AP: Authoritarian Propaganda - The wire service "reports" that skepticism is the bane of science.
Ubiquitous
Once, not so long ago, the planet's prevailing voices
were those of the experts--the people who, right or
wrong, had years of training to back up what they said.
Then came the Internet, and everything changed.
Wrong, it's not Al Gore lamenting the effects of his invention. It's an
Associated Press dispatch by Ted Anthony. Readers of this column know
that the AP, once the gold standard in straight, factual reporting, has
grown increasingly opinionated over the past few years, under the rubric
of "accountability journalism." Yet the AP's editors insist they're NOT
publishing opinion. What you get in a dispatch like this, then, is a
perfect distillation of left-liberal orthodoxy--of the assumptions that
go unquestioned by those who imagine themselves to be "experts" or to be
speaking on their behalf. As Anthony continues:
Consider the global warming debate: The skeptics shout.
The skeptics' opponents shout back. The scientists insist
they have research in their corner. And public debate shifts
from the provable and the empirical toward the spectacle
of argument.
Democracy in action? That's one way of seeing it. But is
something deeper afoot? As the amplification of human opinion
becomes more democratic, is the suspicion of the expert and
the intellectual--a long-held trope in American society--going
globally viral?
Hmm, if the global-warming debate has prompted "suspicion of the expert
and the intellectual," could it have something to do with the recent
revelations that climate scientists manipulated and withheld data and
conspired to suppress alternate hypotheses? Incredibly, Anthony not only
doesn't answer the question, he doesn't even mention the revelations
that prompt it.
Anthony quotes a purported expert on expertise:
Greil Marcus, an American cultural historian and co-author
of "A New Literary History of America," remembers watching
TV in the 1950s, "when there were all these TV dramas about
science vs. religion." And, he says, "science always won."
No more, Marcus says. Instead, cacophony now prevails and
the right to be heard trumps what is being said. "Welcome
to the new Dark Ages," he says.
But the reason "science" no longer "wins" is that what often poses as
science today is different from the real thing. To take an easy example,
supposedly science-minded people often scoff at those who do not
"believe in evolution." The problem with this is not that they are wrong
to defend evolution, but that they mistake evolution, a scientific
theory, for a belief system. When you demand adherence to a set of
beliefs, you are no longer doing science but something that has the
form, if not the substance, of religion.
Similarly, what is clearest from the University of East Anglia emails is
that climate science has become more political than scientific.
Researchers have been abusing the scientific process in order to produce
support for an ideologically predetermined outcome. And global warmism
has strong religious overtones too, as evidenced by this headline in
London's left-wing Guardian: "This Is Bigger Than Climate Change. It Is
a Battle to Redefine Humanity."
Anthony concludes by arguing that skepticism has long been a problem for
science:
Consider the case of the Italian physicist faced with
a barrage of criticism from skeptics to the point where
he faced legal action that dogged him for the rest of
his life.
We know him as Galileo, the father of modern astronomy.
But of course Galileo's antagonists were not skeptics at all. Rather,
they were believers in established dogma and upholders of authority.
Skepticism lies at the heart of real science--and, for that matter, of
real journalism. "Accountability journalism" turns out to be neither
accountability nor journalism, merely propaganda on behalf of those the
AP regards as authorities.
--
"Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem.
Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an
overrepresentation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a
predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and
how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis."
-- Al Gore acknowledges exaggerating the dangers of "global warming"