Columbia Jrnlism Rev cjr csj

wow, no content here till 9/14?

bad code see bak txt 12 22

November 20, 2015< Exxon Vice President for Public and Government Affairs Kenneth P. Cohen sends a letter to**Columbia University**, accusing members of the Graduate School of Journalism of violating the school’s ethics policies regarding the recent articles regarding Exxon’s climate change-related research going back to the 1970s. The Dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism,Steve Coll, issues a response

ff ceo memo

JOURNALISTS AND OBSTRUCTING THE COMMITTEE’S INVESTIGATION

A. Bullying Journalists Who Expose the Truth

Emails obtained by the Committee show Exxon privately pressured journalists about

unfavorable news stories implicating the industry. In October 2015, the Los Angeles Times

published two articles written by students as part of the Energy and Environmental Reporting

Project at the Columbia Journalism School. The articles, which drew on historic documents and

more recent interviews and statements from current and former Exxon employees, showed that

Exxon’s work to prepare its facilities for climate change belied its public statements

downplaying or denying climate science.89

Documents uncovered by the Committee suggest that Exxon baselessly accused a

Columbia Journalism instructor and a post-graduate fellow of wrongdoing in connection with

these stories. On November 20, 2015, Exxon sent a letter to Columbia University’s President

Lee Bollinger, criticizing the articles and alleging ethics violations by the students and the

instructor. Exxon claimed that the journalists were made aware of “significant factual errors” in

the articles and gave the company “less than 24 hours” to respond to a request to comment on the

second story, published on October 23, 2015. 90

The letter singled out the team’s instructor

Susanne Rust for alleged inaccuracies and for not giving the company ample time to respond.

However, internal emails indicate that Exxon was given approximately a month to

comment on essential questions and facts of the story prior to the October 23, 2015, publication,

and that the company had resisted multiple requests by the team of journalists to provide detailed

responses.

Exxon also accused a post-graduate fellow, Sara Jerving, of “misrepresenting herself as a

Columbia Arctic researcher and [making] no mention of the fact that she was affiliated with the

89 Columbia Journalism School, Two-Year Long Investigation: What Exxon Knew About Climate Change

(online at https://journalism.columbia.edu/two-year-long-investigation-what-exxon-knew-about-climate-change)

(accessed Nov. 22, 2022). The first two articles in the series were published in October 2015. The first article,

What Exxon Knew About the Earth’s Melting Arctic, details how between 1986 and 1992 Exxon was already

planning for the impacts that global warming would have on its operations in the Artic, for example by hardening

infrastructure. The second article, How Exxon Went from Leader to Skeptic on Climate Change Research, reveals

how the company, contrary to its own research, “poured millions” into a public messaging campaign to sow doubt

about the science of climate change. The article asserted that, despite being a leader in climate research, the

company was publicly skeptical of climate change because it “feared a growing public consensus would lead to

financially burdensome policies.”

School of Journalism or that the research might eventually be published in a newspaper.”93

Internal Exxon emails contradict these claims as well. These emails show that the company

knew that Ms. Jerving had represented herself accurately as a journalism student at Columbia

University to the people she interviewed for the stories. 94

These exchanges also show industry insiders communicating with Exxon employees

about their skepticism and denial of the science of climate change. For example, Peter Noble, a

longtime oil and gas industry executive and consultant, wrote to Ken Croasdale, a former Exxon

employee and then-consultant for Exxon:

I see nothing inconsistent twitch [sic] your quote from 1991 when we didn’t knw [sic]

much about global climate change to Exxon’s current position in 2015 when we still

don’t know much about climate change even if our politicians claim it is “settled

science.” This is a cross we have to bear for our oil industry connections I guess? 95

Another oil and gas industry insider,Dan Masterson [arctic drill, chevron] wrote to Mr. Croasdale:

The murky part of global warming and climate change seems to be whether it is

anthropogenic or related to other very long term [sic] changes not related to human

activity. I think the latter is the case and that the Exxon executives were correct in stating

that the science was “murky.”96

Shell’s internal documents similarly display a marked discomfort with press inquiries

into the company’s past and present climate efforts, even with journalists from whom they

expect positive coverage. In October 2016, David Hone, Shell’s Chief Climate Change Adviser,

and Curtis Smith, Media Manager for Shell, discussed how to deal with a damaging story about

climate denialism in the oil industry. Mr. Smith suggested reaching out to Paul Barrett from

Bloomberg Businessweek, describing him as “the fellow who wanted to do a deep dive in our

archives to prove Shell was a good actor in the climate space for a long time.” However, Mr.

93 Letter from Mr. Kenneth Cohen, Vice President, ExxonMobil, to Lee Bollinger, President, Columbia

University (Nov. 20, 2015) (online at www.politico.com/f/?id=00000151-5a8a-d6a2-a155-dbca213c0000).

94 In a series of emails, Exxon consultant Ken Croasdale asked his contacts about their interactions with

Ms. Jerving. In response, his contacts indicated they knew she was a journalist. For example, in an email from

Peter Noble to Ken Croasdale on October 14, 2015, Mr. Noble confirmed meeting with Ms. Jerving and that she

“[s]eemed like a nice young lady, a student of journalism at Columbia, I think she said but that just shows that I am

a poor predictor of character?” EM-HCOR3-00943385-90. Moreover, in emails from October 15, 2015, from Anne

Barker and Bob Frederking, a current employee and retired employee at the National Research Council of Canada,

both acknowledged they knew Ms. Jerving was affiliated with Columbia and that their interviews with her came

through the National Research Council’s communications group. EM-HCOR3-00943393-94. In an email from

October 15, 2015, Dan Masterson, another oil and gas industry contact of Mr. Croasdale’s, wrote that, according to

his diary entry, he “Met with Sara Jerving, a post-grad student in journalism at Colombia [sic] University. We

talked for about 1.5 hours re what I did in my career and what took place in the 1970’s, 1980’s and thru the 90’s to

now.” EM-HCOR3-00943410-11.

95 EM-HCOR3-00943388.

96 EM-HCOR3-00943411; see also BPA_HCOR_00029193-94 for BP’s treatment of later reporting from

the Energy and Environmental Reporting Project.

Smith ultimately explained that the deep dive never happened because “we sort of chickened

out” and chose not to give him access. 97

Despite an extensive public relations campaign detailing their clean energy strategy, Shell

executives were reluctant to engage with press questions comparing their investments in clean

energy to continued investments in fossil fuels. On October 8, 2021, Mr. Smith received an

inquiry from a Teen Vogue reporter who asked for comment on an op-ed “criticizing

publications for working with fossil fuel companies and lobbying groups.” The journalist

explained the disconnect between marketing and the fact that “fossil fuel companies’ clean

energy investments account for a small percentage of their total capital expenditure, compared to

investments into finding new pockets of oil and gas.” Mr. Smith responded internally to other

Shell employees, “Not with a ten foot pole.”98

B. Obstructing the Committee’s Investigation

The Committee launched its investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long

climate disinformation and greenwashing campaign in September 2021, requesting documents

from Exxon, Chevron, BP, Shell, API, and the Chamber of Commerce.99

Recently retired ice scientist and ice engineer Dan Masterson was honored today with an Arctic Technology Distinguished Achievement Awards. He received the award at a special ceremony during the Arctic Technology Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was selected in recognition of his significant contributions to the ice sciences and to the design and construction of pioneering Arctic projects.

In selecting Masterson, the ATC Awards Committee considered nominations for major technological, humanitarian, environmental and leadership contributions to the Arctic technology industry.

Masterson retired from Chevron Canada in June after a 45-year career that saw him work onshore and offshore in civil and structural engineering. His engineering achievements began in the 1970’s with pioneering work for Panarctic Oils. He designed and oversaw the construction of floating ice platforms to support drilling operations and floating airstrips for large aircraft.

Masterson is a leader in ice science research programs and major offshore Arctic projects. In announcing the award the ATC release noted that “[Masterson] has combined good science with sound practical engineering experience to be able to define ice loads on structures and also to implement the use of ice as an engineering material.”

Towards the end of his career Masterson had a lead role in the development of ice load criteria for Arctic standards including the Canadian Offshore Standard S-471, API RP2N and the new ISO Standard 19906 for Arctic Offshore Structures In its concluding remans the ATC release noted, “Dan Masterson has provided engineering leadership and mentoring support for younger engineers which is the hallmark of a professional engineer.”

=== ... https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/09/nyt-public-editor-says-false-balance-isnt-a-problem-is-also-guilty-of-it.html ... Does the New York Times Have a False Balance Problem? ... False balance is a valid journalistic concern, one worth taking a lot ... and the related impulse to give both sides of an issue equal say, ...

===

:{:(style="outline-color:initial;outline-style:initial"):}:

The distorting reality of 'false balance' in the media - The ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com › 2014/07/14

Jul 15, 2014 — This is a lesson for all media on both sides of the Atlantic — and not just when it comes to science coverage. There are many sides to ...

Missing: CSJ ‎columbia ‎school

Why pundits and journalists insist on false balance - Columbia ...

https://www.cjr.org › analysis

Apr 29, 2020 — The earliest mention I could find of “false balance” in news ... ABC had created the false impression that both sides had lied equally.

Missing: CSJ ‎school

### The danger of fair and balanced - Columbia Journalism Review

https://archives.cjr.org › the_danger_of_fair_and_balance

Number two, the global warming is already large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse ...

Missing: CSJ ‎| Must include: CSJ

https://archives.cjr.org/essay/the_danger_of_fair_and_balance.php

on a sweltering June day in 1988, James E. Hansen, then the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, appeared before a key committee of the United States Senate.

Seated before a bank of cameras and a panel of grim officials, Hansen delivered testimony that would start to swing accepted wisdom on the emerging science of climate change.

“I would like to draw three main conclusions,” he began. “Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is already large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is large enough to begin to affect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves.”

The “greenhouse effect,” what we now know as climate change or climate disruption, was caused by human activity, mainly the burning of fossil fuels since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, said Hansen and other scientists that day.

