Climate change denial, and their buddies the fossil fuel industry lobby, are not just dragging the scientific method and the peer review process through the mud. It's also journalists and journalism in general who have been tainted. Once upon a time (back when I was a kid in the 1960s for instance) journalism was considered quite a high calling, journalists were regarded as heroes; protectors of the public's right to know and seekers after truth. View any number of movies from the old days where journalists are portrayed as champions of 'the people' and all round good guys. (Superman/Clark Kent anyone?). Nowadays there are still a lot of very hard working, dedicated and honest journalists out there but sadly, there are also a lot of the other kind.
I blame Rupert Murdoch fairly and squarely for the large part of this decline in journalistic ethics and standards, but he has been aided and abetted by the 'PR' industry and their evil twins, the political spin-meisters. I'm sure Watergate was a bit of a wake up call to a lot of politicans that they'd better 'do something' about pesky journalists, but the bastardization of journalism in general has been getting worse and worse ever since the 1970s.
I read an article recently about the rise of the PR industry at the expense of journalism. These days there are about 3 PR people to every working journalist and they're usually much better paid and it's getting worse as print media contracts and ownership has been concentrated, corporatized, consolidated and globalized (Hi Rupert!).
PR Industry Fills Vacuum Left by Shrinking Newsrooms - ProPublica
Quote:
| "You would go into these hearings and there would be more PR people representing these big players than there were reporters, sometimes by a factor of two or three," Barstow said. "There were platoons of PR people." An investigative reporter for The New York Times, Barstow has written several big [4] stories [5] about the shoving match between the media and public relations in what eventually becomes the national dialogue. As the crowd at the hearing clearly showed, the game has been changing.... |
To make matters worse every politician in Washington will often have up to 100 lobbyists working only on trying to influence them, night and day, whatever it takes.
Surely something is badly out of whack here? Surely this is not Democracy working as intended? The public have grown increasingly more suspicious of what they read in the paper and see on the TV news (quite rightly). They don't know who to trust or who to believe. They have grown more and more cynical and often more disengaged in a process they see as corrupt.
The climate change misinformation campaign of course plays on this innate public mistrust. Put this together with the repeated slurs thrown at the United Nations, IPCC, UNFCC and various academic institutions (such as during the climategate nonsense) and it's little wonder that the 'average punter' just switches off the whole thing.
Al Gore has written a nice piece for Rolling Stone this month on the way the media has handled the climate change 'debate' which speaks directly to this problem and is well worth a read.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...enial-20110622
Quote:
| "...Admittedly, the contest over global warming is a challenge for the referee because it's a tag-team match, a real free-for-all. In one corner of the ring are Science and Reason. In the other corner: Poisonous Polluters and Right-wing Ideologues. The referee — in this analogy, the news media — seems confused about whether he is in the news business or the entertainment business. Is he responsible for ensuring a fair match? Or is he part of the show, selling tickets and building the audience? The referee certainly seems distracted: by Donald Trump, Charlie Sheen, the latest reality show — the list of serial obsessions is too long to enumerate here..." |
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