Electrification of the entire island began only in the late 1800s - on pace with the rest of the world.

It is an absurd nitpick in some ways but once you pay attention to what journalists write, you see their errors and biases all the time. This is a variation on Michael Crichton's Gell-Mann Amnesia, except, I cannot forget the pattern of errors.

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Except, once you notice, it is hard to not notice. Gell-Mann amnesia might be a little bit of a relief.

I have several decades providing consulting services to utility companies and have more than a passing knowledge of the industry. While I have never worked for the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, they have long been famous in utility circles, in finance circles and in economic development circles as a case study in self-inflicted harm arising from corruption married with incompetence.

The New York Times ran article this past weekend, How Storms, Missteps and an Ailing Grid Left Puerto Rico in the Dark by James Glanz and Frances Robles. There is a subtle effort to ascribe the slow reestablishment of electricity on the island to FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers, to rapacious chancers, etc. The reality is that the Puerto Rico power grid has been an accident waiting to happen for some decades and is solely due to political corruption and government incompetence. Trump is not to blame, FEMA not to blame, the Army Corps of engineers not to blame or anyone else.

The restoration of power has been slow but unavoidably so, given the local government.

But what really got my goat was this:

The electrification of the entire island began only in the late 1800s, when sugar and tobacco barons began allowing local municipalities access to their power systems, Dr. Ortiz said. Luis Muñoz Marín, the activist who became the island’s first elected governor in 1948, built up the grid and made it the industrial pride of Puerto Rico. By the late 1950s, helicopters were ferrying power poles to the island’s remotest corners.

It's the first sentence.

Journalist are famous for their lack of contextual knowledge, innumeracy, and absence of historical knowledge. But these two journalists are older and educationally well credentialed. One is an astrophysicist.

Still, there is the spinning combined with ignorance and it makes me steam.

There seem to be two implications in that first sentence. First that electricity came late to Puerto Rico and second that that lateness was due to the greed of sugar and tobacco barons.

The first issue is that electrification anywhere in the world only began in the late 1800s. George Westinghouse's first AC plant was only built in 1886. No, Puerto Rico was not late to the game, held back by imperialism or any other issue. In fact, it is pretty remarkable that they were electrifying as early as they were. So why the only in "electrification of the entire island began only in the late 1800s." That seems needless spinning.

And perhaps I am over-reading the snark but, no, "sugar and tobacco barons" didn't begin "allowing local municipalities access to their power systems" as if they had been withholding something naturally the right of the municipalities. Sugar and tobacco companies built power stations for their commercial operations. Power stations which municipalities could also have built but chose not to build.

When those companies had excess generating capacity, they sold it to municipalities. Municipalities received electricity at a lower rate than had they built it themselves and the companies covered some of their fixed costs from selling excess capacity. Everyone wins. The sotto voce implication that the business barons were somehow an evil player in this is just lazy thinking and ignorance of business.

Way too subtle word smithing, and perhaps I am overly sensitive, but it is still exasperating that there is such a deep misrepresentation of the world, so glossily spun into routine articles.

UPDATE: On reflection perhaps the onus is not completely on the journalists. Because they are not quoting Dr. Ortiz but paraphrasing him, it remains possible that the journalists were accurate in their paraphrasing and that the anti-colonial, anti-business inflection originates with Dr. Ortiz. Academia does tend to foster such postmodernist notions and zero-sum thinking. I would have hoped that two well educated journalists would have caught and at least highlighted the inaccuracies or not used the paraphrase at all. These aren't issues of astrophysics, this is high school history and economics.