Colorado Sen. Timothy E. Wirth attended the hearing and in his opening remarks said: “The Energy Committee must move aggressively to examine how energy policy has contributed to the greenhouse effect and the kinds of changes in energy policy that may be needed to reverse the trend of increased emissions of carbon dioxide, a byproduct of the burning of fossil fuels.” Humans, in other words, where driving the warming, and Congress should step in to avoid even more devastating impacts.

At the time of Hansen’s testimony half of the United States was an agricultural wasteland. Meteorologists had declared the worst drought since the Great Dust Bowl. The Mississippi River sank to its lowest level since at least 1872, when record keeping began. The 1980s would become, up to that point anyway, the warmest decade on record. Television screens just a few years earlier beamed images of emaciated figures half a world away, victims of a prolonged drought in the African Sahel. “The Endangered Earth” was Time’s “Planet of the Year.” That climate conditions could cause severe economic damage and deep human suffering was not a huge leap.

Hansen’s forceful testimony about the greenhouse affect wasn’t the first to greet Washington’s political class. As early as 1965, President Johnson was told by his Science Advisory Committee of increasing evidence that human-generated industrial emissions were impacting the atmosphere.

Yet Hansen’s testimony stoked front-page coverage of the issue for the first time and is widely viewed as a turning point in public understanding of human impacts on the climate. The New York Times ran this headline on A1: “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.” In January 1989, PBS’ NOVA aired “Hot Enough for You?” In the fall of that year, The End of Nature, the first book about the greenhouse effect written for a general audience, hit bookshelves, written by a 29-year-old New Yorker staff writer named Bill McKibben. The media had woken up.

Even if the concept of global warming was rising, it seemed another leap of faith for most outside the scientific community to believe humans could be o profoundly transforming something as vast and seemingly permanent as the Earth’s climate—and do it in as little as one hundred years.

In trying to puncture this idea, Hansen and those like McKibben based their argument simply on science and made their case through explanatory writing. They talked about the ways the greenhouse effect would cause more frequent droughts and the sea levels to rise.

They seemed to make what clearly has proven a naïve assumption: that by presenting only the science, they could provoke swift, determined action to reduce their fossil fuel consumption. Politics was not much on their radar.

McKibben is no longer a staff writer at The New Yorker but he remains a journalist, continuing to publish books and influential articles for Rolling Stone about climate change and the need to quickly curb fossil fuel use. He is most known these days, however, for co-founding 350.org, an organization leading the charge against the Keystone XL pipeline and urging global action on climate change.

“There was a lot of coverage and most of it was smart,” he says by phone from his home in Vermont. “Journalists talked to scientists and just reported it. It hadn’t occurred to them that it should be treated as a political issue as opposed to a scientific one,” McKibben says of coverage in the late 1980s.

But, he adds, “It wasn’t long before the fossil fuel industry did a good job of turning it into a political issue, a partisan thing they could exploit, when they started rolling out all the tools that we now understand as an effort to overcome the science. And their main target was the media.”

The fossil fuel industry succeeded. In the ensuing years, the industry not only won over conservatives on the matter of climate change, but they also played into the media trope of balance and fairness.

Since those early days of climate coverage, scientists have grown more certain that there is unassailable evidence that human behavior is making a dire contribution to the planet’s rising temperatures. Yet it’s as if journalists are stuck in time, presenting the science as something still under debate. A notion to be evaluated, tossed around. As scientific certainty grows—97 percent of qualified scientists agree that the planet is warming and humans are the cause—today’s reporters, editors, and producers should cease with the false conceit about a debate and instead drill deeply into the political terrain.

Many scientists and academics say that journalists might focus their inquiries on the sources of scientific misinformation, namely the fossil fuel-funded and ideologically driven think tanks opposed to regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Journalists might also do more to address solutions to climate change in hopes of dampening American anxieties about the economic consequences of facing the issue.

In the ensuing years, the industry not only won over conservatives on the matter of climate change, but they also played into the media trope of balance and fairness.

In 1992, just four years after Hansen’s alarming testimony, *investigative journalist Ross Gelbspan retired from journalism and begun penning political fiction. Gelbspan had undertaken sweeping exposes of the Soviet Union and the Reagan Administration’s “dirty wars” in Central America, while at the Philadelphia Bulletin, Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. So when a Harvard Medical School doctor named Paul Epstein approached him with research linking climate change and the spread of infectious disease, Gelbspan’s reporter instincts once again took over.

The duo wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post’s Outlook section, “Should we fear a global plague?” highlighting Epstein’s research and warning of the migration of many diseases due to a warming world. Gelbspan was about to launch a book-length investigation, but soon after the op-ed was published, he began getting letters from Post readers questioning whether he overstated his case. The rising temperatures were temporary, they said, and part of a natural cycle.

The letters gave him pause. Some of them recommended that he consult the works of climate change skeptics like Richard Lintzen, Fred Singer, Pat Michaels, and Bob Balling. Their arguments were persuasive, and Gelbspan started feeling relief that humanity was not on the precipice of climate catastrophe.

Gelbspan planned to drop the book project. But he had scheduled interviews with several leading climate scientists and felt obliged to honor his commitments. When he spoke with one of them, the scientist dispelled Gelbspan of the idea that the so-called skeptics stood on sound ground. They cherry-picked data, the scientist said, and sowed doubt when in fact virtually all scientists were certain about climate change dynamics.

But one thing perplexed the scientist with whom Gelbspan spoke: who was funding these scientists challenging climate change? They weren’t receiving grants from the usual foundation sources, like the National Science Foundation. Many of the skeptics were legitimate scientists, albeit not specialists in fields related to climatology, but their funding was a black box.

Whoever they were, the skeptics were having an effect. Journalists sought them out in order to provide an opposing view to scientists like Hansen and Roger Revelle, who wrote the 1965 report for the Johnson Administration. Again and again climate change deniers like Lintzen and Singer would appear in media reports, saying the science wasn’t settled or the warming trend was due to a natural cycle.

Gelbspan, by now, was back on the story. He heard that the Minnesota legislature was holding a hearing on the environmental impacts of coal burning. Not only would acid rain, smog, and other types of air pollution be discussed, but a state legislator had requested that global warming be added to the list of impacts to study.

“I had a long talk with the assistant attorney general who was conducting the hearings,” says Gelbspan. “She told me that the coal industry was flying in four skeptics to testify. And this is a really obscure hearing—at the Public Utility Commission or something—and I said, well, how about you compel them to disclose their funding sources.”

On the day of the hearing, the retired investigative reporter says that he was the only journalist in the room.

“Lo and behold, under oath, they provide their list of funding and it’s all coming from the fossil fuel industry,” Gelbspan told me later. “And I say, holy shit, this is what’s going on here.”

What came next was what Penn State University climate scientist Michael E. Mann calls the climate wars, and a principal line of attack was to question the work of reporters who portrayed climate change as settled fact.

It was the perfect line of attack, because it played into a core maxim of journalism: to be fair and balanced in presenting the contours of a debate. Yet to do that, reporters were frequently using industry-backed spokespeople as key sources about the actual science—not about a debate over potential policy solutions, of which industry should fairly be a part. Yet since policy solutions to climate change could severely choke profits, what better way to push back than to question the underlying science?

What McKibben considered accurate coverage of climate change in the late 1980s—reporters covering the science, not the politics—was in Gelbspan’s estimation a major, structural failure on the part of journalists in the 1990s.

It began with who was assigned to cover the subject. “It was only science writers that were covering this stuff and they were not the types to follow the money,” Gelbspan says.

Climate change doubters in those years were taking a page from the fight against the regulation of tobacco products, urging newspapers and radio and television networks to provide “balance” in their reporting of the science. Gelbspan was among the first to understand the folly of their claims. But journalists of lesser mettle were easily fooled or simply too caught up in the quotidian pressures of meeting deadlines. In this way, the denialist community successfully drove a wedge between scientists and reporters.

In Merchants of Doubt, historians Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes trace this history of industry-funded and ideologically driven deception from tobacco, acid rain, the ozone hole, and through to contemporary fights about climate change.

“Tobacco was the first big, systematic denialist campaign,” says Oreskes. “The obvious lesson for journalists is to know that this exists, that it depends on appealing to journalistic virtues of balance and objectivity.” But, she adds, “It leads journalists into a swamp.”

The swamp, in other words, was produced by feigning ignorance toward the accumulating science. There were elements of uncertainty in some areas—about the links between climate change and some extreme weather events, for example. But to say a scientific debate exists about whether temperatures are warming, or that humans are causing it, is to baldly ignore the facts.

With each passing report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, scientists stated with increasing certainty the link between human-generated greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. The panel’s first assessment report, published in 1990 stated: “Emissions resulting from human activities are substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases,” and those gases “enhance the greenhouse effect, resulting on average in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface.” Its second report, released in 1995, warned of “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” This past September the IPCC released its fifth assessment report, which says: “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of observed warming since 1950.”

In 2009 came a fact that would be oft-repeated—that 97 percent of scientists with expertise on climate and atmosphere believed in a link between human-generated greenhouse gases and global warming. That’s a level of consensus only slightly below that of the existence of gravity and equivalent to scientific evidence linking tobacco use and cancer.

Given this level of confidence, says Oreskes, the goal of journalists should have been accuracy rather than balance. Journalists, in other words, wouldn’t have provided “balance” to a debate on gravity, giving equal time to someone asserting that it doesn’t exist; why would they for climate change? As for the two or three percent of so-called skeptics, Oreskes says journalists should be evaluating the motives for their dissent, especially given the history of industry- and think tank-led disinformation campaigns.

Says Oreskes, “It is information that is necessary to judge the objectivity of those researchers and to highlight potential conflicts of interest that can bias research findings.”

it has been 26 years since Hansen sat before the Senate panel with his trove of scientific data. Yet journalists still stagger over their coverage of climate change. When the media industry was flush with revenue, newsrooms were well stocked with experienced, issue-specific reporters and editors. But since the early 2000s, shrinking staffs, the elimination of environmental desks, and narrower news holes has made reporting on climate change even more difficult. The industry has been corrupted not only by its inability to evaluate the political interests of deniers, but by the market forces bearing down on their own business.”

