GLIMS Update: please no errors

[Jeffrey Kargel]

Dear all,
We are facing a very difficult time with a severely politicized environment in media reporting of anything relating to the Earth environment, and glaciers have taken center stage.  Please be careful as you pursue media contacts with your newsworthy science results.  We need those contacts to continue.  But please be more careful than ever in what you say or write.  Nothing you say to a reporter is off the record.  
A science story worth telling should--MUST-- be told to the public in understandable ways.  The essence must be communicated.  The effort to distill down to the essence is where it is so vital yet so easy to go wrong.  Reporters want a headline.  They will probe you for what they can get you to say; they will pick apart what you say and add that to what others say in little sound bites.  We need the sound bites.  The public needs them.  But please be careful!  Exaggerations in "off-the-cuff" remarks to a reporter can come back to haunt a decade later; not just haunt you, but haunt the entire glaciology community.  Maybe we have each been careless at one point or another.  The point is not to cast blame or make anybody feel guilty or worry that something they said a decade ago was a bit rash.  The point concerns what you say today and tomorrow and next year.
My view, and I'm pretty sure your's is, too, is that reality is scary enough to make for a good story; and reality is also fascinating. Hollywood and the media machines can and should get into it.  We can't control where they go.  We MUST make an effort to project how our words will be projected on the front page tomorrow, and possibly ten years from now.
Beware especially of bloggers.  They almost always have an agenda that goes far beyond information or infotainment.  Whether it's a green agenda, and blue or yellow one, it's an agenda, and they mainly don't give a darn about the science.  They want to make a political point, and what you say will likely be manipulated and come out sounding like something you didn't say or mean.
Proceed with caution.
--Jeff Kargel 		 	   		  
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