The media’s slavish adherence to unwarranted ‘balance’

July 3, 2006

Jonathan Weiler raised a great point about the [tag]media[/tag] after seeing “[tag]An Inconvenient Truth[/tag].”

Gore noted that in an exhaustive study of almost every piece of research published on global warming in scientific journals, a sample of 928 articles was examined. Every single one of those 928 studies concluded that global warming was happening and that human activity was substantially responsible for it. In other words, as Gore has noted, the scientific debate about global warming and its sources, is over. In a parallel study of 636 news accounts of global warming, by contrast, 53% suggested that there was no scientific consensus on the question of global warming and its causes.

Any questions?

As Frank Luntz advised Republicans to say for years, “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the [tag]debate[/tag].”

The right took the advice to heart and subsequently pushed the media as hard as they pushed the phony “debate.” It gets back to my biggest frustration with news outlets: in striving for “balance,” they frequently ignore facts. And when it comes to [tag]global warming[/tag], as Weiler noted, it worked.

The one point Al Gore made on the Daily Show that stuck is that he wishes George Bush would SEE “An Inconvient Truth”. After all, just seeing a documentary about the North-Western Hawaiian Islands convinced the President to create a National Monument to protect it.

But Boy George II is in his bubble, and his handlers won’t let him see anything ‘dangerous’…

… to them.

  • I bet it is that damn New York Times. They are so pro-Bush and right wing, I can barely stand to read it.

  • Inconvenient Truth applies to so much more than Global Warming.

    The Bush regime is a propaganda mill of fact suppression and distortion of titanic porportions.
    Suppressed congressional investigations, suppressed elections by fraud, suppressed individual rights of privacy, suppressed free press.

    “Endangered Truth” come more to the point.

    “The right took the advice to heart and subsequently pushed the media… ”
    tells us all we need to know.

  • You know, it’s only 928 studies out of 928 that support the notion of Global Warming caused by man. The deluded/paid shills for Exxon wing of the right wing needs several thousand more before they’ll even think about it!

    Eventually they will figure out that 2+2 is indeed equal to 4. But by then it will be too late.

    Personally, I’d rather be wrong about global warming. However, the reactionary shrill right wing’s has a track record on predicting the outcome of things worse than Miss Cleo.

  • We used to have a pretty good collection of Sunday “gas bag” shows … thoughtful discussions of all points of view on a variety of topics. I’m picturing a very good televised discussion/debate in the early ’60s between Bertrand Russell, Willard F. Libby (1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), and an Indian pacifist whose name I no longer recall (may have been Nehru himself, but I doubt it). Somehow those interesting and informative discussions devolved into screaming matches like “Crossfire”, little more than verbal slam-wresting, a side-show of freaks rather than glimpses of expert minds at work. I don’t know what it’s devolved to from there because I no longer watch.

    I wonder if this country will ever again “get” the difference between established fact and opinion or feeling or faith. My parents weren’t educated beyond high school (Dad less than that), yet they could compose sentences and paragraphs, argue rationally, read the newspapers voraciously, provide us with education (from our first encyclopedia through college). It’s tempting to blame the change on TeeVee, but I think it may be something deeper than that. Perhaps too much attention to material wealth in general?

    We have an electorate which is willfully ignorant of the money we pour down the Pentagon drain, willfully ignorant of the numbers and dollars involved in our monumental prison “system”, willfully ignorant of how we are perceived in the civilized world, willfully ignorant of our own history and potential. The Boob Tube may not explain it all, but it certainly symbolizes us today.

  • 928 articles from scientific journals, versus 53% of 636 news articles. That’s like comparing 928 live oak trees to 337 dandelions…many of which are little more that pre-planned regurgitations from their fellow dandelions….

  • Look at it this way. Commercial interests control the media. Commercial interests tend toward boosterism to maintain the health of the economy or to keep the population moving toward their town, so to speak. If they feel threatened by a point of view, their perspective on the truth would be more “balanced” toward maintaining their commercial edge by casting doubt on any scientific findings that undermine their view of reality or the future of their reality. The same applies to most scientific reporting, political reporting, economic reporting, etc.

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