From The Washington Post -- December 15, 2010:
Fox News on Climate: Ignorant, Manipulative -- or Both?
By Stephen Stromberg
Media Matters says it has uncovered a directive that Bill Sammon, Fox News's Washington bureau chief, sent to the network's reporters, commanding them to "refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies."
This reflects ignorance, ideological manipulation -- or both.
It would have been about as fair if Sammon had instructed Fox's reporters to "refrain from asserting that President Obama was born in America without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question."
Such notions? I'm an opinions journalist, so even at Fox, I might be allowed to say this: The world is currently warming. The 2000s were warmer than the 1990s, the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s, etc. Thermometers say so. Plant characteristics and animal behaviors say so. The energy content of the oceans says so. Sinking islands say so. "The warming of the climate system is unequivocal," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported over the summer. "If the land surface records were systematically flawed and the globe had not really warmed, then it would be almost impossible to explain the concurrent changes in this wide range of indicators produced by many independent groups."
Serious climate-science skeptics, and there are a few, don't really contest the idea that global warming is happening. More coherent criticisms of the commonly accepted temperature record focus on scientists' estimates of much earlier periods and how they compare to the climate change we're seeing now. Sammon, though, makes even the most obvious climate science seem like it might be the sort of superstition that would compel your grandmother to keep a ball of cat fur in a leather glove under her holiday crèche. You know, just in case.
And what's the intensifying "debate" to which Sammon was referring? He wrote his directive last December, during the worst of the so-called Climategate e-mail scandal, which showed that a few climate scientists took some criticism a little too seriously in their private correspondence. But, ultimately, multiple independent review panels found that it didn't demonstrate any real wrongdoing -- and it certainly said little about the actual science.
I also wonder if Sammon would insist his reporters take such care in reporting on climate skeptics' claims about the Medieval Warm Period that they care so much about.
Whether by design or not, Sammon's directive implies a strategy to sneak some of the most improbable climate know-nothingism into supposedly objective newscasts. It used to be that opinions writers constructed their own straw men. Now Fox News is saving everyone else the trouble.
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4 comments:
next time FOX Noise will declare the earth flat.
Gem to read about John McCain, THE maverick.
http://www.thenation.com/article/why-has-john-mccain-blocked-info-mias?page=0,1
Few paragraphs:
"It's not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played a role in his postwar behavior. That confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo--to try to break down other prisoners--and was broadcast over Hanoi's state radio. Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed a school and other civilian targets. The Pentagon has copies of the confessions but will not release them. Also, no outsider I know of has ever seen a nonredacted copy of McCain's debriefing when he returned from captivity, which is classified but can be made public by McCain.
In his bestselling 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs, owing to his propaganda value (his high-ranking father, Rear Adm. John S. McCain II, was then the commander of US forces in the Pacific). Also in this memoir, McCain expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given the confession. "I felt faithless and couldn't control my despair," he writes, revealing that he made two "feeble" attempts at suicide. Tellingly, he says he lived in "dread" that his father would find out about the confession. "I still wince," he writes, "when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace."
Gee, Anon2...Are you pointing a finger at him? You think you could have done better? You can't even imagine what it was like for him, or anyone else there.
And if you READ the book, you would know that he wasn't treated better throughout the whole time. When he turned down the early release, his captors took it out on him in unbelievable ways. Have the book, Anon2.
No additional comments needed.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/17/fox-news-viewers-are-the-_n_798146.html
Fox News Viewers Are The Most Misinformed: Study
Fox News viewers are much more likely than others to believe false information about American politics, a new study concludes.
The study, conducted by the University of Maryland, judged how likely consumers of various news outlets and publications were to believe misinformation about a wide range of political issues. Overall, 90% of respondents said they felt they had heard false information being given to them during the 2010 election campaign. However, while consumers of just about every news outlet believed some information that was false, the study found that Fox News viewers, regardless of political information, were "significantly more likely" to believe that:
--Most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely)
--Most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)
--The economy is getting worse (26 points)
--Most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)
--The stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)
--Their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)
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--The auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)
--When TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)
--And that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)
In addition, the study said, increased viewership of Fox News led to increased belief in these false stories.
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