“You cannot look at the media’s coverage of climate change outside of the context of industry-wide decline,” says Bud Ward, a four-decade veteran of environmental reporting and editor of The Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media.

Whatever the factors that produce it, false balance remains. USA Today, for example, as a matter of policy requires that an editorial on a “controversial” topic be paired with an editorial arguing in opposition. In October, the paper editorialized on the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. In keeping with its policy of providing balance, it gave space to Joseph L. Bast, the head of the conservative Heartland Institute, which is funded by fossil fuel companies and foundations opposed to government regulation. Bast authored op-eds for several other newspapers, including The Washington Post and Bloomberg News.

Perhaps more harmful than distorting the science has been the phenomenon, particularly on the leading Sunday television talk shows, of completely ignoring the issue of climate science altogether.

In May 2013, Heidi Cullen, chief climatologist for Climate Central, which reports on and analyzes the science and impacts of climate change, appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation. It was the first time in five years, according to Media Matters for America, that a scientist had appeared on any of the Sunday talk shows to discuss climate change.

The Copenhagen climate conference, Superstorm Sandy, record high global temperatures, persistent US drought, record wildfires in Australia, and flooding in Europe were top stories during the early 21st century, among many other climate and weather-related events. Yet these influential shows failed to invite any scientific experts to explain what is—and what is not—understood when it comes to global warming, its connections to extreme weather events, and the influence of human activity on them, Media Matters found.

Instead, the Sunday morning shows ran debates between politicians, industry representatives, and opinion columnists who often went un-challenged when mischaracterizing the science to argue a particular political position.

Yet if the fossil fuel industry won the first round in their campaign to influence the media, environmentalists are moving to win the second. Among their weapons are a growing number of specialty websites, such as Climate Central, ClimateWire, The Daily Climate, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning website InsideClimate News, as well as Mother Jones. New entrants into the American media market, too, like The Guardian and Al Jazeera America, the Doha-based network’s US channel, have led the media in their forward-minded coverage of climate change.

Indeed Al Jazeera America, on its inaugural day, aired a 30-minute segment on climate change, which, according to Media Matters, accounted for nearly half of all broadcast coverage of the issue in 2012. When television news coverage of climate change is as anemic as it has been, it doesn’t take much to overtake a tired and confused competition.

The climate wars are also being played out among those who write checks to fund it. Conservative foundations donated just over $900 million annually between 2003 and 2012 to nonprofit organizations and think tanks that engage, at least in part, in efforts questioning climate change, according to a study by Drexel University Professor of Sociology and Environmental Scientist Robert J. Brulle. While much of that funding, in the post-Citizens United political era, is directed toward electoral campaigns and issue-based advertisement, influencing the media remains a central goal for these groups.

It is hard to gauge which side is winning, since comparable numbers for environmental group giving specifically to push climate change awareness are difficult to come by.

Money doesn’t ensure, however, that a group’s message is persuasive. The clearest indication that the media hasn’t done its job is the grave level of public understanding of climate change revealed in opinion polls, which has only gotten worse since the onset of the climate wars. In its latest annual environment survey, Gallup found that 42 percent of those polled believed that the media had overhyped the threat of global warming. Media institutions are but one influence on public opinion. Yet the poll results implicate media institutions’ failure to explain the issue accurately.

“The news media are reflecting the cowardice of the larger society in not looking reality in the eye and reporting the truth of our situation,” says Gelbspan. “It is a damning betrayal of the public trust.”

Says McKibben, “There’s no other way to say it other than that, over 25 years it’s been a massive failure of journalism to communicate the idea to the public that the most dangerous thing that ever happened in the world is in the process of happening.”

Gelbspan believes the path to improved coverage may be for journalists to examine more closely the impacts of climate change, whether economic losses due to more frequent, more intense extreme weather events or how climate change leads to more civil and political conflicts.

Many mainstream media organizations have undertaken deep examinations of the influence of fossil fuel- and conservative think tank-funded political networks, such as those of the Koch Brothers or ExxonMobil. In this way, political reporting and not that of the science writers has been more enterprising in tackling the nexus between these groups and the science coming from them.

Still, ample work remains. By now, we should have progressed to intense coverage of policy debates about how best to address climate change, not whether it exists. In this one case, balance has been the enemy of the truth.

Columbia Journalism School |

https://journalism.columbia.edu

Columbia University School of Journalism offers rigorous M.A., M.S., Ph.D. and dual degree programs taught by world-renowned faculty in New York City.

Missing: false ‎balance ‎CSJ

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/right-wing-media-breitbart-fox-bannon-carlson-hannity-coulter-trump.php

date?

no lnx

What if the right-wing media wins?

Conservative critics of the press want more than just a louder voice. They want The New York Times and The Washington Post to go away.

It was a sweltering July afternoon in the swamp, and a small group of well-dressed, conservative college students from across the country—the next generation of Megyn Kellys, George Wills, and Tucker Carlsons—was filing into an auditorium at the Heritage Foundation’s Washington, DC, headquarters. They had come to study at the feet of Breitbart News Washington editor Matt Boyle, a zealous prophet of the new right-wing media. Boyle’s sermon was not about how to break into the mainstream media and steer the national news agenda toward conservative aims—it was about the end days of journalism itself. And he was not about to skimp on the fire and brimstone.

“Journalistic integrity is dead,” he declared. “There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information.” Standing behind a mahogany podium in a baggy dark suit, Boyle preached with the confidence of a true believer. In a stuttering staccato, he condemned the nation’s preeminent news outlets as “corrupted institutions,” “built on a lie,” and a criminal “syndicate that needs to be dismantled.” Boyle and his compatriots were laboring to usher in an imminent—and glorious—journalistic apocalypse. “We envision a day when CNN is no longer in business. We envision a day when The New York Times closes its doors. I think that day is possible.”

Squint at the Trump era, and it’s easy to see a conservative media in crisis. Over the past 18 months, we have witnessed the fall of Bill O’Reilly, the ouster (and death) of Roger Ailes, prominent conservative outlets from Fox News to Breitbart to The Wall Street Journal op-ed page erupt in upheaval and infighting, Milo Yiannopoulos lose his book deal, and Tomi Lahren lose her job at The Blaze (only to land at Fox). Look closer, though, and you’ll see that much of that drama was simply a function of the outlets’ increased political power (and the heightened scrutiny that’s followed)—a bit of routine turbulence accompanying the unprecedented ascent of the right-wing media.

[ICYMI: You might’ve seen the Times‘s Weinstein story. But did you miss the bombshell published days after?

While Donald Trump’s rise may have, as Politico’s Eliana Johnson recently wrote, “scrambled the pecking order” on the right—elevating Breitbartesque populists over the conservative intellectuals at the Journal and The Weekly Standard—the conservative media complex as a whole is bigger, stronger, and more influential today than it’s ever been. And with so many of its most powerful members now pursuing a scorched-earth assault on America’s journalistic institutions, it’s worth considering what they hope it will look like once they’re done burning down our villages, desecrating our temples, and howling at our lamentations.

Boyle said his goal was simple: “The full destruction and elimination of the entire mainstream media.” Breitbart played up his speech on its homepage that day, but the remarks barely registered in broader media circles. The site and its staff have become known for this kind of bluster, and most journalists have taught themselves to tune it out. Maybe we ought to be paying closer attention.

THERE IS A LONG TRADITION in Republican politics of seeking to discredit journalism. During the 1964 presidential campaign, Barry Goldwater’s press secretary distributed gold pins to reporters that read “Eastern Liberal Press.” Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, in 1969 railed against the “closed fraternity of privileged men” who ran the national news broadcasts. Nixon’s presidency was ultimately felled by reporters, but the critique lived on.

In the decades since, charges of liberal bias (some of them valid, others less so) have practically become an official plank of the GOP platform. The subject has inspired scores of books, countless talk-radio rants, and the creation of an entire cable news empire whose slogan—“Fair and Balanced”—was coined as a condemnation of its competitors.

Crucially, though, for most of that period conservatives maintained a civic-minded rationale for their project. They said they believed in the importance of nonpartisan journalism; in the necessity of a strong, independent press that provided the citizenry with an accurate account of the day’s events. Ultimately, they claimed, they were practicing tough love—offering their criticisms in the spirit of reform.Bernard Goldberg—a CBS News veteran whose tell-all book Bias entered the conservative canon as soon as it was published in 2001—captured this sentiment during a segment on The O’Reilly Factor.“We all know that you can’t live in a free country without a free press,” Goldberg told host O’Reilly. “But you know what else? You can’t live in a free country for long without a fair press. We need a strong mainstream media. That’s why you and I criticize it.”

Of course, some of this stated concern for the Fourth Estate and its lack of objectivity has been disingenuous. But there was value even in the playacting.By paying lip service to the ideal of “fair and balanced” news, conservatives helped sustain the post-WWII consensus that our modern democracy works best with a robust nonpartisan press functioning as the common denominator.

It was Donald Trump who dropped this pretense.Rather than conceal his true meaning with earnest pleas for a fairer press, he fired off tweets casting the media as “enemy of the American people.” Rather than feign reverence for the First Amendment, he promised to “open up our libel laws” to make suing journalists easier. At campaign rallies, he would keep reporters confined to metal press pens, and lead his crowds in a ritualistic booing. As someone who covered dozens of those events, I always thought I could tell when he was going through the motions with his press-bashing, and when he really meant it. During particularly bad news cycles, his voice would take on a growling quality, and he’d punctuate his standard stump-speech line with an extra exclamation: “Absolute scum. Remember that. Scum. Scum. Totally dishonest people.”

Trump’s histrionics were always strategic. He was able to successfully undermine months of critical coverage and dutiful fact-checking by casting reporters as villains. Each time his campaign was in trouble, the candidate escalated the culture war on the press. By the end of the election, we were not just biased or corrupt—we were dangerous, conspiratorial, part of a shadowy globalist cabal. Just days after Trump was sworn into office, chief White House strategist Steve Bannon told The New York Times, “You’re the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party?.?.?.?.?The media’s the opposition party.”

