environment: false equivalence media irresponsibility
by Warren
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Month 12, Day 7: OF COURSE Ignorance is Idiogenic. Where Else Could It Come From?
NPR ran a piece this weekend on how
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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
environment Politics: denialism false equivalence media irresponsibility
by Warren
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Month 11, Day 17: Just Don’t Tell Them!
The Washington Post runs an article by Meg Bostrom, noting that Republicans who secretly know climate change is happening may be able to vote for good policies as long as the word “climate” isn’t attached. She also notes the new scientific SWAT team’s formation. This letter addresses both points.
It is tragic that environmentally attentive Republicans are no longer politically allowed to acknowledge the facts of global heating, and can support good climate policies only if they’re disguised as something else. The fact that decreasing numbers of Americans accept the scientific reality of global warming and the catastrophic changes it will bring is a testimony to the power of our media, which for years have promoted several false and misleading narratives: climate change isn’t happening; even if it is happening, humans aren’t responsible; humans might be to blame, but it won’t be that bad; even if it’s going to be bad, it’ll cost too much to do anything about it; the science isn’t “settled”; Al Gore is fat. It’s encouraging to see that climatologists are girding their loins to enter the media circus in order to combat the misrepresentations and misunderstandings. I wish them luck. They’ll need it.
Warren Senders
environment: false equivalence media irresponsibility
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Month 11, Day 10: We’re Going To Do A Medley of Our Hit
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune runs the same Neela Banerjee piece on the intrepid climatologists who’re jumping into the fray. I used it here as the hook for a more or less generic “false equivalence” screed.
The scientists who’ll soon be joining the fight against misinterpretations and misrepresentations of the facts of climate change have their work cut out for them. Not only are climate denialists ideologically wedded to an extreme anti-science position, the media’s adherence to the doctrine of false equivalence ensures equal amounts of air time or column inches to both parties in an argument, regardless of their reliability. Faced with a choice between, for example, a “professor of thermal engineering” from a Midwestern university and a “research associate in energy policy” from the Foundation for American Freedoms, how is a television viewer to distinguish between an actual climatologist and a mendacious shill from an oil industry-funded think tank? When it comes to the gravest threat humanity has ever faced, our print and broadcast journalists have abdicated their responsibility to the public. Good luck to these brave climate experts; they’ll need it.
Warren Senders
Uncategorized: false equivalence media irresponsibility
by Warren
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Month 10, Day 27: Down Under…
The Australian Newcastle Herald (NSW) has an article noting that scientists talk like scientists, and people often have trouble understanding what they’re talking about when they do that.
Ben Newell, a psychology lecturer at the University of NSW, and Professor Andy Pitman, a scientist from the same body’s climate change research centre, put their findings together recently in The Psychology of Global Warming, a paper for the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
They urged scientists to think about four aspects of how they delivered information: sampling, framing, comprehension and consensus.
“Sampling” is the evidence you use in making judgments. If half the opinions you hear support the view that globing warming is doubtful, you’re more likely to believe that scientists are only half-convinced of its truth.
So an audience that saw a program about “Climategate emails” the night before is going to be a harder sell than the one that saw a map in the paper that morning showing the main street under water by 2050.
{snip}
‘‘Comprehension” is a battle, since it depends on what mental models people are already using.
{snip}
The problem for scientists is that different groups have already reached a consensus about global warming based on any number of factors, including religion and politics, and the members tend to believe each other before they will believe an outsider.
(Indeed. A sceptics group in Minnesota, reviewing the Sydney duo’s paper on their website, commented: “Their conclusion seems to be that people who don’t believe in global warming are too dumb to understand.”)
Actually, that’s my conclusion, too. This letter is a little longer (their limit is 200 words) and is pretty much a standard screed on false equivalency.
And…(drum roll)…it’s letter number three hundred.
Yes, scientists do have trouble communicating with the general public. But it’s crucial to recognize that the facts of global climate change have been obscured for decades by the irresponsible laziness and profit-fixation of our news media. Actual reporting is hard work, involving research, fact-checking and the correlation of data; it’s costly, too, requiring lots of reportorial time. It’s easier to quote a few people with sufficiently divergent opinions, thereby seeming “balanced.” Thus news outlets mislead the public into believing that there are equally valid arguments for and against the reality of climate change — after all, there are people on television representing each side! This abdication of journalistic responsibility has contributed significantly to our current predicament.
But not all arguments are valid. The medieval theory of humours is irrelevant to a report on medicine; an article on global travel doesn’t require input from the Flat Earth Society. With ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agreed on the human causes of global warming, our news media should focus on reporting the bad news as accurately and carefully as they can, rather than hewing to the specious policies of false equivalence that have made their jobs easier in the past.
