Month 12, Day 7: OF COURSE Ignorance is Idiogenic. Where Else Could It Come From?

NPR ran a piece this weekend on how

fewer and fewer Americans believe climate change is a problem. Naturally, they fail to address their own role in the issue.

This went to the NPR Ombudsman.

Sunday’s story on the decreasing number of Americans who believe that climate change represents a significant threat was another triumph for false equivalence, and another failure of journalistic responsibility.

There are two sets of facts, each fairly simple.

The first is the straightforward scientific reality that climate change is happening, that it is going to have disastrous consequences across the planet, and that humans are the primary causal agents.

The second set of facts concerns the manipulation of public opinion, and rests on the reality that conservative “think tanks,” heavily funded by fossil fuel industries, employ contrarian scientists who appear regularly in the print and broadcast media to convey the false impression that there is no clear climatological consensus on global warming.

How many times has the American Enterprise Institute’s Ken Green been featured on NPR news or opinion programming in the past year? And how many of those appearances have included the information that Green’s parent institution is funded by the petroleum industry?

In the absence of actual scientific analysis, listeners are left with dueling voices, one on each side of a complex issue. The media’s role in shaping American ignorance of climate change is (oddly enough) not addressed anywhere in the Weekend Edition piece, which treats this national failure of understanding as something entirely apart from a systemic failure in our communications systems.

To say that NPR has been more responsible than most media outlets on this issue is to set the bar very low.

Warren Senders