Bannon’s first move after being dismissed from his White House posting was to huddle with the billionaire Republican donor Robert Mercer who has backed his right-wing populist media crusade. On the afternoon of his firing, he said in a statement to Joshua Green, author of Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency, “If there’s any confusion out there, let me clear it up: I’m leaving the White House and going to war for Trump against his opponents—on Capitol Hill, in the media and in corporate America.”

IT DOESN’T REQUIRE AN OVERLY ACTIVE IMAGINATION to picture the post-apocalyptic news landscape that so many conservatives seem to be working toward. Media fragmentation accelerates to warp speed. Agenda-driven publishers—be they professionally staffed websites or one-man YouTube channels—churn out narrowly tailored news for increasingly niche audiences. There’s still plenty of factual reporting to turn to when you want hurricane updates or celebrity news, and adversarial investigative journalism doesn’t quite go out of style. But it’s easier than ever for news consumers to ensconce themselves in hermetically sealed information bubbles and ignore revelations that challenge their worldviews. For most people, “news” ceases to function as a means of enlightenment, and becomes fodder for vitriolic political debates that play out endlessly on social media. (Like I said, it’s not hard to imagine.) Inevitably, the rich and powerful—those who can afford to buy and bankroll their own personal Pravdas—benefit most in this brave new world.

This is, of course, a worst-case scenario. But is it really so far-fetched? Already, many of the nation’s most important outlets—the publications and networks that comprise the core of American journalism—have seen their audience shrink and splinter; their credibility plummet among vast swathes of the public; and their financial futures turn bleak. If The New York Times and ABC News were to shut down or, more likely, dwindle into shells of their former selves, would they be replaced with new mega-outlets that share their resources, their reach, and their editorial values? It’s possible. But it seems just as likely that they wouldn’t be replaced at all.

“This whole idea of media objectivity is relatively new,” says Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor at large who founded and runs the right-wing website Daily Wire. Like other conservatives I talked to, he envisions a return to the media conventions of centuries past, when news was delivered largely by the organs of parties and ideological movements. “At the founding, it was a bunch of partisan press going after each other.” If Shapiro had his way, the news would be a polemical free-for-all and media outlets would give up any pretense of non-partisanship. He dismissed the Pulitzer-winning fact-check site PolitiFact as a “leftist outlet,” and generally rejected the idea that any news organizations should be held up as “grand arbiters of truth and falsity.” The very notion, he says, is “anti-democratic.”

“Basically, I think we ought to get away from drawing strict boundaries around ‘journalism,’” Shapiro told me. He pointed to James O’Keefe, a conservative activist who is famous for producing secretly recorded (and often selectively edited) videos that purport to expose the sins of academia, the media, and the government. “Is he an activist?” Shapiro asks. “Yes. Does he commit journalism? Yes. Is he a journalist? Well, it depends on whether he’s committing acts of journalism in that moment.”

Ann Coulter, the vociferously pro-Trump pundit and author, echoed these sentiments in our email exchange. She told me that virtually all news coverage of the president by the “elite” media—a group she says includes not just The Washington Post and NBC, but also many old-line conservative publications—has been dishonest, frivolous, and pack-like. “Chuck Todd agreeing with Jeff Flake about what a barbarian Trump is isn’t news!” Coulter says. “I guess what I’d like, in my ideal world, is that we all start arguing about issues and ideas.”

I asked her if there was any room in that vision for news outlets that play a neutral, referee-like role—contributing to the debate only by adding facts and debunking falsehoods. Coulter seemed uninterested in the question. The publications that have tried to serve that function, she contends, have become “too screechy and inaccurate,” and have rightly lost the public’s trust. “No serious person would trust either the NYT or WaPo’s ‘FACT CHECK’!”

[ICYMI: Former gossip columnist says there’s one fact about his past relationship with Trump that’s tough to admit

The concept of an obstinately objective press has been under assault in America for some time now, of course, and not just from the right. Critics like NYU’s Jay Rosen argue persuasively that news outlets do a disservice to their audiences when they coat their journalism in a sheen of artificial neutrality. Better to aim for transparency, the argument goes—to be honest about where you’re coming from, and to then strive for fairness and open-minded engagement. But there is a considerable difference between the proponents of this theory and those who cynically celebrate the “weaponization of information” and the rise of “alternative facts.”

The so-called marketplace of ideas only works when reality serves as a regulating force. For constructive debates to take place in a society like ours—and for national consensus to emerge on any given question—it’s essential we start from a broadly agreed-upon set of basic facts. Who will provide them if the mainstream media collapses into a melee of warring partisan publications?

LATE ONE AFTERNOON IN JULY, I met withMatthew Continetti, editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon, in a pizzeria on the ground floor of the Watergate—the DC office complex that stands today as a concrete brutalist monument to the most iconic journalistic triumph of the 20th century. Continetti is not a bomb-thrower by nature. He is polite and cerebral and meticulous about his diction—often pausing for several seconds to consider his words before answering a question. On the day we met, he had just come from George Washington University, where he teaches a class on the history of the intellectual conservative movement.

Continetti grew up in the middle-class suburbs of northern Virginia with parents whom he describes as not “particularly political.” His conversion to conservatism came at Columbia University, while studying Plato’s Republic during an undergrad class on political philosophy. It was around this same time that he decided to pursue journalism, writing articles for the student newspaper as well as for a conservative national magazine called Campus. Aspiring journalists who lean to the right often face a choice as they prepare to enter the industry: try to carve out a career in the mainstream press, or follow the well-trod path into conservative media? Continetti opted for the latter—working as anintern at National Review while he was attending Columbia, and becoming a star writer at The Weekly Standard after graduating. (In 2012, hemarried Anne Kristol, the daughter of Bill Kristol, the magazine’s founder.)

The site Continetti edits today contains a fair amount of trolling—a running series of Kate Upton clickbait; winking headlines like “Greatest Living President Is Also Fantastic Painter”—but it has also earned a reputation for real-deal journalism. Its reporters run down leads, work their sources, call for comment, and issue corrections when necessary. If a partisan press really is the future, we could do worse than the Free Beacon.

I hoped Continetti might have a more optimistic outlook on the world after the mainstream media’s demise. But as we spoke, he was unremittingly bearish on the prospect that any 21st-century outlet could win the trust of a broad, diverse cross-section of news consumers. “One of the reasons there’s no common denominator in media is there’s really no common denominator in American life,” he told me. “As a general rule, we are a divided society. We have very real disagreements about values, about what’s important.”[ --> choice of "facts"]

I couldn’t help but interject: Shouldn’t facts be the common denominator? I asked, painfully aware that I was exhibiting the kind of journalistic sanctimony that the Free Beacon regularly ridicules.

Continetti exhaled, patiently, and shook his head. “I think the problem you describe is unsolvable,” he told me. “People are going to believe what they want. It’s not my job to tell them what to believe. It’s my job to edit a site that provides new information and adds value every day. Certainly, there are many people, like Howard Dean, who say it’s ‘fake news.’ But OK, I’m not going to control what Howard Dean thinks. He has every right.”A smirk appeared on Continetti’s face. “And I don’t believe a word he says, either.”

IN MANY WAYS, Donald Trump was the perfect candidate to channel the conservative media—the talk radio id personified and plopped onto a debate stage. As someone whose status as a perpetually aggrieved media critic long predated his conversion to conservatism, Trump quickly discovered that rank-and-file Republican voters were an enthusiastic audience for his gripes about the press.[recycled newt debate riposte?] And as Trump worked to reinvent himself as a Republican political celebrity, he naturally took his cues from the popular right-wing media. His first major foray into conservative politics was as the world’s most famous “birther,” championing a conspiracy theory that was gaining steam on talk radio and right-wing blogs. Later, as a candidate, he punctuated his stump speeches with stories he’d read on Breitbartand parroted the talking points he’d picked up watching Fox & Friends.

Trump did face real opposition in the primaries from the conservative intelligentsia. Kristol and New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat were early and outspoken critics, while National Review published an entire anti-Trump issue in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. But those with the loudest megaphones—people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity—saw Trump’s affection for them and their tribe, and rewarded it by providing the kind of boosterism that Mitt Romney would have sold one of his sons for.

And so, when Trump won in 2016, it wasn’t just a victory for him and his campaign. It was a coup for the conservative media, whose destructionist attitude toward the mainstream press can now be found at virtually every level—from the hosts of Fox News, to the ascendant internet personalities of the alt-right. “Nothing is grander, nothing is more glorious, nothing is more satisfying, nothing is sweeter, nothing is more validating, nothing is better for America than the death of the mainstream media’s political power,” John Nolte crowed in the Daily Wire the day after the election.

The Gateway Pundit flatly declared, “The mainstream media is your enemy.” And Infowars captured the sentiment by featuring an editorial cartoon depicting right-wing media figures as asteroids hurtling toward earth where news-network dinosaurs await their “extinction.”

In a decidedly dystopian spin on service journalism, some in the conservative media have begun providing their audiences with how-to guides for finishing off the journalistic establishment. Limbaugh told his listeners they should stop consuming news from the mainstream press altogether. “I’ll let you know what they’re up to,” he assured them. “And as a bonus, I’ll nuke it!” Hannity urged his viewers to start targeting individual journalists—and their bosses—on social media. And the alt-right bloggerRoosh Valizadeh has called for a coordinated campaign of bullying aimed at reporters. “Make them appear as ‘uncool’ salarymen in the eyes of the public,” he wrote. “Mock their appearance, their mannerisms, and their weaknesses.”

It would be easy to dismiss all this as performative, and ultimately harmless, trolling. But if the Trump era has taught us anything, it should be that these elements of the conservative media are not to be underestimated. In 2016, they conquered the Republican Party. Now they’re coming for the press.

Mainstream’s right turn

Today’s right-wing media world didn’t surface overnight. Below, a timeline of its development.

—Pete Vernon

Magazine editor William F. Buckley, Jr. (Online Library of Law and Liberty)

1947

Henry Regnery founds conservative book and magazine company Regnery Publishing. William F. Buckley Jr. later advises him: “I would recommend that you state that in your opinion an objective reading of the facts tends to make one conservative and Christian; that therefore your firm is both objective and partisan in behalf of these values.”

