News Media Journalism Malfeasance – Watts Up With That?

From the Cornwall Alliance

The following is a guest article by Russell Cook.

From all the news of ‘raging wildfires’ / ‘melting glaciers / ‘increasingly extreme weather’ / ‘hottest month ever recorded,’ it’s no surprise how that morphs into news of ‘climate anxiety’ affecting youths ranging from children to young college students. Supposedly well-intentioned journalists then add articles to their repertoire about ‘coping with the climate crisis.’ On top of that, the Christian community is implored to act on the ‘religious moral imperative to save the planet’ from an evil, profit-seeking. planet-destroying fossil fuel industry.

Legacy news media reporters never question any of this, including clarion calls from environmentalists that the public must be educated about fossil fuel usage perilously heating the planet. That call is in the demands of the latest “ExxonKnew” lawsuit, where Big Oil is being sued for causing the heat wave which supposedly killed a woman. The woman’s daughter not only demands a damages award, but also for “a public education campaign to rectify Defendants’ decades of misinformation.”

Regarding the need for public education, I agree completely . . . but entirely in the opposite direction.

I’ll set up my point using an amusing scene from the 1997 science fiction film “Men in Black,” where the aggressive MIB agent fires explosive blasts at a fleeing space alien on the belief that this particular creature must be stopped at all costs. His supervisor admonishes him,

“There’s always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they do not know about it!!“

Ignorance is bliss there. Back in the real world, the public could get on with their happy lives after being fully informed of all facts of the climate issue. People suffer from ‘climate anxiety’ because they do not know about science-based assessments from skeptic climate scientists!

Consider how the PBS NewsHour news outlet has completely excluded skeptic climate scientists from its program to rebut any assessments from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Cornwall Alliance’s Director of Research and Education, PhD climate scientist Dr David Legates could authoritatively rebut and potentially embarrass IPCC / NASA / NOAA scientist guests on the NewsHour. It’s why scientists like him are shunned there.

An especially ridiculous news media assertion I’ve heard for years is that the public isn’t more alarmed about the ‘climate crisis’ because reporters have adhered to the ‘equal balance’ tenet of journalism – giving too much balance to skeptic scientists. But when was the last time anyone has seen that kind of treatment for skeptic scientists or other expert speakers on the topic? The PBS NewsHour has violated their own guideline on balanced reporting for over 25 years.

Therein lies the actual crisis in the climate issue. It’s not the runaway climate itself. It’s the legacy news media’s malfeasance on the issue from not reporting all of the facts.

High school / college students could polled nationwide, asking how many have heard of the 1970s global cooling craze, and then asking how many have never heard anything in depth about it before hearing the first poll question. They could be asked for their reaction to a 2016 Fox News video clip of ClimateDepot.com’s Marc Morano, who brought in an armadillo to illustrate how that animal was reported in the ’70s to be fleeing south from global cooling.

The critical question for anyone to ask is how how on Earth could “Exxon Know” as far back as the ’50s / ’60s / ’70s that their products caused catastrophic warming, in the face of all the news headlines speaking of impending cooling.

Among all the news reports about “ExxonKnew” lawsuits being filed, no reporter ever poses that hardball question. It’s a sure bet that the PBS NewsHour would never allow Marc Morano onto their program to reveal how legions of pre-1980s reports about the global cooling crisis were so widespread that it even was featured in a 1977 episode of the “Barney Miller” sitcom.

That’s only one of the major faults with the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. These claim the industry not only ‘knew’ about the harm of global warming from the use of petroleum, the accusation continues by saying the industry then duped the public into believing there was no harm via deceptive public relations campaigns designed to undercut the ‘scientific consensus’ about the certainty of fossil fuels driving global warming.

At my GelbspanFiles blog, I detail at huge length how the central accusation elements seen in the lawsuits are totally without merit; the two separate sets of ‘leaked industry memos’ concern plans that were never implemented anywhere; the scientist they say was paid a million dollar+ bribe by Exxon never received any such payment nor was he directed to write science reports meeting the approval of any fossil fuel company leaders; specific copies of ‘newspaper advertorials’ offered as direct evidence of industry deception campaigns were never published anywhere.

Journalists have not done that.

They would never ask self-proclaimed ‘expert on industry disinformation campaigns’ Naomi Oreskes what information she conveyed to the late Pope Francis that enabled her to write the Introduction to his 2015 Encyclical on Climate Change; the Encyclical’s biography paragraph for her all but insinuates that skeptic climate scientists lied to the public about the issue.

That’s one of the more insidious angles of the climate issue — how enviro-activists try to exploit the goodness of Christians by portraying the climate issue as ‘a moral imperative to save the planet from evil Big Oil Execs and their ‘liars-for-hire’ skeptic scientists.’ The critical question right there is elemental:

Which is the bigger sin, failing to take action to stop global warming, an issue increasingly being exposed as being based on dicey science pronouncements . . . . . or breaking the commandment against bearing false witness concerning particular people who point out the problems with those dicey pronouncements?

The climate issue is still alive today because the legacy news media long ago abdicated from their responsibility to tell the public all of the facts about it. The issue can die of a death of a thousand cuts when the public fully comprehends how they have the opportunity to pose tough questions to the authorities they encounter — teachers, journalists, policymakers. I’m old enough to remember when the bad guys used to flee from reporters asking them questions they could not answer. The public needs to flip that same image against the legacy news media.

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