Daily Mail
tabloid? owned by?
longtime origin of escalator: eg
WUHAN LAB BS
good info on gop corrupt eg wiles dtr? 10 26
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AN 10 26
Sources inside the White House say Trump and company are "panicking" as his administration masterminds jump ship for more lucrative jobs elsewhere, says the Daily Mail.
“Susie Wiles summoned her top advisers to her West Wing office just after 8.15 am Friday for a crisis meeting as a wave of stories about Trump allies cashing in on their access threatened to swamp the White House,” reports the Daily Mail, and the president's chief of staff was “panicked,” said a source familiar with the meeting. Wiles and the administration are still coming to grips with the political and media fallout from two of the president's top political lieutenants taking profitable paydays with foreign entities.
Additionally, Daily Mail said anxiety was building around reports about Wiles’ own daughters' pro-Russia foreign lobbying work, according to two sources familiar with the mood in the building.
The Daily Mail's sources relay that the White House was “blindsided last week” after reports that Chris LaCivita and James Blair, Trump's trusted political hands, had spent the October 4 weekend in the Balkans, advising a Putin-aligned government that was claiming election victory. Reports claim the men traveled to Republika Srpska, a self-governing part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. There they "consulted" on voting issues ahead of Sunday's election for the nationalist party.
Trump was infuriated at the news LaCivita and Blair — the leaders of Trump's political operation for the 2026 midterms — were out of the country “scoring handsome consulting fees” with just weeks to go before November and Republicans fighting for their lives to preserve House and Senate majorities.
According to the Daily Mail, White House sources say Wiles “first met with her policy right-hand Walker Barrett before assembling other top White House aides, including Megan Bauer, head of Cabinet Affairs, for the early-morning powwow.”
When contacted, White House spokespeople described the meeting as just the 'usual' Friday morning meeting, but an administration official said Trump was 'furious,' and the president has been desperately “working the phones, calling allies to ask how he should handle the embarrassing disclosure about LaCivita and Blair.”
The Daily Mail adds that the White House declined to describe the nature of the conversations she had with staff that Friday.
Days earlier, Trump claimed he saw no conflict with LaCivita and Blair’s off-site money-making, but sources say behind the scenes “that tenor had changed,” with the turmoil handing Democrats fresh ammunition just as early voting begins and the party’s grip on Congress appears slippery, Republican operatives told to the Daily Mail.
The Daily Mail says representatives for LaCivita, Blair was and Jared Kushner were contacted for comment, but failed to respond in time for the Wednesday article.
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REF 3
Scientist searching for a coronavirus cure exposes right-wing “disinformation campaign” that led to Trump cutting his funding
60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley: “There never was a $3.7 million U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab”
Written by Eric Kleefeld
:{Published 05/11/20
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Fox-Trump feedback loop has been a dangerous factor undermining the United States’ response to the crisis. Now, as CBS News’ *60 Minutes* documented on Sunday night, right-wing media misinformation about the coronavirus’s origins — the idea that it originated in an infectious disease research laboratory in Wuhan, China — has even resulted in the Trump administration shutting down funding for actual pandemic research.
CBS anchor Scott Pelley spotlighted infectious disease researcher Dr. Peter Daszak, head of the New York-based nonprofit medical organization EcoHealth Alliance, which just recently lost a $3.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As CBS noted, Daszak's “work is helping in the search for a COVID-19 cure.”
The broadcast traced the chain of events back to when Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said during an April 14 appearance on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight: “The NIH gives this $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They then advertise that they need coronavirus researchers. Following that, coronavirus erupts in Wuhan.”
:{Video
Citation
From the April 14, 2020, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight
Newsmax correspondent Emerald Robinson then asked President Donald Trump about the supposed grant during a White House briefing on April 17 — attributing this grant to actions by the Obama administration — to which Trump said he would end it “very quickly.”
But these allegations were untrue.
“There never was a $3.7 million U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab,” Pelley explained. The grant was actually to EcoHealth, of which about $100,000 per year went toward working with the Wuhan facility — and even that could only take place after careful review by the NIH.
:{Video
Citation
From the May 10, 2020, edition of CBS News’ 60 Minutes
PELLEY: His funding from the NIH, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, was killed, two weeks ago, by a political disinformation campaign targeting China's Wuhan Institute.
...
PELLEY: On April 14, Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz claimed China's Wuhan Institute had, quote, "birthed a monster." Gaetz is a vigorous defender of the president. He's been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for allegedly threatening a witness against Mr. Trump and he led a protest to delay impeachment testimony.
...
PELLEY: There never was a $3.7 million U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab. But, the falsehood spread like a virus, in the White House, and without verification, in the briefing room.
The specific claim that $3.7 million was sent to the Wuhan lab has been spread by a variety of sources, such as when the U.K.-based Daily Mail on April 11 mentioned “documents” it obtained that it said showed scientists in Wuhan had “experimented on bats as part of a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health”; the article featured comments from Gaetz regarding the Wuhan Institute.