Warren Senders
environment: false equivalence media failure
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Month 10, Day 19: Clueless?? Clueless!!
PC Magazine ran an article on the Yale Study which showed (surprise!) that Americans generally don’t have a clue about climate change, although they’re sorta kinda worried about it anyway.
It took me almost as long to find the magazine’s LTE email as it did to write the letter, which is a standard “false equivalency” screed enlivened by my new catchphrase, “Symmetrical Stenography,” which I think is sorta kinda clever.
It is unsurprising that the Yale study shows that Americans are confused and misinformed about climate change. For many decades, our print and broadcast media have failed to do their jobs. The role of a free press in American society should be crucial to the development of that fine Jeffersonian ideal, a “well-informed citizenry.” Instead of pursuing the truth by doing genuine research and asking hard questions (e.g. “Cui Bono?”), our news outlets have chosen the far easier path of Symmetrical Stenography, in which a statement by a group of scientific experts is “balanced” with a counter-statement by an industry-funded spokesperson. This necessarily gives the impression that the “jury is still out” on climate change, since at least as many deniers as advocates are seen on television, heard on radio, and read in print. But the scientific jury came back in a long time ago, and its verdict is unequivocal: anthropogenic global warming is real, it’s dangerous, and humans are causing it. If our media presented climate denialists in proper proportion, we would be hearing from ninety-seven very worried climatologists for every glib, dismissive, industry shill.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: climate bill false equivalence media irresponsibility
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Month 10, Day 5: Pulling Out All The Stops
The New Yorker ran a beautifully written and profoundly depressing piece by Ryan Lizza outlining all the contributing factors to the failure of climate change legislation in this Congress. It’s a must-read…but if you give a shit, it’ll make you furious and depressed.
I employed maximum possible erudition in my letter, the better to tickle their editorial fancy. As far as I could ascertain, they have no length limit, so I ran well over my usual 150 words. Let’s see; maybe I’ll get lucky!
Ryan Lizza’s exposition of our politicians’ failure to address climate change is gutwrenching. Responsibility for this potentially species-fatal incapacity can be assigned to many factors, including the ludicrously attenuated attention span of the average American consumer, the profit-fixated corporate entities which seek ever-greater control over all aspects of our distorted version of market capitalism, the pathologically negative response patterns of Republican politicians, the Big Lies peddled every day by Fox News, and the readiness of politicians of all ideological stripes to embrace what the liberal blogger “Digby” once pithily summed up as “Irrational Fear of Hippies.”
We have never encountered anything like this before in human history. In the past, existential threats to our nation, our allies or our species were effectively immediate: a civil war, an epidemic, a crazed dictator, a nuclear Armageddon. Now, confronting a danger which many respected scientists predict could end in a vast planetary die-off, we are stymied — because our politics is incompetent, structurally unable to respond to events which move on time-scales grander than those underlying our elections.
Our media establishment’s handling of this issue, by contrast, is perfectly competent, but shamefully disingenuous. By hewing to a specious doctrine of false equivalence, in which evidence compiled and correlated by hundreds of working scientists must be “balanced” by the dismissive pronunciamenti of a paid corporate shill, print and broadcast outlets have buried the threats we face from global climate chaos under a pile of irrelevancies, statistical misinterpretations, ad hominem attacks, strawmen and flat-out lies. “Those who can make you believe absurdities,” goes Voltaire’s apothegm, “can make you commit atrocities.” It seems, alas, that those who can make us disbelieve reason and evidence are making inevitable an atrocity of planetary dimensions.
Our descendants, if descendants there be, will not be kind in their assessments of our politicians, our media, and ourselves. On the other hand, given the likelihood of increasingly hostile climatic conditions in the new Anthropocene Epoch, they’ll probably be far too preoccupied with the daily struggle to survive to spend much time assigning blame. That is comfort, I suppose, of a sort.
Warren Senders
environment: false equivalence heatwave media irresponsibility
by Warren
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Month 9, Day 29: There Was A Movie By That Name, IIRC
LA had a really hot day, as the LA Times reported.
I’m really busy; this letter is pretty much a bricolage of earlier materials. What the hell.