Clarence Manion (State Archives of Florida)

1954

Clarence Manion begins the Manion Forum radio show, of which he bragged, “Every speaker over our network has been 100 percent Right Wing?.?.?.?.?You may rest assured, no Left Winger, no international Socialist, no One-Worlder, no Communist will ever be heard over the 110 stations of the Manion Forum network.”

1964

So frequently does Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign complain about bias in the coverage of his candidacy that his press secretary jovially hands out pins that read “Eastern Liberal [ELITE] Press” to the reporters on the campaign plane.

1969

Vice President Spiro Agnew gives a televised speech complaining about how President Richard Nixon’s Vietnam War policies are covered by the press. “Perhaps the place to start looking for a credibility gap is not in the offices of the Government in Washington,” he says, “but in the studios of the networks in New York.”

1973

Nixon supporters dismiss the Watergate scandal as a witch hunt by a liberal media. “Watergate,” says Senator Jesse Helms, “became the lever by which embittered liberal pundits have sought to reverse the 1972 conservative judgment of the people.”

1988

The Rush Limbaugh Show quickly becomes one of the country’s most popular syndicated radio programs. “In those days the mainstream liberals had a media monopoly,” Limbaugh later says. “Nobody did political talk, let alone conservative political talk.”

1996

Announcing the Fox News Channel, its chief executive Roger Ailes says the 24-hour news network “would like to restore objectivity where we find it lacking?.?.?.?.?We just expect to do fine, balanced journalism.”

2004

Dan Rather steps down as CBS Evening News anchor after memos in a CBS report alleging George W. Bush received preferential treatment while serving in the Texas Air National Guard are revealed by conservative bloggers as fakes.

2009

Andrew Breitbart announces that his eponymous website will launch a “Big Journalism” vertical [?] with the intention to “fight the mainstream media?.?.?.?who have repeatedly, and under the guise of objectivity and political neutrality, promoted a blatantly left-of-center, pro-Democratic Partyagenda.”

2016

Donald Trump makes attacks against journalists a hallmark of his presidential campaign. He bans a number of outlets from attending his rallies and events. Less than a month after taking office, Trump refers to the media in a tweet as “the enemy of the American People!”

[ICYMI: The first reporter to arrive at Vegas gunman’s house has covered the story in many ways–except one

McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He was previously a reporter for BuzzFeed News, where he covered two presidential campaigns, and before that he wrote for Newsweek. He is the author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party.

What if reporters covered the climate crisis like Edward R. Murrow covered the start of World War II?" That was the question from Bill Moyers as Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation launched a new program to increase coverage of climate change.
The Trump administration moved to silence the head of the CDC's climate and health program -- but he is fighting back.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse took to the Senate floor and called for better media coverage of the climate crisis: "I have noticed this trend so I’ve begun keeping an eye on the Sunday shows’ coverage this year. Each month I look at how many substantive segments on climate change each show runs. It’s not good. In April, for instance, there were only two substantive segments on climate change across all five shows. They have basically become Sunday morning political gossip columns."

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/beloit-college-erik-prince-free-speech-college-campuses.php

538 Pielke:

One of the dangerous things about purporting objectivity because your journalism uses data is that even data can be conveyed with prejudice. “In a perfect world the data would just speak for itself, but that’s never the case,” the economist Allison Schranger wrote at Quartz following FiveThirtyEight’s launch. “Interpreting and presenting data requires making judgments and possibly mistakes.” That’s why so many writers have been concerned about FiveThirtyEight’s climate writer, Roger Pielke, Jr, a University of Colorado professor, who ThinkProgress once called “the most debunked person in the science blogosphere, possibly the entire Web.”

Though Pielke has a deep pool of knowledge about climate change, as The Week has chronicled, he also has strong personal opinions and a history of using data to back them up against the larger scientific community. President Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, has “accused [Pielke] of selective quotation and obfuscation,” and though Pielke claims to believe in climate change, Foreign Policy has included him on its list of climate skeptics. (He also has a shaky history with data, having once included the results of the filmmaker Michael Mann when analyzing the inflation of news coverage of a study by the scientist Michael Mann.)

Pielke’s first post for the site covers the link between climate change and extreme weather—or lack thereof: “Disasters Cost More Than Ever—But Not Because of Climate Change.” In the post, he first shows the rising rate of global disaster losses, then adjusts the figure for the rise in global GDP—showing that global disaster losses have actually flatlined. “We’re seeing ever-larger losses simply because we have more to lose—when an earthquake or flood occurs, more stuff gets damaged,” writes Pielke. Which is an interesting point, but not relevant to climate change.

The shame is, there are plenty of subjects that could use a parsing from FiveThirtyEight: Silver could suss out the actual climate impact of shipping oil by rail, or give hard numbers on how decreased public research dollars effects disease funding—a subject the The New York Times specifically said was missing “[comprehensive] tracking [of] the magnitude and impact of private science.” Even a rigorous look at how to parse out acceptable health coverage would be welcome.

usrtk:

Jon Entine, a leading chemical industry PR operative who has written dozens of articles defending corporate interests, today attacked the Columbia University’s Journalism School, stating that it “smeared Exxon,” engaged in “advocacy journalism,” and hired “an activist” to run the Journalism School.

In response, consumer group U.S. Right to Know called on Entine to reveal in full detail his funding and ties to the industries he defends in his writing.

“Who is funding Jon Entine and the Genetic Literacy Project?” asked Gary Ruskin, co-director of U.S. Right to Know. “Will Jon Entine disclose his funders? If not, what is he hiding?”

TABLOID

http://nypost.com/2016/03/01/how-the-columbia-journalism-school-smeared-exxon/

When the Columbia Journalism School set up a project in 2014 to generate articles on energy and the environment, was its real agenda to exploit ExxonMobil’s reputation as a climate-change villain?

The fellowship project culminated last fall in an LA Times series that accused the world’s largest oil company of downplaying the risks of climate change. InsideClimateNews, an aggressive online site known for its doomsday environmentalism, posted a nearly identical article, tapping Columbia’s research.

The stories paint a dark picture of the oil-industry icon, charging it with a cover-up that echoes the tobacco industry’s denial of health problems from cigarettes.

“Exxon,” the authors say, “made a strategic decision . . . to publicly emphasize doubt and uncertainty regarding climate change science even as its internal research embraced the growing scientific consensus.”

Exxon, the series claimed, had known for years that climate change was real — but hid the science to keep revenues flowing.

The Columbia fellows drew blood. In New York, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman— citing the reports — announced a probe into whether Exxon misled shareholders. Just last week, state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli demanded the Securities and Exchange Commission force the company to provide “an annual assessment of the impact on its business of public climate change policies.”

In DC, too, some Democratic congressmen asked the Justice Department to launch a probe into a possible “conspiracy between Shell, ExxonMobil and potentially other companies in the fossil fuel industry.”

Yet the team’s approach appears to be biased and unprofessional. For one thing, it started with the preconceived belief that oil companies are malfeasant for not embracing costly, scientifically dubious amelioration policies.

Columbia’s swerve into advocacy journalism may have its roots in the 2013 appointment of Steve Coll as journalism-school dean. Coll is known for his polemic, “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and Power,” which led to his appointment. Months later, Columbia bestowed a Pulitzer on InsideClimateNews. Coll soon hatched the Energy and Environmental Reporting Project, partnering with the Exxon-loathing group.

He also recruited Susanne Rust, a decorated but controversial reporter known for journalism advocacy, most recently with California Watch. Columbia hid the source of the project’s funding: a number of ideologically oriented foundations.

In December, Exxon fired off a letter to Columbia President Lee Bollinger, noting that the fellows had “cherry-picked — and distorted — statements attributed to various company employees to wrongly suggest definitive conclusions about the risk of climate change were reached decades ago by company researchers.”

CJR itself questioned the project’s ethics: Schools are “increasingly producing professional journalism projects, often drawing funds from outside groups to help support the work,” wrote CJR. It challenged the “balance in what subjects get reported, as well as appropriate disclosure of the outside funders and their political leanings.”

The funders? A Who’s Who of anti-fossil-fuel groups: Energy Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Rockefeller Family Fund, Lorana Sullivan Foundation, Tellus Mater Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which also supports the J-school.

Is ExxonMobil a climate-denier — as the series insinuated? Not at all. The company has publicly acknowledged that human-induced climate change is real. In 2007 Chief Executive Rex Tillerson stated: “The risks to society and ecosystems from climate change could prove to be significant.”

But while consensus exists on warming, there is no consensus on how to address it. In a 2004 newspaper advertorial,Exxon said: “Scientific uncertainties continue to limit our ability to make objective, quantitative determinations regarding the human role in recent climate change or the degree and consequences of future change.”

That’s mainstream: Opinions are mixed as to whether humans can meaningfully slow climate trends, and whether diverting trillions is worth the trade-offs.

The Columbia project serves as a warning: A premier university hires an activist to run its J-school. It partners with an activist online Web site to target an energy company previously savaged by its new dean in his book. The effort is funded by foundations whose role as fossil-fuel critics was hidden from readers. In the end, the journalists themselves wind up playing defense.

The series is a finalist for Harvard’s Goldsmith award and is a favorite for a Columbia-awarded Pulitzer. Such prizes would tarnish those schools and the journalism profession that relies on them as ethical barometers.

Jon Entine, founder of the Genetic Literacy Project, is a senior fellow at the University of California-Davis.

As NY State Probes Exxon, Oil Giant Targets the Journalists Who Exposed Climate Change Cover-Up

By Amy Goodman [1] / Democracy Now! [2]

December 2, 2015

Oil giant ExxonMobil is under criminal investigation in New York over claims it lied to the public and investors about the risks of climate change. Now Exxon is fighting back against the journalists who exposed how it concealed its own findings dating back to the 1970s that fossil fuels cause global warming, alter the climate and melt the Arctic ice.

Students at Columbia Journalism School collaborated with The Los Angeles Times on two of the exposés. Exxon accused the students of producing inaccurate and misleading articles. In its complaint, Exxon also referred to the "numerous and productive relationships" Exxon Mobil has with Columbia; Exxon has donated nearly $220,000 to the school.