And on April 26, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani tweeted:
PolitiFact rated the claim as “False,” noting, “The grant was made in 2014, and the amount that went to the lab was a bit under $600,000. The grant restriction did not apply to identifying naturally occurring viruses.”
In an interview on a New York talk radio show on April 26, Giuliani opened a new rhetorical front to pin the blame on another target: Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and a target of right-wing ire since the crisis began. Outlets such as The Washington Times, RedState, and Gateway Pundit all picked up on Giuliani’s false allegations attempting to tie Fauci to this supposed large grant of money to the lab.
Fauci has repeatedly dismissed the right-wing media’s conspiracy theories surrounding COVID-19, and in an article published last week in National Geographic, he reaffirmed not only that the virus was not manipulated artificially in a lab, but also dismissed the secondary conspiracy theory that it could have been discovered occurring naturally but then leaked from the facility in the course of other research work:
“If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” Fauci says. Based on the scientific evidence, he also doesn’t entertain an alternate theory‐that someone found the coronavirus in the wild, brought it to a lab, and then it accidentally escaped.
Fox News has played a key role in spreading these right-wing media conspiracy theories and other coronavirus misinformation throughout the pandemic.
Earlier in the crisis, Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) actively pushed the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was released from the Wuhan research facility. They and other voices on Fox News repeatedly cited a study from the respected medical journal The Lancet to allege that the virus did not come from the city’s wet market — and therefore it must have come from a laboratory — even as The Lancet itself has disavowed the very notion that right-wing media are trying to spin.
More recently, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said, “I personally believe it's entirely possible that they engineered the Wuhan virus.” And just last week, Fox host Tucker Carlson claimed that a multinational intelligence dossier “confirms much of what we've suspected” about the virus coming from the Wuhan facility. Intelligence professionals have refuted the fringe theory and the claim that the dossier even supported the idea amid this latest push from Fox and other Murdoch media outlets, such as The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, Australia.
Other right-wing media voices from outside Fox News have also pushed this theory:
- The Washington Times ran an article in late January, titled “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China's biowarfare program.” That article now contains a disclaimer at the top: *“Editor’s note (March 25, 2020): Since this story ran, scientists outside of China have had a chance to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They concluded it does not show signs of having been manufactured or purposefully manipulated in a lab, though the exact origin remains murky and experts debate whether it may have leaked from a Chinese lab that was studying it.”
- Steve Bannon, Trump’s former Chief White House Strategist, has spread the idea and given interviews to one of his financial benefactors, Chinese billionaire-in-exile Guo Wengui. At one point, however, Bannon interviewed an actual virologist who told him that idea was “a load of crap.”
- Right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who Trump recently awarded the Medal of Freedom, declared in February: “It probably is a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized. All superpower nations weaponize bioweapons. They experiment with them.”
- Sebastian Gorka, far-right political commentator and former deputy assistant to Trump, agreed on the April 27 edition of his radio show that “one of the most likely scenarios” is that China deliberately released the virus to the rest of the world in order to take down other countries’ economies.
- Sinclair Broadcasting host Eric Bolling, who was in regular communications with the White House about the pandemic back in March, has repeatedly asked about this theory in interviews with White House officials and members of Congress. In one example, he told the U.S. assistant secretary for health: “This virus feels to me that it was more engineered than simply someone eating a bat in China in a wet market and it jumping from animal to human.”
- One America News Network, a far-wing outlet repeatedly promoted by Trump himself, has been tying in the idea about the Wuhan lab together with other conspiracy theories about billionaire philanthropists Bill Gates and George Soros, the “deep state,” and population control.
ESCA RG 2
https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/republicans-fantasy/
in the real world, there are real problems that serious people are worried about: global pandemic, climate change, economic inequality, systematic racism, mass shootings, and gendered violence, just to name a few. The problem for Republicans, of course, is that they are, quite literally, on the wrong side of pretty much each of those issues, and spend their time either actively making problems worse or getting in the way of people who want to fix things. Outside of sociopaths, Fox News hosts, and people with "Pepe" memes in their Twitter profiles, however, few people want to look in the mirror and see a villain gazing back at them. So right-wing media, which has always been addicted to selling its audiences on imaginary threats and preposterous fairy tales of conservative victimhood, has only been escalating such nonsense in recent months as the Republican policy agenda has been increasingly exposed to be nonexistent.
If your "team" is on the side of the Capitol insurrectionists and Derek Chauvin, it's hard to suppress the haunting fear that you're the baddies. So Fox News is on hand to spoon out alluring fantasies that recast liberals as the bad guys and conservatives as the long-suffering heroes.Tucker Carlson — a Fox News host who clearly relishes being a cartoon villain (think: "Dan White Society") — coughed up an almost too-perfect sample of the form Monday night, when he encouraged his audience of millions to harass ordinary people minding their own business under the guise of "helping."
