Take the coverage of the Covington High School protest, for example. When the available facts seemed to support the narrative that white, male, MAGA-hat-wearing, anti-abortion Catholic students were racially harassing a defenseless Native American elder, the media was shouting "fascism!" from the rooftops.
But when more facts emerged in the form of a longer video showing the high school students being abused, and with no mere smirk, by a group of overtly racist Black Hebrew Israelites no less--and the Native American elder accosting the students rather than the other way around--suddenly that no longer serves a narrative the left wants to tell, and there's been comparatively little coverage of the aftermath of the mob unleashed by the initial reporting, of the death threats to students and the high school's temporary closure.
This is why it is crucial for the media to present the facts from more than one, very specific angle, even when the facts are largely not in dispute.
Except that that was also reported mostly everywhere. Also, one sided 'evil-looking' harassment is news that is more interesting to most people because it might signal some trend. No-one (left or right) would have found a word-fight between evenly-wrong grey characters very interesting if that was the story in the first place. Because it just isn't.
That doesn't make the mainstream press left-biased. I think it actually isn't.
That you would rank the Covington kids as "evenly-wrong" with their racist (not to mention adult) abusers is incredible.
(Not debating the "even-ness of wrongs", as that is a six-year-old's excuse for punching their sibling - "They started it!!")
But this is litterally the position of both camps in the US right now. Donald Trump, Wells Griffith, Jeff Sessions, all have (or had) tremendous power over US energy policies, and they all share (publicly at least) indubitably non-scientific views on the climate change problem.
Or do you double and triple down on denial so your opponents are busy trying to convince you rather than trying to maneuver you into compromise.
After all, based on progress so far your strategy has been exceptionally successful.
But I think the whole issue comes down to a lack of trust in the media - if I already thought that the media is following a political agenda (or just exaggerating to get more views/shares) and then they started pushing climate change heavily, saying we need to aggressively regulate industries and eliminate blue-collar energy jobs in favour of high-tech clean energy (both generally considered left wing policies/strategies already) I would likely look at that with extreme skepticism.
So we're back to the issue of media trustworthiness. I think media needs to earn back the trust of the right in order that climate change reporting be taken seriously. There's still going to be the issue of industry advocates pushing fake science, but that needs a whole different approach to tackle.
There’s 180K people employed in oil, coal, and natural gas jobs compared to 370K in solar. From a pure numbers standpoint this is just a completely farscical angle, but it’s a great example of why there is no true media bias problem, but there is a huge problem with stupid people who will believe anything and vote with fear.
I don't personally think it's a conspiracy - as I said, I believe that we need to attempt to counteract anthropomorphic climate change. But the evidence does bear the idea out.
The idea that Republicans are all just morons is cancerous as fuck. And I'm British - I have no horse in that race. But seeing Democrats actively promote the idea that Republicans are white trash hillbilly redneck bumpkins with sub-80 IQ makes me really dislike those Democrats. Rather than basically claiming superiority over your political opponents, why not try to understand their position, and the circumstances that lead them to believe things different from what you believe? It's supreme arrogance to think you know everything and your opponents know nothing.
Agreed with the rest of your points.
Per that document, page 29, there are ~370k jobs in solar, yes. But there are ~160k jobs in coal, ~360k jobs in natural gas, and ~515k jobs in oil. Plus the ~36k jobs in "advanced gas", whatever that is.
Unless you were talking about just the "electric power generation" column?
Case in point. The BBC trotting out Nigel Lawson as their standard puppet to "balance" pieces on climate change appears to have been about presenting the opposite point of view for balance. From a denier happy to spout easily disprovable fake facts, with no knowledge of the science. Every interview with a climate scientist appeared to come with a space for an unqualified denier. I suspect it's far more an indictment of a sad lack of scientific awareness in the BBC than deliberate political bias. Perhaps inevitable now they've been required to outsource so much.
Far from demonstrating the absurdity of the denier's position, for many of the public, it gave it credibility. For those with enough scientific awareness, yes his "balance" clearly consisted of cringe-inducing lies.
