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Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

N.Y. Times and Elisabeth Rosenthal Face Credibility Siege over Unbalanced Climate Coverage

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

UPDATE:  Climate scientist Ken Caldeira has just sent me an email titled, “I can’t believe the New York Times has done it again …” that I’ll reprint in its entirety at the end.

You can contact the NY Times public editor, Clark Hoyt, at public@nytimes.com.

NYT Feb20

The NYT has published arguably its worst climate story ever, “U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege,” by Elisabeth Rosenthal.

Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, whom the NYT itself quoted last year as “an expert on environmental communications,” emailed me that the piece is “the worst, one sided reporting I have ever seen.”  When I called him up, he went further saying:

In this article, the New York Times has become an echo-chamber for the climate disinformation movement.

You might think it impossible for any newspaper — let alone the one-time “paper of record” — to run a story raising “accusations of scientific sloppiness” about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that never quotes a single climate scientist.

You might think it inconceivable that the NYT would base its attack on the accusations and half-truths provided by “climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists” where

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Abandoning all journalistic standards, CBS libels Michael Mann based on a YouTube video — while reporting his exoneration!

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

“You know you’re in trouble when you’re being spoofed on YouTube.”

So begins one of the most shockingly unprofessional “news stories” you are ever likely to see from a major network that isn’t Fox.

The news organization that gave us Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite now bases its reporting on YouTube videos.  Thursday, CBS libeled climatologist Michael Mann on the basis of nothing more than a jingle someone uploaded to the Web:

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Yes, Obama is still pursuing clean air, clean energy jobs bill that puts a price on carbon pollution

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Today, in an extended set of remarks at a town hall meeting in Nashua New Hampshire, the President once again strongly endorsed a comprehensive bill that combines energy and climate policy — and sets a price on carbon:

The concept of incentivizing clean energy so that it’s the cheaper, more effective kind of energy is one that is proven to work and is actually a market-based approach.

In fact, he went on and on extolling the virtues of putting a price on sulfur trading in the Clean Air Act:

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Washington Post’s Kurtz calls paper’s op-ed page “left-leaning” — even as it features mostly right wingers.

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

The mainstream media takne as a whole acts as a center-right institution that supports the status quo on key issues (see Newsweek stunner: Why the “status quo” establishment media’s coverage of global warming is so fatally useless, Part 1 and Part 2).  That’s why one of the great triumphs of conservative messaging has been selling the myth of the “liberal media” (see “Working the Refs”).

That triumph of myth over reality has, among other things, helped guilt the media into giving equal time (and beyond) to the most extreme conservative views even when they spread disinformation on subjects they have no expertise on whatsoever.  Nowhere is that clearer than in the once venerated Washington Post (see WashPost goes tabloid, publishes second falsehood-filled op-ed by Sarah Palin in five months — on climate science and WashPost recycles another denier WSJ op-ed, this time from coal apologist Bjorn Lomborg. Funny how two new senior Post editors came from the WSJ.

Last week, Think Progress had a story revealing just how successful conservatives have been at selling this myth:

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The award for the reporter who is as confused about plug-in hybrids as the folks he quotes …

Monday, February 1st, 2010

… goes to Mike Musgrove of the Washington P0st for his piece, “As carmakers plug ‘green,’ Washington Auto Show consumers have plenty of questions.”

As evidence of the kind of questions that puzzled consumers have about how plug-in cars work, Musgrove writes:

The unmistakable message is that the day of the electric and hybrid car is at hand. But it’s also clear that there are plenty of questions among the crowd about how this alternatively fueled world is supposed to work.

“What if you’re driving and you don’t have any power left?” asks John Wu, who is checking out the Chevy Volt with some friends. “Won’t you just be stuck there?” The guys make cracks about Volt drivers running low on juice and pulling up to a stranger’s house, begging for access to an outlet.

Funny stuff — if you were writing a piece trying to mock regular people in the vein of the 1980s-era David Letterman.  But in fact there is nothing wrong with regular folks being underinformed about a brand new product — people would come up to me all the time when I first bought the Prius and asked me where you plug it in.

Most people just aren’t that plugged into the latest techno-news.  Why should they be?  There aren’t any for sale yet, after all!

