Everyone is entitled to opinions. But facts are facts. And [Arthur Brisbane] the public editor’s column about our June 26 story on shale gas economics gets many of them wrong. As a result, the column’s conclusions are, quite simply, misguided and unsupported.

The column said, for example, that our story needed “more convincing substantiation.” What this ignores is the data we assessed from over 9,000 wells, the S.E.C. document review of two dozen companies, and the dozens of industry emails we published. It overlooks the several dozen interviews with experts we conducted, the several-hundred page online document reader and a follow-up story with dozens more emails and documents from federal regulators echoing industry concerns. It would be tough to find a news organization that has explored these financial issues more thoroughly and documented them more extensively.

The column claims that our story needed “more space for a reasoned explanation of the other side.” And yet our story directly quotes eight pro-industry voices and includes input from over a dozen more in the online document readers, with detailed annotations. In the story and the document reader we went to great lengths to explain the nuances, clarify and calibrate wording to show what the emails did and, just as important, did not say.

The column fails to mention that Mr. Brisbane looked into numerous specific allegations about the stories, including claims that The Times might have been manipulated by sources who aimed to profit from shorting shale gas, and found every single one of those allegations to be factually baseless and entirely unsubstantiated.