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Fox News Distorts Climate Science; In Other News, the Pope Is Catholic.
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Peter Terpstra
Sep 25, 2012, 1:52:42 PM9/25/12
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Fox News Distorts Climate Science; In Other News, the Pope Is Catholic
By Philip Yam | September 22, 2012 | 70
For anyone with an interest in journalism, it’s no surprise that Fox
News Channel and the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal lean well
to the right. Editorially, these two jewels of Rupert Murdoch’s News
Corp. have a long history of denying human-induced global warming, in
keeping with certain ideological interests.
New data support the anecdotes and conventional wisdom. At a midday
panel on September 21 in New York City’s Science, Industry and Business
Library, the Union of Concerned Scientists released results of an
analysis quantifying the media outlets’ distortions of climate science.
In the six months from February to July 2012, the UCS searched for the
terms “climate change” and “global warming” during primetime Fox News
Channel programs, which consist of political commentary shows such as
The O’Reilly Factor and Hannity.
The UCS found that, in 37 of 40 instances, Fox News programs misled
viewers about climate science—mainly, by broadly dismissing it. As an
example, the UCS quotes an on-air statement from April 11, 2012: “I
thought we were getting warmer. But in the ‘70s, it was, look out, we’re
all going to freeze.” (The report didn’t reveal the name of the actual
source.) Fox News hosts and guests also mocked and disparaged statements
from scientists and drowned out genuine scientific assertions with
cherry-picked data and false claims.
The WSJ opinion pages fared a bit better: only 81 percent of the 48
references to the climate key words were misleading, according to the
UCS analysis. Such instances included a reference to climatologist James
Hansen as an alarmist and an assertion that we are only in a global
warming “bubble” that raises questions about the veracity of climate
science and the “credibility of its advocates,” WSJ editors wrote. The
few accurate statements came from readers’ letters to the editors,
remarked Brenda Ekwurzel, a UCS climate scientist who presented the data
at the panel. (The opinion pages are distinct from newsroom operations,
which media researchers in 2010 actually found to lean left.)
You can quibble with the UCS analysis—it did not look at The New York
Times or MSNBC programs such as The Rachel Maddow Show, for example. But
the results stay true to past incidents, such as this doozy in which a
meteorologist asserted that thermodynamics makes global warming
impossible. Indeed, News Corp. goes quite far in toeing the right-wing
line, so much so that it even tried to rewrite the history of the
Internet to deny the U.S. government’s creation of it.
Rather than surprising, the results might be more of a disappointment—to
Rupert Murdoch himself. Murdoch acknowledged in 2007 the reality of
anthropogenic climate change and pledged that his company’s operations
would become carbon-neutral—a goal achieved in 2011. Still, as the UCS
data indicate, many of News Corp.’s most influential and powerful
employees continue to perpetuate climate denialism.
Battles against antiscience are nothing new, of course. Groups that
advocate scientific reasoning, such as CSICOP and the Skeptical Society,
have long tried to combat paranormal and pseudoscience beliefs and
claims. But the fight has been a slog. When I interviewed CSICOP founder
Paul Kurtz in 1996, he said that “we thought that if you just provide
information, people would reject” paranormal thinking. Clearly, that
hasn’t worked. “The problem is more massive and complicated than we
imagined,” he lamented.
Climate scientists face a similar challenge. As Angela Anderson,
director of the UCS Climate and Energy program, stated at Friday’s
panel, convincing people takes more than information. You must appeal to
their values, too.
The shrill political programs on cable TV know that—I suspect that most
of the 1.9 million viewers of Fox News primetime tune in to confirm
their biases and bolster their belief that government and its
regulations are forces for bad. The task ahead is to show that climate
change is even worse—a tall order, for sure.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/09/22/fox-news-distorts-climate-science/?WT_mc_id=SA_CAT_SP_20120924
By Philip Yam | September 22, 2012 | 70
For anyone with an interest in journalism, it’s no surprise that Fox
News Channel and the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal lean well
to the right. Editorially, these two jewels of Rupert Murdoch’s News
Corp. have a long history of denying human-induced global warming, in
keeping with certain ideological interests.
New data support the anecdotes and conventional wisdom. At a midday
panel on September 21 in New York City’s Science, Industry and Business
Library, the Union of Concerned Scientists released results of an
analysis quantifying the media outlets’ distortions of climate science.
In the six months from February to July 2012, the UCS searched for the
terms “climate change” and “global warming” during primetime Fox News
Channel programs, which consist of political commentary shows such as
The O’Reilly Factor and Hannity.
The UCS found that, in 37 of 40 instances, Fox News programs misled
viewers about climate science—mainly, by broadly dismissing it. As an
example, the UCS quotes an on-air statement from April 11, 2012: “I
thought we were getting warmer. But in the ‘70s, it was, look out, we’re
all going to freeze.” (The report didn’t reveal the name of the actual
source.) Fox News hosts and guests also mocked and disparaged statements
from scientists and drowned out genuine scientific assertions with
cherry-picked data and false claims.
The WSJ opinion pages fared a bit better: only 81 percent of the 48
references to the climate key words were misleading, according to the
UCS analysis. Such instances included a reference to climatologist James
Hansen as an alarmist and an assertion that we are only in a global
warming “bubble” that raises questions about the veracity of climate
science and the “credibility of its advocates,” WSJ editors wrote. The
few accurate statements came from readers’ letters to the editors,
remarked Brenda Ekwurzel, a UCS climate scientist who presented the data
at the panel. (The opinion pages are distinct from newsroom operations,
which media researchers in 2010 actually found to lean left.)
You can quibble with the UCS analysis—it did not look at The New York
Times or MSNBC programs such as The Rachel Maddow Show, for example. But
the results stay true to past incidents, such as this doozy in which a
meteorologist asserted that thermodynamics makes global warming
impossible. Indeed, News Corp. goes quite far in toeing the right-wing
line, so much so that it even tried to rewrite the history of the
Internet to deny the U.S. government’s creation of it.
Rather than surprising, the results might be more of a disappointment—to
Rupert Murdoch himself. Murdoch acknowledged in 2007 the reality of
anthropogenic climate change and pledged that his company’s operations
would become carbon-neutral—a goal achieved in 2011. Still, as the UCS
data indicate, many of News Corp.’s most influential and powerful
employees continue to perpetuate climate denialism.
Battles against antiscience are nothing new, of course. Groups that
advocate scientific reasoning, such as CSICOP and the Skeptical Society,
have long tried to combat paranormal and pseudoscience beliefs and
claims. But the fight has been a slog. When I interviewed CSICOP founder
Paul Kurtz in 1996, he said that “we thought that if you just provide
information, people would reject” paranormal thinking. Clearly, that
hasn’t worked. “The problem is more massive and complicated than we
imagined,” he lamented.
Climate scientists face a similar challenge. As Angela Anderson,
director of the UCS Climate and Energy program, stated at Friday’s
panel, convincing people takes more than information. You must appeal to
their values, too.
The shrill political programs on cable TV know that—I suspect that most
of the 1.9 million viewers of Fox News primetime tune in to confirm
their biases and bolster their belief that government and its
regulations are forces for bad. The task ahead is to show that climate
change is even worse—a tall order, for sure.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/09/22/fox-news-distorts-climate-science/?WT_mc_id=SA_CAT_SP_20120924
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