What’s wrong and definitely not funny at all is that the reporter is underinformed — and has actually produced a piece that is only going to further confuse the public.  Rather than correcting the glaring error of the people he quotes, his next sentence is a non sequitur:

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Limbaugh, Fox News suckered by Bin Laden into repeating his disinformation and message of hatred

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Terrorists try very hard to spread their disinformation.  A key goal is to get others to spread it for them, especially ones who are holed up in a cave somewhere.  Thus terrorists craft their disinformation into a sensational message that they hope gullible members of the global media will repeat.

So who got suckered into repeating the message of the number one terrorist in the world?

Amazing.

But Limbaugh isn’t alone.  It’s a top story on Drudge.  And here’s FoxNews:

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DelingpoleGate: Monbiot slams anti-science columnist for leading “Telegraph into vicious climate over email”

Friday, January 29th, 2010

The Brits manage to make our anti-science reporters, columnists, and media seem like Walter Cronkite.  One of the most notorious is James Delingpole and his “paper,” the UK’s Telegraph, who recently helped launched a major effort to intimidate and harass climate scientists.

Delingpole is a self-described “libertarian conservative” who likes “recreational drugs.”  He’s the Glenn Beck of climate writers who puts out stuff like, “Build-a-bear: the sinister green plot to turn our kids into eco-fascist Manchurian candidates.”  Seriously (see “Right wing bullies Build-A-Bear into removing videos about manmade climate change“).

For Delingpole, every transgression by scientists — real or imagined — is a scandal.  In his Monday column he jumped the shark gate, with his piece “After Climategate, Pachaurigate and Glaciergate: Amazongate.”  Later I’ll deal with the “substance” of that piece, which begins absurdly, “AGW theory is toast.”

Right now I want to focus on what it best described as Delingpole-gate.   George Monbiot elaborates in his Wednesday blog post, “James Delingpole leads Telegraph into vicious climate over email“:

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Is Ed Wallace’s Business Week column a “Crock of S*%t”?

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) - Mauna Loa or Keeling curve (map/graphic/illustration)

The status quo media has a new anti-science columnist, Ed Wallace.  He had a column yesterday in Business Week, “Is Global Warming a ‘Crock of S*%t?’ “  Here is a typical pearl of disinformation:

Then, on the last day of 2009, Wolfgang Knorr of the Earth Sciences Dept. at the University of Bristol released new research showing the possibility that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has not risen in the past 160 years. Maybe he’s wrong, but at least he published his views for peer review in the Geophysical Research Letters.

Not even close.  As anyone with access to Google knows, that is not what Knorr said at all (see “Yes, the atmospheric CO2 fraction has risen at a dangerously fast rate in the past 160 years, reaching levels not seen in millions of years“).  See also the single most famous chart of observational data in the entire climate arena (above), the Keeling Curve of “Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2).”

Knorr’s study merely suggested the fraction of human-emitted CO2 that stays in the atmosphere may have stayed flat for 160 years.  It had a bad headline and confused many folks for a few days, but it was pretty quickly straightened out for anyone paying attention.

To write this piece and not even bother using Google for 30 seconds to fact-check it is a sign of utter disdain for the truth.

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An endangered species: The environmental reporter

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Journalism has been melting down faster than Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier.  Science journalism is “basically going out of existence,” as one top science reporter recently put it.  And Columbia University suspended its Environmental Journalism Program even though “our graduates have done well in their careers.” If you want to hear from some of the reporters themselves, here is a piece by Tyler Hamilton, first published here.  Tyler is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest daily newspaper.  He’s written some great stories — see “Toronto Star: ‘Why media tell climate story poorly’ ” and “Nuclear Bombshell: $26 Billion cost — $10,800 per kilowatt! — killed Ontario nuclear bid.”

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WSJ shutters Environmental Capital blog; Revkin wonders “Green media bubble popping?”

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

http://www.topshelfbooks.com/shop_image/product/003676.jpgKeith Johnson of the WSJ’s “Environmental Capital” blog just announced its termination:

After more than two years and over 2,000 posts, Environmental Capital is closing its virtual doors.

