[LINK] Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study

[rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au]

Jan,

Jan Whitaker wrote:

> At 01:56 PM 3/02/2007, Rick Welykochy wrote:
>
>> (B) The survey of popular media (newspapers, magazines, TV) found that
>>     approx 56% of the articles examined disputed the veracity of the
>>     global warming (and also tended to use the term climate change 
>> instead --
>>     spin). The reason for this discrepancy? An active campaign funded
>>     by vested interests (Big Oil) to discredit the theory through 
>> popular
>>     culture and media.
>
>
> Or is this nearly 50% alternative view an example of MSM (blog speak 
> for mainstream media - had to look it up myself recently and decided 
> to use it more often) trying to be 'unbiased'? The concept of having 
> 'equal time' does nothing for showing the public that there is 
> weighting toward one view or another.

In a word, "yes". "Balance", for example in debates over the ABC, is a 
piece of weaselry which is deployed to put media and journalists on the 
defensive. As a result, people get tricked into believing they have to 
give airplay to kookery like the denial lobby, intelligent design, and 
so on.

All too often, journalists have been drawn into debating whether or not 
their coverage is "balanced" as a distraction. "Balanced" does not 
matter: the MEAA code of ethics spells it out. Journalists are required 
to tell the truth, and truth is an inherently unbalanced concept. Truth 
says "the Earth is not flat", where balance says "even the crackpot 
flat-Earthers deserve airtime".

If a vastly wealthy lobby (which incidentally includes big advertisers) 
needed to give airtime to the flat-earth theory, you can be sure that 
they would construct a campaign which would target publishers ("We just 
want to ensure that the public receives both sides of the story, and 
remember that we are big advertisers") as well as individual 
journalists. And we would start seeing stories talking up the "other 
side of the argument".

If you wanted to see where the money is, one good way is to look at 
where kooks are treated seriously in the media. Creation science and 
intelligent design gets a run in America because it is backed by money. 
Climate change denial is driven everywhere by large dollars (and 
undisclosed conflicts; a column last week by someone associated with the 
Institute of Public Affairs quoted a criticism of the Stern Review 
without disclosing that it was part-authored by one IPA member, and 
part-funded by Exxon). Other examples will occur to others ...

The "balance equals fair equals true" game played by the lobbies also 
feeds into another journalist characteristic: "he said" journalism is a 
really quick and easy meal, and the journalist gets to say: "What I 
wrote is true: he did say it. I'm not responsible if he's a lying shill. 
And anyway I had to get his opinion because the editor said the story 
has to be balanced."

The journalist gets a salve to the conscience, the shill is working for 
an institute which only incidentally gets big donations from advertisers 
like motor companies, oil companies and coal companies, and the 
manipulation of the press by advertisers is done at arms' length. And 
everybody's happy, except that the punters are given bad science as 
being equally as important as good science.

Richard Chirgwin

>
> The global warming v climate change language is a Bush White House 
> thing. I heard somewhere that the US administration always changes it 
> to 'climate change' because 'global warming' was seen to be too 
> alarming. Change is thought to be a neutral word.
>
> Jan
>
>
> Jan Whitaker
> JLWhitaker Associates, Melbourne Victoria
> jwhit at janwhitaker.com
> business: http://www.janwhitaker.com
> personal: http://www.janwhitaker.com/personal/
> commentary: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
>
> 'Seed planting is often the most important step. Without the seed, 
> there is no plant.' - JW, April 2005
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