In what is perhaps the most shameless column I’ve ever read, Steve Outing advocates media advocacy in trade rag Editor & Publisher. He claims that the alternative to “objectivity” is “truth-telling”. The cause in which he says newspapers should ditch this objectivity? Why, climate change, of course.

I’ve … been thinking about the newspaper industry and global warming. And frankly, I don’t think newspapers are doing enough. Indeed, newspapers’ fabled commitment to “objectivity” has been a detriment to efforts to combat global warming.

The industry still has a lot of power to influence people. How about if newspapers abandon their old way of doing things when it comes to the issue of global warming, and turn their influence to good? It just might be that through this issue alone, newspapers revive themselves to some extent. Editors are shirking their responsibility to improve our world, in my view, so let’s change that.

What follows is a tortuous explanation of how the opposite of objectivity is not subjectivity, as simpletons might think. In fact, it is “truth-telling” and “advocacy.” I kid you not. This isn’t a publication defending its own editorial slant. This is a media trade publication recommending that newspapers in general abandon impartiality, and consider the often complex, often speculative debate on the causes, impact, severity and extent of climate change as settled fact. The issue now, he says, is what newspapers can do.

Outing is apparently unaware of embarrassments such as the Newsweek column that took the original global cooling advocacy mag’s more recent cover story on global warming to pieces as “vast oversimplification of a messy story” and “a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading”. He sustains his argument for some time, before making just a teensy weensy mistake:

Advocacy has gotten a bad name in modern news media. I would argue that climate change is too important of an issue squander the power of the news media. Newspapers can and should not only educate people about what they can do, but pro-actively lead and encourage behavior change. That will mean setting aside a time-honored journalistic practice — for this one vital issue.

If his argument held any water at all, why would newspapers need to “get over objectivity”, but only “for this one vital issue”?

Breathless rumours are doing the rounds that the largest diamond ever found is currently stashed in a Johannesburg bank vault, according to an article by Matthew Hill in Mining Weekly, a South African trade publication. Some reports say it’s as big as a soccer ball. Judging by the picture alongside, either the soccer ball is rather smaller than regulation size, or they’re making huge cellphones again.

Granted, if the claimed size of 7,000 carats is accurate, not only would this diamond be twice as large as the famed Cullinan diamond, which was the world’s largest uncut diamond when it was discovered over a century ago, but it would also be more than 150 times the size of the largest green diamond ever found.

The find was reported to the media by Brett Jolly, described as a director of an obscure property developer named Two Point Five Group, which is apparently a shareholder in the unnamed mine where it was discovered. Jolly and his company appear to be just as mysterious as the claimed diamond. Google knows Two Point Five Group only as a company in New York State company licensed by the state’s Department of Labour as an asbestos contractor.

A story on the claim by Natasha Joseph in the Cape Times quotes “an insider” as saying: “No one has heard anything, not even rumours. The general reaction is that if (the diamond has been found), and if (Jolly) is shooting his mouth off the way he is, we would have known about it.”

I propose the name Kryptonite for the stone. What better to name it after than a piece of cut green plastic used in a film about a mysterious superhero?