Although I didn’t agree with all of the analysis, I’m quite sad to see this “Daily analysis of the business of the environment by The Wall Street Journal” go.

The WSJ obviously has a right-wing editorial board and an editorial page that is a leading source of anti-science disinformation.  But the blog seemed reasonably independent and was certainly a timely source of information on energy and environmental issues.

The NYT’s Revkin tweets:

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WattUpWithThat labels Australia’s government “retarded”

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Okay, bloggers aren’t journalists, but some headlines are just beyond the pale for insensitivity:

WattsUp

No, I’m not going subject you to the full schoolyard headline.  The post has been up for a few hours (click here if you must), which suggests Watts is okay with it.  Even more amazingly, I see that the original piece that Watts is excerpting doesn’t use the word at all, which means it was added by the WattsUpWithThat folks.  Still, I suspect/hope the headline will be changed by the time you look, anyway, though the URL will probably remain….

I guess Watts didn’t take kindly to Rudd’s blistering speech last year (see Australia’s Rudd slams the “deniers” and the “gaggle” of “conspiracy theorists” opposing climate action).

Met Office’s Richard Betts incorrectly asserts “the dramatic decline in Arctic sea ice in 2007 … was then partly reversed in 2008 and 2009.”

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Memo to media, non-cryosphere scientists:  The peer-reviewed literature does not provide support for the view that the Arctic “recovered” in 2008 — and even what happened in 2009 has now been called into question (see below).   Don’t fall into the mindset of the anti-science disinformers, who all seem to think two dimensionally.

In July, leading cryoscientists at JPL, the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington, and NASA published a major peer-reviewed article, “Thinning and volume loss of the Arctic Ocean sea ice cover: 2003–2008” (discussed here) and posted this figure of Arctic ice volume:

http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Arctic-Ice-Volume-.gif

Not bloody much “recovery” or “reversal” from 2007 to 2008.

Now Andy Revkin has just posted a typical Goldilocks piece on Dot Earth — it’s not too hot, it’s not too cold.  I don’t want to rehash all of my problems with this approach, but I will say that since the observational evidence shows that warming of the climate system is “unequivocal” — and essentially the entire scientific community and every member government of the IPCC agrees with that analysis — it is clearly reasonable for the media to discuss certain very unique, extreme weather events predicted by climate science in the context of that warming — as Revkin himself once did in discussing the remarkable extremes in Australia last year [see CNN, ABC, WashPost, AP, blow Australian wildfire, drought, heatwave “Hell (and High Water) on Earth” story — never mention climate change].  Since we’re not in a cooling trend, of course, it would be illogical for a competent reporter to use a cold snap as evidence of such a non-existent trend.

I want to focus on a quote he got from Richard Betts, the head of the climate impacts division at Britain’s Met Office, which shows that even the most knowledgeable climate experts don’t follow the literature as closely as they should:

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Rolling Stone on “The Climate Killers: 17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb the climate catastrophe.”

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

Rolling Stone has two pieces on climate politics in its latest issue, by Jeff Goodell and Tim Dickinson.  “Planet Earth 911” is on “Big Oil and Big Coal’s lobbying campaign to block progress on global warming,” and “The Climate Killers” is on Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch, Jack Gerard, Rex Tillerson, Sen. Mary Landrieu, The Swift Boat smearer, Inhofe, David Ratcliffe, Dick Gephardt (!), George Will, Tom Donohue, Don Blankenship, Fred Singer, Sen. John McCain (!), Rep. Joe Barton, Charles and David Koch.

I don’t agree with either piece 100% but they are well worth reading, and not just because the latter piece quotes me a couple of times.  Rolling Stone deserves a huge amount of credit for continuing to put out first-rate work on the story of the century.

Let’s look a little closer at three of RS’s “climate killers,” starting with Buffett:

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NYT’s David Brooks: “I totally accept the scientific authorities who say that global warming is real and that it is manmade.”

Friday, January 8th, 2010

I totally buy the argument that we need to set a cap on carbon emissions….

I was once again reminded how many business and investment types are thinking quite practically and capitalistically about green, job-creating technologies. For us Hamiltonian conservatives who believe in internal improvements, energy and infrastructure are obviously the two big areas where we should be investing.

