Today the New York Times finally gets round to covering the scandals roiling the International Panel on Climate Change and its controversial head, high-flying railroad engineer and soft-porn novelist Dr. Rajendra Pachauri. It’s a front-page story but incredibly dully written, as if its object is to depress interest in the subject. In its way, it’s a textbook example of why the Times is doomed.
The first thing you notice is that the NYT is not investigating the scandals itself but merely commenting on stories reported by the Times of London and my old colleagues at Britain’s Telegraph. Jay Currie asks:
Perhaps the New York Times has become a blog.
Not quite. If so, they’d include links to the Brit originals. I will make just one observation, relating to the reporter’s dogged attempts to exonerate Dr. Pachauri from charges of conflict of interest. Elisabeth Rosenthal says it’s all hunky-dory because the money the IPCC chair gets as a paid consultant to private companies goes to help poor children in rural India or something. She adds:
Dr. Pachauri, 69, said the only work income he received was a salary from the Energy and Resources Institute: about $49,000, according to his 2009 Indian tax return, which he provided to The New York Times. The return also lists $16,000 in other income, most of it interest on accounts in Indian banks.
But the most casual glance at Dr. Pachauri suggests that this is not a man with a $65,000 lifestyle. For example, within the space of a week he made two round-trips from New York to Delhi, in each case staying a day and then flying back to the U.S. — the first time for a cricket practice, the second for the actual match. First-class airfare for those two trips alone would be about a third of his pre-tax income.
So who paid for them? The U.N.? Or one of his consulting clients? Or more likely that institute of his for helping upcountry villagers? He was, after all, playing for his Institute’s amateur cricket team. So, when Deutsche Bank pay Dr. Pachauri’s consulting fees to his Institute, are they in fact funding his remarkably lavish lifestyle?
Let’s take another example: The launch festivities for his warmographic novel (in which he demonstrates an obsession with bosomly swell on a par with noted breast man Andrew Sullivan) were paid for by BP. Curious. Big Oil sponsoring Big Breasts for Big Climate.
Dr. Pachauri is in the happy position of so many people one encounters in “public service” who rarely if ever have cause to write a personal check. But why is the New York Times reporter assigned to this story so ill-informed that she doesn’t even ask him about the cricket and the breast-book party and all the other stuff?
As I said, the Times coverage only makes sense if your object is to bore readers away.