On Tuesday, Steve Coll, the dean of the Columbia journalism school, responded to Exxon’s critiques after an extensive review. Our guest Bill McKibben has been following the Exxon exposes closely. In October he was arrested after staging a one-man protest at a local Exxon station. He held a sign reading, "This pump temporarily closed because ExxonMobil lied about climate."

Below is an interview with McKibben, followed by a transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. As we turn right now to the oil giant Exxon Mobil. It’s under criminal investigation in New York over claims it lied to the public and investors about the risks of climate change. Now Exxon is fighting back against the journalists who exposed how Exxon concealed its own findings dating back to the 1970’s that fossil fuels cause global warming, alter the climate, and melt the Arctic ice. Students at Columbia Journalism School collaborated with The Los Angeles Times on two of the exposés. Exxon accused the students of producing inaccurate and misleading articles. In its complaint, Exxon also referred to the "numerous and productive relationships" Exxon Mobil has with Columbia. Exxon has donated nearly $220,000 to the school. On Tuesday, Steve Coll, the Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, responded to Exxon’s critique written to Columbia’s president after an extensive review. Coll wrote, "Your letter disputes the substance of the two articles in a number of respects, but consists largely of attacks on the project’s journalists. I have concluded that your allegations are unsupported by evidence. More than that, I have been troubled to discover you have made serious allegations of professional misconduct in your letter against members of the project even though you or your media relations colleagues possess email records showing your allegations are false," Coll wrote.

Well, our guest Bill McKibben, cofounder of 350.org. He was arrested after staging a one-man protest at his local Exxon station in Vermont. He held a sign reading, "This pump temporarily closed because ExxonMobil lied about climate." Bill McKibben, you are a journalist yourself. Talk about the significance of ExxonMobil writing this letter of complaint to the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, who then turned the letter over to Steve Coll, also a leading journalist, who did an investigation of Columbia Journalism School students.

BILL MCKIBBEN: So, Exxon is never very subtle and this was a particularly heavy-handed instance of it. Their letter to Columbia can only be described as thuggish. It carried every kind of implication about how they would do one thing or another to them if they did not get satisfaction. But I think they might think twice before they do it again. The letter that came back from Steve Coll at Columbia was a six page masterpiece of dissection. It sort of shows what happens when real reporters go up against PR people. It was remarkable, Amy.

These stories, I mean, this is just Exxon trying to kick up smoke around the edges. There’s no problem with the stories. They’re incredibly powerful and incredibly true, and so salient to where we sit today. If Exxon had told the truth about what it knew 25 years ago, we would not be needing to have COP21. We would have sometime around COP3 or four really got down to work as a planet. And this problem wouldn’t be solved yet, but we would not have wasted 25 years in funny debate.

AMY GOODMAN: And we did an extensive look at this on Democracy Now! on the investigation of both Inside Climate News, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalistic organization and The Los Angeles Times, which, of course, has won many Pulitzers. But the evidence that — they had top scientists. They were deeply concerned about this, doing very good work, and saw climate change as real. But then what happened?

BILL MCKIBBEN: Well, then they, instead of acting on their knowledge, they instead set up the architecture of denial and disinformation. There was a remarkable piece that came out, a study that came out in Nature, yesterday, documenting the fact that money from Exxon and the Koch brothers constituted the sort of epicenter of denial. This was one of those big data analyses that traced the links between thousands of different organizations and newsletters and front groups and they traced it back to Exxon. That’s why the Secretary of State, yesterday, John Kerry, in a pretty rare moment, in Rolling Stone really let loose on Exxon and said that it was — if these allegations were true, it was worse than the tobacco industry and a betrayal of everything it meant to be a responsible corporation.

AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of the New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launching a criminal probe into ExxonMobil?

BILL MCKIBBEN: Well, you can be sure that Exxon is taking it seriously because, yesterday, they hired one of the most expensive lawyers in the country, Theodore Wells, most recently famous for having written the Deflategate report about the New England patriots in last year’s football season. Theodore Wells, from Paul Weiss Rifkind in New York, is now Exxon’s — on retainer for Exxon to try and battle these allegations. But, good luck to them because the evidence, down there black and white, is pretty stunning. Remember, at the best, no one is saying — the best that anyone is saying that Exxon was merely reprehensible, not outright criminal. That is the best defense that anyone has mounted for them so far.

AMY GOODMAN: So we’re not talking about a civil probe, we’re talking about a criminal probe. This good land Exxon officials in jail?

BILL MCKIBBEN: Well, who knows? At the moment, they’re just subpoenaing documents. We’re still at the beginning stages of this. And of course, the great hope is that other attorney generals, Kamala Harris in California, for instance, will, we hope join in at some point and that the department of justice — 360,000 American’s have petitioned the Department of Justice, asking them to investigate Exxon.

AMY GOODMAN: And on the issue of ExxonMobil writing the letter to the president of Columbia University, in it mentioning the amount of money they have given to Columbia, do you see this as attack on freedom of the press?

BILL MCKIBBEN: Oh, I mean, who knows what precisely they had in mind, but Exxon has attacked the freedom of thought of an entire planet for 25 years. They knew the truth and they did it. They told people things that they knew not to be true. There is no more devastating attack on the freedom of thought than that.

http://www.alternet.org/print/environment/ny-state-probes-exxon-oil-giant-targets-journalists-who-exposed-climate-change-cover

http://www.alternet.org/environment/ny-state-probes-exxon-oil-giant-targets-journalists-who-exposed-climate-change-cover

http://ecowatch.com/2015/11/28/sources-funded-monsanto

Following a Columbia Journalism Review articleon whether science journalists should accept money from corporate interests and whether there is adequate disclosure of sources’ corporate ties and conflicts of interest, U.S. Right to Know reviewed recent articles to assess how often journalists and columnists quote academic sources without stating that they are funded by the agrichemical giant Monsanto.

Our review found 27 articles quoting (or authored by) university professors after they received Monsanto funding, but without disclosing that funding.

This is a collapse of journalistic standards. When reporters quote sources about food issues such as GMOs or organic food, readers deserve to know if the sources have been funded by Monsanto or have other conflicts of interest.

The principal effect of failing to reveal these conflicts of interest is to unfairly enhance the credibility of Monsanto-funded academics and their support of GMOs and criticism of organic food, while detracting from the credibility of consumer advocates.

Our review found that many top media outlets quoted either University of Florida Professor Kevin Folta or University of Illinois Professor Emeritus Bruce Chassy without disclosing that the professors received funding from Monsanto. According to documents published by the New York Times, Professor Folta received Monsanto funding in August 2014 and Professor Chassyin October 2011, if not before.

Many of these journalistic failures occurred at influential news outlets: newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune; science publications such as Nature, Science Insider and Discover; magazines such as the New Yorker, Wired and The Atlantic; as well as broadcast outlets like ABC and NPR.

Following is a list of news articles quoting (or authored by) Professors Folta and Chassy—after they received their Monsanto funding—but failing to disclose that they had received the Monsanto funding.

New York Times: “Taking on the Food Industry, One Blog Post at a Time.” By Courtney Rubin, March 13. (Also ran in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune).
New York Times: “Foes of Modified Corn Find Support in a Study.” By Andrew Pollack, Sept. 19, 2012.
Washington Post: “Kraft Mac & Cheese Just Got Duller. You Can Thank (Or Blame) ‘The Food Babe’.” By Michael E. Miller, April 21. (Also ran in the Chicago Tribune).
Washington Post: “Proof He’s the Science Guy: Bill Nye Is Changing His Mind About GMOs.” By Puneet Kollipara, March 3.
Nature: “GM-Crop Opponents Expand Probe Into Ties Between Scientists and Industry.” By Keith Kloor, Aug. 6.
NPR: “Is The Food Babe A Fearmonger? Scientists Are Speaking Out.” By Maria Godoy, Feb. 10.
New Yorker:“The Operator.” By Michael Specter, Feb. 4, 2013.
The Atlantic: “The Food Babe: Enemy of Chemicals.” By James Hamblin, Feb. 11.
Wired: “Anti-GMO Activist Seeks to Expose Scientists Emails with Big Ag.” By Alan Levinovitz, Feb. 23.
ABC News: “Scientists Developing Hypo-Allergenic Apples.” By Gillian Mohney, March 22, 2013.
Science Insider:“Agricultural Researchers Rattled by Demands for Documents from Group Opposed to GM Foods.” By Keith Kloor, Feb. 11.
Columbia Journalism Review: “Why Scientists Often Hate Records Requests.” By Anna Clark, Feb. 25.
Discover:“Open Letter to Bill Nye from a Plant Scientist.” By Keith Kloor, Nov. 10, 2014.
Discover: “How to Balance Transparency with Academic Freedom?“ By Keith Kloor, Feb. 27.
Discover:“Anti-GMO Group Seeks Emails from University Scientists.” By Keith Kloor, Feb. 11.
Forbes: “Zombie Retracted Séralini GMO Maize Rat Study Republished To Hostile Scientist Reactions.” By Jon Entine, June 24, 2014.
Forbes: “Did The New Yorker Botch Puff Piece On Frog Scientist Tyrone Hayes, Turning Rogue into Beleaguered Hero?“ By Jon Entine, March 10, 2014.
Forbes: “You Can Put Lipstick On A Pig (Study), But It Still Stinks.” By Bruce M. Chassy and Henry I. Miller, July 17, 2013.
Forbes:“Anti-GMO Scientist Gilles-Eric Seralini, Activist Jeffrey Smith Withdraw from Food Biotech Debate.” By Jon Entine, May 29, 2013.
Forbes: “Malpractice On Dr. Oz: Pop Health Expert Hosts Anti-GM Food Rant; Scientists Push Back.” By Jon Entine, Oct. 19, 2012.
Forbes: “Scientists Smell a Rat In Fraudulent Genetic Engineering Study.” By Henry I. Miller and Bruce Chassy, Sept. 25, 2012.
Forbes: “The Science of Things That Aren’t So.” By Bruce Chassy and Henry I. Miller, Feb. 22, 2012.
Des Moines Register: “Consumers Are Misled About Organic Safety.” By John Block, Oct. 10, 2014.
Gainesville Sun:“Genetically Modified Foods Face Hurdles.” By Jeff Schweers, June 29, 2014.
Peoria Journal Star:“Hybrid Crops That Used to Offer Resistance to Rootworm No Match for Mother Nature.” By Steve Tarter, June 21, 2014.
Gawker:“The ‘Food Babe’ Blogger Is Full of Shit.” By Yvette d’Entremont, April 6.
Louis Post-Dispatch: “California Labeling Fight May Raise Food Prices for All of Us.”By David Nicklaus, Aug. 19, 2012.