David Brooks is one of the few leading conservative intellectuals who hasn’t been knee-jerk anti-science on climate change.   In a 2005 piece on conservative intellectual exhaustion, “Running Out of Steam” he even asserted:

Global warming is real (conservatives secretly know this).

Well, subsequent events have demonstrated that if conservatives (other than Sen. Lindsey Graham) know that global warming is real, it is the best kept secret since, well, that whole fake moon landing thing (see “Unscientific America, Part 1: From the moon-landing deniers to WattsUpWithThat” and Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 3: RNC Chair Steele withdraws support for Rep. Kirk over his vote on climate and clean energy bill).

Still, Brooks himself knows it, and in a pretty candid “New Year’s Resolutions” piece (with fellow NYT columnist Gail Collins), he spells out what he believes.  I would not that Collins does not particularly distinguished herself in this piece:

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Chris Matthews: Politico serves as the Drudge-Like “news conduit” for Dick Cheney

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

I am less and less a fan of the more and more center-right Politico (see “Memo to Politico: Do you really aspire to being nothing more than a new media version of the MSM — stenographers of the status quo?“)  This TP repost has some blunt comments from a leading TV journalist:

Last month, Politico conducted an “interview” with former Vice President Dick Cheney. As ThinkProgress noted at the time, the paper’s top reporters — Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen — transcribed Cheney’s attacks on Obama without challenge, criticism, or rebuttal.

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With science journalism “basically going out of existence,” how should climate scientists deal with well-funded, anti-science disinformation campaign?

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

The central lesson of Climategate is not that climate science is corrupt. The leaked e-mails do nothing to disprove the scientific consensus on global warming. Instead, the controversy highlights that in a world of blogs, cable news and talk radio, scientists are poorly equipped to communicate their knowledge and, especially, to respond when science comes under attack.

A few scientists answered the Climategate charges almost instantly. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, whose e-mails were among those made public, made a number of television and radio appearances. A blog to which Mann contributes, RealClimate.org, also launched a quick response showing that the e-mails had been taken out of context. But they were largely alone. “I haven’t had all that many other scientists helping in that effort,” Mann told me recently.

So writes Chris Mooney in his must-read op-ed opinion piece in the Washington Post, “On issues like global warming and evolution, scientists need to speak up.”  It looks like the Post is feeling just a tad guilty over the travesty of the Sarah Palin op-ed, having now published three responses, though only one was on the op-ed page.  Mooney is on the second page of the Outlook section, which probably gets much fewer readers than the op-ed page now residing in the paper’s front section.

I certainly can’t disagree with Mooney’s core argument, since I have been making a similar point for a while (see Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1).  Indeed, Physics World published a piece of mine on this very subject last year (see “Publicize or perish: The scientific community is failing miserably in communicating the potential catastrophe of climate change).

I was so frustrated that scientists were not communicating with the media in a media-friendly way on Climategate/Swifthack that, after waiting several days for the scientific community to put together a media call, I did so myself (see Exclusive audio of press call today with Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt, and Michael Oppenheimer on “Climate Science: Setting the Record Straight”).  I was also very critical of the scientist at the center of the maelstrom for adopting the Tiger Woods approach to media relations (see “Phil Jones has today announced that he will stand aside as Director of the Climatic Research Unit until the completion of an independent Review”).  Jones’ failure to speak up, failure to make himself available to the press the way Mann did, helped this story blow up.

BUT I can’t really agree that scientists haven’t responded.  Here’s but a short list of the many leading scientific institutions and hundreds of scientists who have:

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Why journalists should not twitter, Parts 87, 88, 89

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

http://a3.vox.com/6a00cd96fad6804cd50110181a7b4b860f-500piJournalists simply shouldn’t be twittering on science or other subjects that require more than 140 characters to discuss intelligently, which is pretty much every topic.  The stodgy, old media have a great desire — a brutal Desire — to be like the hip, new media, but twitter is crack for serious reporters (see Should journalists twitter?).

