Mainstream media abandons journalism for activism on climate change

Credit: planetsave.com

For whatever reasons, large parts of today’s media are bending over backwards to support the notion that man is changing the climate – and in a negative way. Opposing lines of evidence and theory are routinely ignored or dismissed as unworthy of attention. Recently some of them have even attempted to whitewash the notorious ‘Climategate’ episode of 2009 that exposed the e-mails of biased climate scientists trying to promote the man-made warming idea.
What happened to genuine reporting?

For more than 20 years I’ve watched media outlets fail to accurately portray the debate surrounding climate change, writes H. Sterling Burnett in The American Spectator. Unfortunately, things are getting worse.

Over the past six months, news outlets including The Guardian, long a mouthpiece for leftist propaganda, and Telemundo announced they will now use the fear-invoking term “climate emergency” instead of the more descriptive phrase “climate change.”

In Florida, rather than competing for news on climate matters, six news outlets — Miami Herald, Orlando Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Tampa Bay Times, and WLRN Public Media — are collaborating on climate coverage under the moniker Florida Climate Reporting Network (FCRN).

This means each news outlet that receives their climate stories from FCRN will be speaking with one voice on the issue.

Recently, in the midst of Hurricane Barry, research meteorologist Ryan Maue tweeted about how national coverage of the storm was driven by a single set of talking points.

In one tweet, Maue asked, “How is [it] that every news article on ‘Barry’ and climate change published in past few days has a similar headline, premise and conclusion — or, if you will, set of talking points? Is this original reporting or something else like an outfit providing copy?”

Maue answered his own question in a subsequent tweet: “Strategic communications groups funded by the usual foundations set up these rapid response services for journalists — so they can quickly churn out copy. … The bad news coverage is not by accident at all.”

Contrary to the mainstream media drumbeat, there is no consensus that catastrophic climate change is happening and humans are causing it. Yet, due to publishers and broadcasters not requiring their operations to maintain standards of fairness and veracity, the mainstream media uncritically presents a climate crisis as settled fact.

If journalists displayed a modicum of intellectual curiosity, they could easily find peer-reviewed surveys, hundreds of skeptical studies, and letters signed by hundreds of scientists attesting to the falsity of one or more aspects of the three-part claim of climate alarmists: first, that the climate is changing and humans are the cause. Second, on the whole, the results will be bad or catastrophic. And third, we must end the use of fossil fuels in the near future to prevent the destruction of human civilization and the environment.

Full article here.