Of course it was made far worse by the BBC taking so long to realise and acknowledge their big mistake. I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the memo they had to send around late last year. I suppose cry, I expected much better of them. Maybe a little fact checking too.
And I agree with you're analysis; legacy media typically trot out straw men only to signal how superior their view is.
The one time I heard him talk, he set off all of my kook alarms in the first few minutes of his lecture.
This is sort of third or fourth-hand, so don't just trust it blindly, but what I generally hear is that most of the real "other side" does actually believe climate change is real. They just oppose action because they believe humans aren't the cause, and almost any action we take will be a lot of wasted time and money that could be used better for other things.
The problem is that upon hearing that they oppose action, the "climate change is real" people totally ignore their reasons and lump them in with the crazy "climate change isn't real" people.
I did this once. I had fully accepted the media's narrative that these people were all kooks and idiots, so I was curious what could possibly cause them to think these things. I went and read some of their websites for the same reason I went and read some flat earther websites the other day, for amusement.
Unfortunately it turned out that (surprise) journalists had been wildly misleading me about what these people really believe, probably because journalists as a class of people accept intellectual authority without question, especially in the scientific realm. The problem of fraudulent psychology results is one well known example of this.
Here's what a lot of "climate change denial" really boils down to:
- CO2 is indeed a greenhouse gas. We are indeed releasing lots of it.
I've yet to see anyone deny this, although I'm sure there are people out there who do. However this is not mainstream "denial".
- But we don't really know what effect this is having, or if it's really changing the climate
This is where climate change "deniers" separate from journalistic mainstream. They aren't so much in denial as much, much less certain about climate science and its conclusions, to the extent that they often conclude nothing should be done.
- This is partly because the climate is too complex to model, and partly because of scientific bias, fraud and malpractice.
A lot of climate change denial turns out to be a specific case of more general criticisms of the scientific establishment. Their style of argument can easily be ported to criticisms of social science or economics, with hardly any tweaks.
Basically: proclaiming certain doom and that your field of study is the only way to avoid it is a surefire way to get massive amounts of grant money, media coverage and political power. In addition, the "deniers" tend to have lots of evidence of actual serious problems with the science. One recent article I saw pointed out that the thermometer dataset that has been used for over 20 years to measure climate change is full of obvious errors, like temperatures that would be physically impossible or which are clearly the result of bad celsius/Farenheit conversions, or which are taken from thermometers that are literally at the start of airport runways i.e. routinely blasted with jet exhaust.
When errors that are obvious to laymen are discovered in critical datasets that have been used for years to make very precise predictions about very complex things, it is reasonable for some people to conclude the science is less certain than journalists present it, and as a consequence that maybe the costs of inaction are lower than has been presented.
Can anyone point me to hard, unbiased (in your opinion, of course) data that supports the assertion that climate change is caused by humans or otherwise depicts an accurate representation of our current understanding on the subject?
Is it possible that climate change is due to natural and not human forces?
How many were against Einstein for decades? Appeal to consensus among experts is still a fallacy.
Climate change has both consensus and evidence. It seems irresponsible to keep spreading doubt in the face of both.
I think this debate goes round in circles because we rely on news organisations to do several things at once, and they should probably be unbundled.
We rely on them to report immediate, factual events, like a fire in a hotel or an impending storm.
We rely on them to do longer form reporting on social trends, new scientific findings, business and governmental activities, etc.
We rely on them to locate and expose corruption and malpractice amongst the powerful.
We rely on them for book and film reviews.
And sometimes we rely on them to engage in analysis and generally telling us what to think, because figuring out our own opinions on complex topics is hard work. We'd like them to do it for us and then boil things down to an executive summary that we can then adopt wholesale as if it were our own opinions.
It's not clear to me that it makes sense to bundle so many things together, or if this is a useful combination or just an artifact of an earlier era when distributing the written word required lots of equipment and big agent networks. Now the internet exists should we be defending these agglomerations or breaking them apart?
Basically, instead of trying to convince people who still refuse to believe the evidence, they should be switching to something more productive, like building dome cities or building colonies on the Moon or something.
