Other than the fire, how was your weekend, Mrs. O'Leary?

From Bucking global trends, Japan again embraces coal power by Dennis Normile. The opening line.

Most of the world is turning its back on burning coal to produce electricity, but not Japan. The nation has fired up at least eight new coal power plants in the past 2 years and has plans for an additional 36 over the next decade—the biggest planned coal power expansion in any developed nation (not including China and India).

"Not including China and India"? That's the journalistic equivalent of the old joke "Other than the fire, how was your weekend Mrs. O'Leary?"

The top five economies in the world are

China ($23 trillion)
US ($19 trillion)
India ($9 trillion)
Japan ($5 trillion)
Germany ($4 trillion)

The entire global economy is $127 trillion, so these five countries account for about half of global productivity.

While the US is still adding coal plants to its generating base, it is cancelling planned plants and retiring old coal plants faster than it is building new ones. In other words, the US is replacing its coal plants with natural gas, a far cleaner source of energy. Coal is a smaller and smaller share of our energy supply.

All the other top five countries (including Germany) are increasing the net number of coal plants and increasing the percentage of generation from coal.

In contrast to the implication of Normile with his lead sentence, all the major economies are building more coal plants and all of them, other than the US, are becoming more dependent on coal.

If you read at face value, you would understand from Normile that coal is in retreat as an energy source and that Japan is an exception by increasing its dependence on coal. The reality is that among the major economies, coal remains a primary energy source and the number of plants and the dependency on coal is growing strongly. The US is the only major economy to buck that trend.

That is a fairly big gap between factual reality as measured by number of coal plants and the implied reality as described by a journalist in a mainstream reputable magazine.

Forget "Fake News" as a bandied-about ideological or political issue. Almost certainly the bigger issue is simply inaccurate reporting. This is a matter of epistemic quality. A functioning democracy is unusually dependent on an informed citizenry. When the mainstream press is unable to accurately convey easily ascertainable information, it puts the whole system at risk.

I do not know if the errors in journalistic writing are sourced in ignorance, confirmation bias, ideology, haste, lack of standards, absence of editing or any of innumerable other possible causes. Whatever the root cause, it appears to be a material issue.