Is Prominent Media Coverage of the Climate Deniers Conference Warranted?
by David Sassoon - Mar 9th, 2009
At SolveClimate, we've answered the question posed in the headline with a resounding "no!" Unfortunately, the New York Times and The Guardian – to name two prominent outlets – think otherwise. Read their stories about the three-day International Conference on Climate Change, organized by the Heartland Institute, and you are left with a big so-what.
The stories serve primarily to legitimize the attempts of climate change deniers to undermine the integrity of science through political means, with prominent media coverage being their most potent weapon.
Once again, Kevin Grandia of DeSmogBlog and Kert Davies of Greenpeace are on site, doing yeoman's work to make sure the media stories are "balanced."
Grandia produced an indispensable guide called "How to Manufacture Public Doubt - analysis of the public relations techniques used by the climate denial industry."
Davies was letting the media know that the so-called experts giving presentations at the conference were “a shrinking collection of extremists” and that they were “left talking to themselves.”
At the very end of the New York Times story, Andy Revkin quotes Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University and an author of many reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. After reviewing the text of presentations of the meeting, Schneider said that they were efforts to “bamboozle the innocent.”
That's a scientific assessment that shouldn't have been buried at the bottom of the story. Imagine if the New York Times headline read:
Climate Skeptics Meet in NY to Bamboozle the Public about Peer-Reviewed Science
That might have been a story worthy of printing. Instead, we've been served up yet another he-said-she-said story. Sigh.
Last year, our story on the same conference was headlined: Ooops! Climate Deniers' NY Conference a Big Blunder.
... they released their silly denialist manifesto for all the world to see. It begins:
Now, therefore, we recommend: That world leaders reject the views
expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as “An Inconvenient
Truth.”Sure. Show up in New York and tell the world to erase the Nobel prize. And an Oscar.
The final verdict was best captured in this headline: Networks Ignore, Newspapers Mock NY Climate Change Conference.
So why is the media taking the conference seriously this year and providing a platform for the propagation of misinformation?
Looks like the media's been bamboozled yet again.
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A men brother!
A men brother,
The press shouldn't be documenting scientific conferences, they should be telling us what the polar opposite think of them, ie titling them "Climate Sceptics Meet in NY to Bamboozle the Public ...". By including a conclusion of the events in the title readers don't have to think for themselves, the conclusions are right there!
Opposing points of view to the ‘consensus’ on climate change are dangerous, they could lead to people investigating the science that it is based on.
The media shouldn’t cover these events, they should bury them. Its best the public don’t even know these crazies exist. We all know its getting warmer, we all know CO2 is a pollutant.
And clearly like you say, how can anyone argue with an Oscar winning documentary? This is almost as bad as the British Court that found 9 basic errors in Al Gores movie and instructed schools to point them out when they played it. What are they saying? Do they think Al Gore is stupid or a liar?
Belongs in the Entertainment section
I presume they will next cover Astrologer conventions and the Flat Earth Society.
The reason? News...
The event itself, if covered as an event, is not news -- just as a gathering of environmental campaigners, animal-welfare campaigners, coal lobbyists etc would not be, in and of itself.
But the fact that the gathered skeptical scientists are worried about each others' unscientific assertions IS news (including specific on-record criticism of the solar explanation for recent climate change, etc). And the fact that corporations like Exxon say on the record now that these groups are "diverting attention" -- after supporting them in the past -- is news. My job is to track news. Ergo, a story, and blog post:
http://tinyurl.com/dotSkeptics09
Old News
It is already very old news that Exxon has pulled support from Heartland and other groups like it; only because you e-mailed Exxon and got a response is it now "news" again. You manufactured it.
Further, the disagreement among deniers "about each others' unscientific assertions" IS NOT news. It's an absurdity.
Yet you treat it like news.
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