“The record highs follow a summer of record lows.” That sentence sums up the Times’ coverage of the recent heat wave in the city. Left out of the article (and of most coverage of extreme weather in the nation’s press) is any mention of global climate change. It is impossible to specifically attribute any single weather event to global warming; science doesn’t work that way. But it is irrefutable that since the mid-1980’s, climatologists have predicted exactly these sorts of phenomena as consequences of the greenhouse effect: anomalous highs, lows, and general weirdness. As climate change is felt more and more forcefully everywhere around the world, our media continues to pretend that the evidence for human causes of global heating hasn’t been established. If the evidence for Iraqi WMD’s was as strong as that for anthropogenic global warming, we’d have been able to buy nuclear bombs on the streets of Baghdad.
Warren Senders
environment: false equivalence
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Month 8, Day 29: Falls ekwivalents maykz jernalizm ezee!
The LA Times ran an AP story about this summer’s bizarre weather.
I also sent a copy of this letter to the Associated Press’ contact line, with a request that they forward it to the author.
Mary Esch notes that meteorologists don’t see the recent planetary heat wave as a sign of global warming, and also mentions that “atmospheric scientists” are increasingly concerned about anthropogenic climate change. This apparent conflict should have been addressed by the author, who fails to point out that while no single weather event can be unambiguously attributed to global warming, climatologists have been predicting for decades that the greenhouse effect would trigger weirder and weirder weather, world-wide. Climatic prediction is based on statistical analysis; weather prediction is based on local and regional measurements. Given that their predictions have been repeatedly vindicated, it is irresponsible to suggest an equivalence between the overwhelming consensus of thousands of climate scientists (a consensus decades in the making)…and the apparently contrary opinion of Accuweather’s Brian Edwards, a young man who (as a little research shows) received his B.S. in Meteorology two years ago.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: false equivalence George Will idiots washington post
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Month 8, Day 3: An Acorn!
The blind pig that is the Washington Post just published a genuinely good editorial about climate change.
Indeed, as the editorial points out, there is no longer a “controversy” of any kind with regard to the scientific factuality of anthropogenic climate change. The world is rapidly approaching a climatic tipping point which will almost certainly trigger a future profoundly inimical to human existence, and human activity is responsible. In a few years we will be far too busy dealing with the ramifications of the crisis to assign blame. Right now, however, there’s still enough breathing room to point out that the Washington Post has been “denier central” for years — muddying the waters and obscuring the truth in column after column by anti-science ignorati like George Will, Sarah Palin, Bjorn Lomborg, Robert Bruce and Robert Samuelson. As the “home-town paper” of our government, the Post has a responsibility to provide factual information and reasoned analysis to America’s policy-makers — and to refrain from printing misleading, inaccurate and scientifically unsound pontifications which provide our political class with convenient rationalizations to avoid action.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: climate bill Deepwater Horizon false equivalence idiots newsweek
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Month 7, Day 31: Grrrrrrrrr.
Newsweek ran an article on the “biggest losers” from the Deepwater Horizon debacle. This approach is typical of the horserace-obsessed journalistic establishment, and it’s part and parcel of our national ADD. Among the “losers” was a climate bill:
Who could have predicted that a landmark environmental disaster would make a comprehensive energy bill even less likely? Yet before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, offshore oil and gas drilling was actually a point of compromise between Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Obama had lifted the moratorium on exploration off the East Coast, which seemed like a gesture to win support from “Drill, Baby, Drill” Republicans for more far-reaching proposals, including a cap-and-trade scheme to curb greenhouse emissions. Now, opposition to offshore drilling has increased in the wake of the spill. In fact, Obama has imposed a six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling permits. MSN’s Jim Jubak observed, “Without increased drilling as a bargaining chip to offer, there’s no way to build the coalition necessary to pass an energy bill that focuses on fighting global climate change.” His words were prescient–with little support from the White House, leading Democrats finally pronounced cap-and-trade dead in the Senate last week.
This analysis has a modicum of short-term political factuality to it, but it’s also a way for Newsweek to avoid confronting the truth about their role in shaping the discussion.
Yes, by taking offshore drilling off the table, the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico counterintuitively played a role in making climate/energy legislation less likely to pass the Senate. But our continuing failure to confront climate change can’t be blamed on BP’s malfeasance. Rather, the responsibility rests with those who have fostered a culture of denial which has made it possible for our policy-makers to ignore decades of increasingly urgent warnings. By perpetuating a policy of false equivalence in which every statement from a qualified scientist is balanced by a dismissal from an industry-funded denialist, our media conveys the impression of an unresolved controversy. If the “debate” over climate change were represented accurately, we’d hear forty-eight climatologists for every “skeptic.” Our print and broadcast media have abdicated their responsibility to the truth, and their failure is going to have painful consequences for us all.
Warren Senders