No scientist believes that civilization is going to collapse because of climate change.
The predicted effects, according to the scientific consensus, is that sea levels will rise by a meter or 2 over the next hundred years. That is not an extinction level event. Not even close.
The scale of how bad things are, are more on the scale of trillions of dollars worth of damages. Thats bad, but it is bad on the same scale as another Iraq war, and not bad on the scale of billions dieing.
Also known as a "Squash Match".
If pro wrestling can move on from them, maybe news media should too!
The role of "jobbers" or "enhancement talent" (i.e. performers on the show whose role was to make the real stars look good) faded in the mid-1980's.
The industry consolidated, from a collection of regional operators focused on live events, to two main companies with national footprints and a focus on television (i.e. WWF and WCW). Competition heated up between the two, and the "squash matches" that had filled out live event cards were not compelling to the newer television audience.
With the dawn of The Attitude Era (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_Era), squash matches became virtually extinct. They had already become more rare in the preceding years. Much of the Attitude Era can be seen as a postmodern deconstruction of the old-school tropes that came before. In this environment, a group of former-"jobbers" even formed an on-screen faction dealing wit the concept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_J.O.B._Squad), which elevated them to moderate stardom by breaking the fourth wall for an increasingly-informed audience.
Today, some performers will still never have the same potential for stardom as other top performers. But no one is kept on the roster to always lose. It's too boring, and doesn't really work to enhance the winners.
You are correct, of course. The industry changed only because the "mark" fans "smartened up" and demanded it!
>"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." -President of the United States
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/26589529219124838...
> "[..Its cold right now..] What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you!" -Leader and representative of the United States
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/10900742540104048...
Remove the deliberately goofy language you've used ("conspiracy theorist," "new world order") and just say "someone who believes the danger of climate change is not real and is a lie perpetrated by the political left." When you've done that, you have a rather mainstream conservative American position.
What you see as deliberately manufactured, idiotic strawmen are sometimes just idiots.
I see two modes to this. On factual matters (flat Earth, anti-vaxxers, chemtrails), I fully support the "figure it out and print/publish only the truth".
In opinion matters (how much tax should the poor/middle/rich pay, should public higher education be free/cheaper, should we implement UBI, etc), I'm far more interested in hearing from both/all sides, even at risk of some of the fringe viewpoints getting more airtime than currently.
"News" is not the simple reporting of facts, probably never was, and inherent in even the apparent reporting of facts is an interpretation of them (if nothing else by virtue of the facts you select to report upon and then emphasis you give them).
I think the zeitgeist right now is people are afraid to fully own their beliefs AND be open to debate.
Right now there's too much fear of repercussion one way or another. Which is only pushing the extremes further.
There is no one "correct" side amongst people and events, only impressions and accounts, which can vary tremendously.
It's also important not to take a side in the news, but to lay out facts and people issues involved as fairly as possible, rather than what happens these days: hiding datapoints, falsifying statements, taking sides and rarely understanding anything about or relating to the people involved.
Perhaps on stories of grievance or accusation, journalists musy play devil's advocate by asking for a response to opposition and ask the question most people are too afraid to ask.
Taking sides is for the editorial, not news, lest it become merely a TV church espousing gospel and seed faith, while the polarized others are turned off and away. Neither group communicates to the other, and neither challenges the others ideas... a dichotomous, divided-and-conquered, atomized society falls apart.
PS: I've been around the sun a few times, and I note a liability red flag whenever a person espouses black-and-white thinking. It's usually an unreasonableness better kept at a distance.
So, no, we don't need balanced news. But we need critically inclusive news.
For example, I would be interested in listening to a reasonable anti-vaxxer. Not the "vaccines-cause-autism" one, (although this point deserves an honorable mention), but someone with more methodical approach. I know it's hard to find a voice of reason in the choir of conspiracists, but who said making good press should be easy?
I also would be interested in listening to a good flat-earther. I see it as a very good mental exercise for the reader: if I had now knowledge about the shape of our planet, could I actually tell the truth from the false here?
Same goes for climate (non)changers, Russian hackers and so on.