Case in point:  Yesterday, I published a guest piece in which I provided a long introduction — “The coming climate panic?  Will U.S. conservatives usher in the era of permanently big government?“  Former NYT reporter Andy Revkin then launched a series of uber-confused tweets that grotesquely misrepresented that post, muddled the science, and seemingly contradicted his own reporting.

Yes, I’ve been tough on Revkin in the past year, but these tweets are simply beyond ridiculous.  Let’s start with the first, which manages to get one of my major points exactly backwards:

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The NY Times starts 2010 pushing the same damn disinformation about climate science it did in 2009

Friday, January 1st, 2010

A few people were critical of me for putting the NY Times third on the list of the 2009 “Citizen Kane” awards for non-excellence in climate journalism.

But now the NYT has started the year with a true piece of anti-scientific crap masquerading as clever pop commentary, “It’s Always the End of the World as We Know It,” by Denis Dutton, a man Wikipedia — but not the NY Times — explains is a “libertarian media commentator/activist.”

For the record, the science is quite clear that unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions are projected to lead to the end of the world as we know it, including “towering seas, storms, droughts and mass extinctions” — as this literature review makes clear.  It’s no surprise that a libertarian professor of philosophy would write an anti-science screed.  But what is the NYT’s excuse for publishing it?

Indeed, it was the NYT, not Dutton, which came up with the graphic above that lumps “Global warming” with “Evil Aliens” and “Nostradamus.”  Seriously.

Long-time CP commenter has saved me the trouble of a longer response on this New Year’s Day, with a letter to the editor he posted here:

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Guess who was the most frequent ‘Meet the Press’ guest in 2009?

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

Hint:  This person was forced out of political office in the shadow of disgrace and failure.  [Note to self:  Maybe that doesn't winnow down the field much here in Washington, DC.]

Hint:  This person has such staggering political independence and acumen that he said in July that Sarah “Four Pinocchios” Palin is a conservative leader on energy issues.

Hint:  In June, this person summed up the conservative ethos, saying “I am not a citizen of the world! I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous.”

Hint:  This person is an eco-fraud, who flip-flopped on the central policy issue of our time — reducing CO2 emissions.

And yes, this person tweeted of the recent East Coast snow storm:

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Memo to swing Senators: You are going to vote on a bipartisan, economy-wide climate and clean energy jobs bill this spring. Get over it.

Monday, December 28th, 2009

The Politico wasn’t a finalist for the 2009 “Citizen Kane” award for non-excellence in climate journalism solely because it is (supposedly) a new media outlet.  But while the Politico offers itself as an antidote to the old media, this collection of political journalists has quickly established itself as more of the same.  Squared.

Indeed, because they focus on the political ping pong game, with little or no substantive analysis of the issues they write about in a large fraction of their pieces, they are in danger of becoming a poor man’s David Broder, the sultan of the status quo, stenographer of those centrists who are fatally uninformed about global warming.

For instance, in “Republicans push on ‘Climategate’,” the Politico focused strictly on how the right-wing anti-science crowd were using the purloined emails and didn’t even have a single comment from an actual scientist until the second page of the story — and that was science advisor Holdren from his (terrific) House testimony.   And they buried the most important  line:

Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) dismissed the controversy as more of a public relations problem than a serious scientific meltdown.

An equally bad piece this month, “Have the greens failed?” sought to pass a negative judgment on the entire clean energy effort of the Obama administration and environmental advocates who support its goals — before Obama’s first year was up (!) and with no mention of many of the president’s remarkable achievements (!!), including for instance,  Obama will raise new car fuel efficiency standards to 35.5 mpg by 2015, which is the biggest step the U.S. government has ever taken to cut CO2.

This is standard old-media stuff — when the President’s poll numberes are in a down cycle, declare defeat and failure.  Since nobody would read the Politico for substantive analysis, which is done infinitely better at a number of major media outlets and blogs, the only possible reason to read the Politico is for the political analysis.  But why bother when that analysis is both so predictable and so influenced by the Politico’s center-right, status quo spin on everything?

Naturally, the Politico’s pundits have turned their substance-free, horserace-heavy attention to the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill, in an article titled “Senate Democrats to W.H.: Drop cap-and-trade.”  The piece is a perfect example of journalistic malpractice, intentionally misleading  from the very start — the headline and lede:

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