Have journalistic ethics declined?
Climate change, and the link to human activities, is a well established fact to the great majority of climate scientists. Yet the main-stream media give as much space to climate change deniers as they do to climate scientists, in spite of the lack of credibility of the former.
Does this indicate sloppy journalism, sensational journalism, poor journalism, lowest-common-denominator journalism, or all of the above?
Your answer was a reasonable one Stirling, but you are wrong when you say "There seems to as many experts who don’t believe that it is occurring as there are who do". If you accept that the experts are climatologists rather than geologists and non-scientists, then almost all the experts accept that the climate is changing and is caused by humanity.
WebHelp; Lord Christopher Monckton is not a climate scientist, he is not a scientist at all. He is a very glib climate denier – to me that is not sufficient to make him an ‘expert’. The other names were not familiar to me.
Journalistic standards have certainly declined over the past 20 years, as shown by the dramatically deteriorating quality of TV news programmes and of newspapers. Very few exceptions.
Several things
Deliberate disinformation campaigns, spreading blatantly false statements such as "There seems to as many experts who don’t believe that [global warming] is occurring as there are who do", picked up in all good faith no doubt by people like Sterling
(We know from polls that a strong majority of scientists, and over 90% of those who really are experts on climate, believe that anthropogenic global warming is happening; the number who believe that global warming as such is happening must be even larger)
Journalists with poor scientific background and inadequate resources, who don’t have the time or knowledge to read, say, 1 million words of hacked e-mails and accept what they are told at face value (the BBC, no less, highlighted the words "hide the decline", written in 1999 when there was absolutely no question that temperatures were rising)
Journalism as entertainment. Money that should be spent on investigation going to pay the salaries of anchors or wafflers. Anyone can make good TV out of an argument, however bogus, but making good TV out of complicated science is much more difficult.
The plausibility of specious "tell both sides" propaganda. If this reminds you of the "controversy" over evolution, it should.
I used to give my chemistry classes a lecture on the "hole" in the ozone, and how its cause was identified. At the end, one student came up to me and said "why do I have to know this stuff? I’m a journalism major."
March 31st, 2010 at 3:08 pm
There still are many unanswered questions about "global warming". There seems to as many experts who don’t believe that it is occurring as there are who do. Both sides should receiving equal time by the media at this point. I for one am simply not sure what to believe. Both sides make some very strong arguments. It doesn’t help the believers side when the public learns that much of the data to support the evidence has been fudged or collected in a very sloppy manner, i.e. the U.N.s IPCC’s inaccurate reports.
I do believe that the media in general has been steadily "dummying down" for the masses to get ratings and make more money … including journalism. I’d say that the same thing is true for the entertainment media also. It’s sad.
Welcome to the brave new world.
References :
IPCC’s list of fake warnings
Express Buzz – Jan 31, 2010
But the focus of that piece was not global warming at all but the effects of logging. A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC’s …
Glacier error ‘cost us dear’: UN climate panel chief AFP
Pachauri admits damage to UN climate change panel The Australian
82 months and counting… | 100 months to sav
March 31st, 2010 at 3:43 pm
Journalistic standards have certainly declined over the past 20 years, as shown by the dramatically deteriorating quality of TV news programmes and of newspapers. Very few exceptions.
Several things
Deliberate disinformation campaigns, spreading blatantly false statements such as "There seems to as many experts who don’t believe that [global warming] is occurring as there are who do", picked up in all good faith no doubt by people like Sterling
(We know from polls that a strong majority of scientists, and over 90% of those who really are experts on climate, believe that anthropogenic global warming is happening; the number who believe that global warming as such is happening must be even larger)
Journalists with poor scientific background and inadequate resources, who don’t have the time or knowledge to read, say, 1 million words of hacked e-mails and accept what they are told at face value (the BBC, no less, highlighted the words "hide the decline", written in 1999 when there was absolutely no question that temperatures were rising)
Journalism as entertainment. Money that should be spent on investigation going to pay the salaries of anchors or wafflers. Anyone can make good TV out of an argument, however bogus, but making good TV out of complicated science is much more difficult.
The plausibility of specious "tell both sides" propaganda. If this reminds you of the "controversy" over evolution, it should.
I used to give my chemistry classes a lecture on the "hole" in the ozone, and how its cause was identified. At the end, one student came up to me and said "why do I have to know this stuff? I’m a journalism major."
References :
March 31st, 2010 at 4:19 pm
there is an interview series where top experts in both fields where asked….i would check out their answers, since they can give you a better overview than i: http://www.ourblook.com/component/option,com_sectionex/Itemid,200076/id,8/view,category/#catid390
References :