This is merely one example of two professors who were not identified as received funding from Monsanto and yet these two professors received major traction in the media as “independent” experts on GMOs and organics. The only reason the professors admitted to receiving Monsanto funding was due to emails uncovered by Freedom of Information Act requests filed by U.S. Right to Know, a consumer group.

How often does it happen that journalists present other academics funded by food or agrichemical companies as “independent” sources and without disclosing their corporate funding?

One remedy for this problem is that when journalists write about food, that they carefully ask their sources whether they have any conflicts of interest, where they get their funding from and whether they receive any funding from food or agrichemical companies like Monsanto or their PR front groups.

That, however, may not be enough. Professor Kevin Folta received Monsanto funding, yet repeatedly denied ties to or funding from Monsanto. Reporters—and readers—should be aware that such deceit by Monsanto-funded academics has recently occurred and be on their guard against it.

How the Media Fail to Explain the Basic Science That Proves Climate Change

By Laura Dattaro [1] / Columbia Journalism Review [2]

March 16, 2015

Two weeks ago, theNew York Times published an article [3] detailing the results of an investigation into Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, an aerospace engineer who’s published several papers questioning the link between human emissions of greenhouse gases and global warming. Soon, it was revealed, has received more than $1.2 million from the fossil fuel industry over the course of the last decade.

It’s a story with a lot of moving pieces. There’s the funding itself, and Soon’s failure to disclose it; there’s his affiliations with both Harvard and the Smithsonian, which appear [4] to have benefited from his questionable grants; there’s his published papers, and what to do with them; and there are questions about what all of this means for academia and the peer-review process.

But one piece that got lost is the piece that all of this is ostensibly about: science. Very few outlets — with the notable exception [5] of theWashington Post— took the time to explain what exactly Soon claims about climate change (that it’s caused by the sun), and how his claims fit in with accepted science (short answer: they don’t). Instead, most outlets focused on Soon’s funding, and his use of the word “deliverables” to refer to studies he had completed with that funding, as something close to proof that his research can’t be trusted.

While the source of a scientist’s funding is certainly relevant, particularly in the current political context in which industry interests fund entire institutions dedicated to denying climate science, it doesn’t supersede a close look by journalists at whether the scientist is actually correct. And some recent studies give hope that even reporters who may not have the expertise, or the time, to dig into the data on solar radiation and the sunspot cycle can still have an impact on public understanding of climate science.

In the great media universe, it would be great to have at least a few instances of dealing with the science. But I kind of think it’s unrealistic.

Last summer, climate communication researchers at George Mason University and Yale University published a commentary [6] urging the science community to reiterate the scientific consensus on climate change—that 97 percent of scientists support the conclusion that climate change is real, and humans are causing it—citing studies showing that exposing individuals to this message can increase their estimates of the scientific consensus by 10 to 20 percent. And a recent study [7] from Yale found that simply stating this fact can induce changes in beliefs about climate change and increase support for public action on the issue in study participants from both sides of the political aisle.

“In the mainstream media, there’s really not a lot of room for a full explication of the science,” said Elizabeth Bass, director of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Scienceand associate professor of journalism at Stony Brook University. “In the great media universe, it would be great to have at least a few instances of dealing with the science. But I kind of think it’s unrealistic.”

The Soon investigation, then, may have been a lost opportunity for some great science journalism, and a chance to rehash what the science community knows (and doesn’t) about climate change. And it’s not the first time this has happened.

In late 2013, for example, researchers at Drexel University attempted to trace [8] the sources of “dark money”—money that had been donated by industry interests to dubious “research” institutions and think tanks through organizations that obscure the original donors. That news released a wave of backlash from more conservative outlets, including a Forbes contributor piece [9] that claimed far more “dark money” went to fund “global warming alarmism.” Little of this coverage, on either side, mentioned any of the actual science being questioned.

“I think that’s very common,” Bass said. “Political reporters and government reporters far outnumber science reporters, and most of the time when science and public policy collide, or when science is clearly very important in public policy, it’s likely the government and political reporters covering it. They bring their own perspective to it.”

Industry funding is also an issue for the field of biomedical research, and the press who covers it. In February, British researchers leaped to the defense [10] of a top UK government health official after theBritish Medical Journal revealed [11] that she had received more than $2 million from companies like Coca-Cola, implying that her credibility on obesity policy had been compromised. Coverage from theGuardian’s health editor mentioned no scientific health studies, a critique the researchers were quick to lobby at the BMJ.

In areas of research where a scientist’s conclusions can shape decision making at the individual and policy levels, funding provides important context. But it’s not the whole story.

“If a doctor said that smoking is great for you and has no ill effects, and then you found out they were fully funded by Philip Morris, wouldn’t that make you a tad suspicious? And rightly so,” said Phil Plait, an astronomer and author of the Slate column Bad Astronomer. “But you have to be careful about overreach, and not going too far with it. Suspicious funding is not proof. In the end, the proof is in the claims.”

http://www.alternet.org/print/media/how-media-fail-explain-basic-science-proves-climate-change

Laura Dattaro is a freelance reporter in New York with a focus on the environment and an interest in all things science.

==

wiki

Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) is an American magazine for professional journalists published bimonthly by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 1961.

Its contents include news and media industry trends, analysis, professional ethics and stories behind news.

The chairman of the magazine is Victor Navasky, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and former editor and publisher of the politically progressive The Nation. According to Executive Editor Michael Hoyt, Navasky's role is "99% financial" and "he doesn't push anything editorially," adding that Navasky has "learned how to get a small magazine of ideas into the black, and he's trying to come up with some strategies for us."^[2]

In August 2007, Mike Hoyt, the CJR''s executive editor since 2003, said the CJR''s income in 2007 would exceed expenses by about $50,000, with estimates of a $40,000 surplus in 2008. Hoyt attributed the surpluses to a mix of some staff cuts, such as not replacing three editors who left, and fundraising increases. Donations to the CJR in the past three years have included about $1.25 million from a group of news veterans headed by former Philadelphia Inquirer executive editor Eugene Roberts.^[3]

As of mid-2007, the CJR had an eight-person staff, an annual budget of $2.3 million, and circulation of about 19,000, including 6,000 student subscriptions.^[3]

References

:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Liz Spayd named editor-in-chief of 'CJR'
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Graham Webster, "Victor Navasky Now Playing Key Role at 'CJR'", Editor & Publisher, July 15, 2005
^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Journalism_Review#cite_ref-E.26P082207_3-1) Joe Strupp, "AJR Facing Major Debt -- But CJR Says It's In The Black", Editor & Publisher, August 22, 2007

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/**2013**/05/8529901/tough-times-columbia-journalism-review-editor-departs-others-are-laid-#

in media, there are big fish and little fish. Which is why the appointment of Cyndi Stivers as editor-in-chief of AOL.com didn't create a lot of noise about what would happen to the publication she was leaving, the Columbia Journalism Review, of which she'd served as editor-in-chief for less than two years.

The magazine is an acknowledged authority on the journalism business. Its specialization notwithstanding, it's among the most important reads in the industry. And it's having a rough time right now.

As news of Stivers' hiring at the giant web portal spread within media circles on Thursday, CJR's longtime executive editor, Mike Hoyt, who'd run the editorial side of the magazine for years before Stivers was hired above him in late 2011, was in the process of being laid off, Capital has learned.

And he's not the only one: Justin Peters, CJR's editor-at-large, also was informed yesterday that he and Hoyt would be out of jobs as of the end of June, when Nick Lemannpasses the baton to his fellow :{New Yorker:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px none;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}: writer Steve Coll as dean of the Columbia Journalism School, which has published CJR since 1961. (Peters did not respond to emails seeking comment.)

media, there are big fish and little fish. Which is why the appointment of Cyndi Stivers as editor-in-chief of AOL.com didn't create a lot of noise about what would happen to the publication she was leaving, the Columbia Journalism Review, of which she'd served as editor-in-chief for less than two years.

The magazine is an acknowledged authority on the journalism business. Its specialization notwithstanding, it's among the most important reads in the industry. And it's having a rough time right now.

joe pompeo

posted orig http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/climate_change_denial_skeptic.php?page=all

Responding to the CJR’s ‘Attack of the Climate Denial Books’

by Russell Cook March 14, 2013

http://blog.heartland.org/2013/03/responding-to-the-cjrs-attack-of-the-climate-denial-books/

RedHotLies pix]

Yesterday I wrote the following letter to Cristine Russell in response to her March 12 article in the Columbia Journalism Review titled “Attack of the climate-denial books: Conservative think tanks fuel publishing boom that spreads misinformation.” I have yet to get a reply, but will share it if it ever arrives.

Ms Russell,

Just a few questions arising out of your article yesterday which are what any open-minded journalist or fair-minded ordinary citizen might ask:

What specific “misinformation” do conservative think-tanks spread?

How does it follow that such books are labeled “climate-denials” when they go to great length citing material, including peer-reviewed science journal-published papers, in telling how skeptic climate scientists claim the IPCC has not conclusively made its case that human-induced greenhouse gases are the primary driver of global warming? Why does that not merit the label “plausible skepticism”?

Why would Riley Dunlap make the statement about “… authors, in turn, are often treated as ‘climate experts’ who may be interviewed on television and radio and quoted by sympathetic columnists…” in the face of no less than the same thing happening with people such as Al Gore, PR man James Hoggan, ex-reporter Ross Gelbspan, and activists Bill McKibben, John Passacantando, Kert Davies and Phil Radford?

