your newspaper of record where we only print what’s fit for people such as ourselves. Got it?”