Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party….  In a bygone era of fact-based commentary typified, left to right, by my late colleagues Scotty Reston and Bill Safire, these deceptions would have been given their proper label: disinformation….

[Ailes] and his video ferrets have intimidated center-right and center-left journalists into suppressing conclusions — whether on health-care reform or other issues — they once would have stated as demonstrably proven by their reporting.

As for Fox News, lots of people who know better are keeping quiet about what to call it. Its news operation can, in fact, be called many things, but reporters of my generation, with memories and keyboards, dare not call it journalism.

Sunday, the Washington Post published a must-read piece by Howell Raines, “Why don’t honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?“  Raines, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former NY Times executive editor, focuses on Fox’s disinformation on health care, but it is equally true of their disinformation on climate change (see here), which is why I’m writing about it.

Ironically, WP media critic Howard Kurtz blows the opportunity to call out FoxNews in his story today, “The Beck Factor at Fox: Staffers say comments taint their work“:

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I was on a pretty thoughtful panel discussion, “The Media, the Scientists and the Planet,” broadcast on TV Ontario.

The other guests on The Agenda with Steve Paikin included Curtis Brainard, who critiques science and environment reporting for the Columbia Journalism Review, Walter Russell Mead, who is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, and everybody’s favorite Canadian energy and technology columnist, the Toronto Star’s Tyler Hamilton.

Here is the hour-long video:

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So The Economist is running an online debate about green jobs with online voting.  And they have used a poorly worded debate “motion” — some might call it a set up — “This house believes that creating green jobs is a sensible aspiration for governments.”

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Polling data is misunderstood and misread all of the time.  The public strongly supports action on climate and clean energy legislation, even if it raises their energy bill by $10 a month, but even (lazy) environmentalists are unaware of that.

Now it turns out that polling on the science may be equally misunderstood, as USA Today reported Tuesday:

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I understand why anti-science disinformers like Marc Morano kick climate science messaging when it’s down.  But why Josh Dorfman?

The Host of “The Lazy Environmentalist” writes on Huffpost how he got truck drivers and other car enthusiasts excited by the “fast speeds, raw power, and American self-reliance” of electric cars running on American electricity.  Cool.  I’m all for it.  Been pushing electric drive vehicles myself for quite some time.  Heck, been pushing the American self-reliance pitch a long, long time (see my 1996 Atlantic Monthly article, “MidEast Oil Forever”).

But then he feels obliged to join the circular firing squad:

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The serial misinformers and misrepresenters demand equal time for their misinformation and misrepresentations.  What should climate science defenders and the media do?

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