And, though I have many more questions, this last one: Although Dunlap’s work is said to be ” defining what he calls the ‘organized climate-denial machine’,” has he or any other sociologist or any investigative journalist, book author or anybody else ever actually proven the existence of it — namely through the showing of specific material (document scans, undercover video/audio transcripts, leaked emails, money-transfer receipts corresponding to instructions for skeptics to lie about specific science points, etc)?

As I suggested in the comment I placed at the end of your article, we have every appearance that people like Dunlap are “all show and no go” when it comes to the accusation of corruption lodged against skeptic climate scientists, which critically if not fatally impairs their analysis of why skeptics do what they do.

No need to trust me on my own viewpoint, what I urge you to do is exactly what I’ve done: Namely, corroborate the accusation that skeptic climate scientists are on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry to lie about the issue. To do that, you must look into its origins, peel back the layers of who repeats it from whom, and where the original people got their material from and whether the material meets standards you’d find in courtroom evidentiary hearings.

I’d offer you the proverbial $10,000 challenge that you cannot do so, if only I could raise that much money. However, imagine having to meet a much tougher challenge, accomplishing this task under an order from Columbia Journalism Review’s acting Dean (whoever that may be), Chairman Victor Navasky, Editor-in-Chief Cyndi Stivers, Science and Environmental Journalism Assistant Professor / Director Marguerite Holloway, Center for Investigative Journalism Director Sheila Coronel, or even Columbia University’s President Lee Bollinger.

What happens if you fail to meet that challenge?

If you findRed Hot Lies in an airport bookstore or online bookseller, don’t expect a juicy account of a political sex scandal cover-up. The book’s target is climate science and scientists. Its premise: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.

It is one of a growing number of climate-change-denial books in the US and abroad, most of which have “a strong link” to influential conservative think tanks, according to a new study by Riley E. Dunlap of Oklahoma State University and Peter J. Jacques of the University of Central Florida. Their analysis found that authors of nearly 90 percent of books from publishing houses (others were self-published) had ties to conservative think tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Marshall Institute.

The books help think tanks and others promote conservative causes, raise uncertainty about the threat of man-made greenhouse gas emissions, and downplay the need for reducing carbon emissions, Dunlap said in an interview. They are a perfect vehicle for the “top-down diffusion of climate-science denial from elites and conservative think tanks in this country to rank-and-file Republicans and Tea Party members,” he said.

In addition, the books help conservative think tanks in the US “spread the seeds of climate denial to other countries,” including the UK, Canada, and Australia, as well as a number of European nations, said Dunlap.

Climate skepticism books “are especially important for reaching the conservative movement’s core constituency, wider segments of the public, and critical sectors of society such as corporate, political and media leaders,” Dunlap and Jacques wrote in their paper, published online in February by the journal American Behavioral Scientist. “They are clearly a vital weapon in the conservative movement’s war on climate science, and one of the key means by which it diffuses climate change denial throughout American society and into other nations.”

The books “confer a sense of legitimacy on their authors and provide an effective tool for combating the findings of climate scientists that are published primarily in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals,” Dunlap and Jacques noted in the paper.

Dunlap said that climate skeptics’ books tend to recycle “zombie arguments that are disproven over and over and then pop up again. The books can make any points they want to,” without going through any of the scientific peer-review process that traditional scientific papers require.

Regardless of whether or not they have scientific credentials, the authors, in turn, are often treated as “climate experts” who may be interviewed on television and radio and quoted by sympathetic columnists, bloggers, and conservative politicians, said Dunlap. While they often preach to the converted and are sold by think tanks and conservative book clubs, the books may also be sold by online retailers and chain book stores, often positioned as science books alongside books by climate scientists. Dunlap said that several of the books have been bestsellers among climate change books on Amazon and are, not surprisingly, sold by the Conservative Book Club.

Dunlap has been a leader in sociological studies of climate change. His earlier work focused on defining what he calls the “organized climate-denial machine.” He received considerable media attention for a 2011 paper, with Aaron McCright, published in Global Environment Change, called “Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change among Conservative White Males in the United States.”

For the recent study, Dunlap and Jacques searched for English-language books that reject the strong scientific evidence that global warming is occurring, that human activities are the predominant cause, and that negative impacts to humans and natural systems may occur. They found 108 books published between 1982 (Carbon Dioxide: Friend or Foe) and 2010, half of them between 2005 and 2010, and 15 of them in 2010 alone.

The authors noted that there had been an “explosion” of books since 2007, following a string of high-profile events, including: Al Gore’s 2006 film Inconvenient Truth and its 2007 Academy Award; the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which found “unequivocal” evidence of global warming attributable to human activities); the 2009 United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen; and the push for climate legislation in the US Congress, which was defeated in 2010.

Overall, 72 percent of the 108 books had “a verifiable link” to a conservative think tank, and virtually all of them espoused conservative ideology, Dunlap and Jacques found. Thirty-three books were self-published (mostly between 2007 and 2009). About 40 percent of these books, often by authors with no scientific training, had links to think tanks, but they often relied heavily on other think-tank-affiliated books, according to Dunlap and Jacques.

While 66 of the 108 climate denial books came from American authors (61 percent), another 19 books (18 percent) came from the UK, followed by seven from Canada, and six from Australia. The rest came from nations such as Denmark, France, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Germany, New Zealand, and the Netherlands. Since 2000, four of every 10 denial books have come from authors outside the US—evidence, say Dunlap and Jacques, of “the success of the US conservative movement in helping diffuse denial internationally.”

They also credit a coterie of primarily American contrarian scientists (usually PhDs in natural science or physics with links to think tanks who have authored climate-denial books) with “planting and legitimizing climate-change denial within conservative circles.” These include Singer and Michaels, as well Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow, and Robert Nierenberg (the last three co-founded the conservative George C. Marshall Institute, and are now deceased).

Lawyer Christopher Horner, affiliated with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wrote Red Hot Lies in 2008 and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism) in 2007, both published by the conservative Regnery Publishing.

Dunlap and Jacques’s study will appear in the June issue of American Behavioral Scientist as part of a seven-part special package, edited by Dunlap, focused on “climate change skepticism and denial.” Although their analysis didn’t examine works published after 2010, Dunlap said that climate-denial books continue to be published and may become even more popular if the Obama administration follows up its climate-change rhetoric with new initiatives to control heat-trapping greenhouse-gas emissions.

Indeed, a list of books found on Amazon on Tuesday by searching for “climate change” or “global warming” included two 2012 climate-denial books near the top: Global Warming False Alarm, 2nd edition: The Bad Science Behind the United Nations’ Assertion that Man-made CO2 Causes Global Warming, by Ralph Alexander, an Australian with a PhD in physics who works as a “market analyst in environmentally friendly materials at a small Midwest consulting firm in the USA,” and The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, by James Inhofe, the Republican senator from Oklahoma—where Dunlap teaches.

See more at: http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/climate_change_denial_skeptic.php?page=all#sthash.bS7oVmiz.dpuf

If you find Red Hot Lies in an airport bookstore or online bookseller, don’t expect a juicy account of a political sex scandal cover-up. The book’s target is climate science and scientists. Its premise: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.

It is one of a growing number of climate-change-denial books in the US and abroad, most of which have “a strong link” to influential conservative think tanks, according to a new study by Riley E. Dunlap of Oklahoma State University and Peter J. Jacques of the University of Central Florida. Their analysis found that authors of nearly 90 percent of books from publishing houses (others were self-published) had ties to conservative think tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Marshall Institute.

Climate skepticism books “are especially important for reaching the conservative movement’s core constituency, wider segments of the public, and critical sectors of society such as corporate, political and media leaders,” Dunlap and Jacques wrote in their paper, published online in February by the journal American Behavioral Scientist. “They are clearly a vital weapon in the conservative movement’s war on climate science, and one of the key means by which it diffuses climate change denial throughout American society and into other nations.”

Dunlap has been a leader in sociological studies of climate change. His earlier work focused on defining what he calls the “organized climate-denial machine.” He received considerable media attention for a 2011 paper, with Aaron McCright, published in Global Environment Change, called “Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change among Conservative White Males in the United States.”

For the recent study, Dunlap and Jacques searched for English-language books that reject the strong scientific evidence that global warming is occurring, that human activities are the predominant cause, and that negative impacts to humans and natural systems may occur. They found 108 books published between 1982 (Carbon Dioxide: Friend or Foe) and 2010, half of them between 2005 and 2010, and 15 of them in 2010 alone.

The authors noted that there had been an “explosion” of books since 2007, following a string of high-profile events, including: Al Gore’s 2006 film Inconvenient Truth and its 2007 Academy Award; the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which found “unequivocal” evidence of global warming attributable to human activities); the 2009 United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen; and the push for climate legislation in the US Congress, which was defeated in 2010.

Lawyer Christopher Horner, affiliated with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wrote Red Hot Lies in 2008 and *The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism)* in 2007, both published by the conservative Regnery Publishing.

Dunlap and Jacques’s study will appear in the June issue of American Behavioral Scientist as part of a seven-part special package, edited by Dunlap, focused on “climate change skepticism and denial.” Although their analysis didn’t examine works published after 2010, Dunlap said that climate-denial books continue to be published and may become even more popular if the Obama administration follows up its climate-change rhetoric with new initiatives to control heat-trapping greenhouse-gas emissions.

Indeed, a list of books found on Amazon on Tuesday by searching for “climate change” or “global warming” included two 2012 climate-denial books near the top: *Global Warming False Alarm, 2nd edition: The Bad Science Behind the United Nations’ Assertion that Man-made CO2 Causes Global Warming*, by Ralph Alexander, an Australian with a PhD in physics who works as a “market analyst in environmentally friendly materials at a small Midwest consulting firm in the USA,” and *The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future*, by James Inhofe, the Republican senator from Oklahoma—where Dunlap teaches.

- See more at: http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/climate_change_denial_skeptic.php?page=all#sthash.bS7oVmiz.dpuf

Columbia Jrnlism Rev cjr csj

The distorting reality of 'false balance' in the media - The ...

Why pundits and journalists insist on false balance - Columbia ...

Columbia Journalism School |

How the Media Fail to Explain the Basic Science That Proves Climate Change

See also

References