Using as cover the recent reports that much of outdoor masking is unnecessary to prevent the transmission of COVID-19, Carlson told his audience that people wearing masks outside are "the aggressors" and that "the next time you see someone in a mask on the sidewalk or on the bike path, do not hesitate" to get in their face and demand they remove the mask. Carlson claimed this can be done "politely but firmly," but of course, it's categorically impossible to "politely" boss other people around about choices that simply do not affect you. And no, his story about how masks "prevent intimacy and human contact" is not enough. Strangers on the street do not owe you "intimacy," despite what creeps who follow women around and demand smiles might wish to believe.
Carlson then escalated by asking his viewers to call the police when they see children wearing masks because it "should be illegal." [call cops and cps till they show] Of course, Carlson also knows full well how dangerous such nuisance calls (which are *actually* illegal) can be if the target is a person of color — and likely, he's counting on it, Derek Chauvin defender that he is.
Skipping a mask outside does, indeed, seem to be mostly harmless, which means that the common-sense response is to simply leave other people alone while you also do what you want. But conservatives want revenge because they've been made to wear masks where it is necessary. Carlson is only too happy to feed them a narrative that allows them to pretend to be heroes while continuing to be jerks for no good reason whatsoever.
Over the weekend, we saw another comically over-the-top example of right-wing fake victimhood narratives when a totally fake — and obviously fake — conspiracy theory about President Joe Biden imposing severe beef rations tore through the right-wing media and exploded on social media.
Jon Skolnik explained here at Salon how right-wing media distorted a study about reducing meat consumption to impact climate change, pretended it somehow was part of Biden's infrastructure plan and ran wild with it. But what was truly remarkable wasn't just that the folks at Fox News and other outlets deliberately misled the public with false claims that Biden planned to "limit" beef consumption to four pounds a year. It was how this lie managed to spread rapidly, infecting every corner of the country, in record time.
"It's tempting to dismiss this attack as too absurd to be believed," Dan Pfeiffer wrote in his Message Box newsletter, but warned that, "But too often, Democrats focus on the absurdity of the specifics and ignore the believability of the general impression."
Indeed, watching the "Biden's banning beef" lie spread out over social media, boosted by supposedly "apolitical" Instagram influencers and other such conduits, it was easy to see how this worked. Many people — possibly most — had wholly emotional reactions when they heard or read the lie, and were too focused on lashing out angrily to think critically about the story. So many reactions online were variations of "how dare you criticize me" and "fake meat tastes bad," instead of the more helpful "is this even true?"
The best right-wing B.S. works in this way, by activating people's pre-existing guilt and making them feel defensive. A lot of Americans, even on the right, already feel bad about how much beef they eat. It's not just because it's bad for the environment, but because they know it's bad for their health, and American discourse around food and health tends to be highly moralistic. The Biden beef lie works first by activating that sense of shame and then giving people a story that makes them feel better about themselves, about how they're actually the good guys here. They get so focused on trying to make their defensive feelings go away that they don't stop to search Snopesor Politifact and find out if it's even true.
Carlson is playing the same game with his mask nonsense.
Conservatives obviously have a lot of sublimated guilt over refusing to take the pandemic seriously and are therefore on a hair-trigger for defensive reactions. So they're ready to hear how someone else wearing a mask is a judgment on them, about how they're the "real" victims, and mask-wearers are the "real" bad guys. Truth and common sense are crowded out by these over-the-top emotional reactions, driven by their own — in many cases, completely earned — sense of shame.
As Pfeiffer notes, the only way to push back on nonsense like this is for ordinary people to confront those who are spreading it on social media. The problem is that these right-wing freakouts are fueled by conservatives feeling angry, ashamed, and judged — frankly often because they deserve to feel bad about their behavior. Unfortunately, that means that the smarter reactions are ones that turn the temperature down, not up. It can help a lot for interlocutors to focus on facts, instead of moral judgments about things like mask-wearing or beef-eating, and save the moral discussion for another time, when folks are in a less defensive mindset.
Either way, the amount of culture war debris that the right-wing media will be churning out is going to be immense over the next few years. Conservatives have a lot of guilt for their terrible behavior and beliefs, and therefore will be easy marks for any and every story that lets them believe they're the victims and not the victimizers. Right-wing media, as these examples show, is incredibly good at kicking up fake controversies that feed off those defensive feelings. Conservatives are addicted to these lies, and like most addicts, they need increasingly stronger stuff to get their fix. Be prepared.
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
- Can America escape the GOP's Ayn Rand death cult? - Alternet.org ›
- CPAC veers into neo-Nazi fantasy — was it deliberate? - Alternet.org ›
- Kevin McCarthy slammed for his 'delusional cult behavior' as he ... ›
ref
https://www.salon.com/2021/04/26/plant-based-beer-and-beef-bans-how-larry-kudlow-set-off-a-right-wing-anti-biden-smear-campaign/
fox Business Network host and former economic Trump adviser Larry Kudlow set off something of a right-wing smear campaign over the weekend when he went on a tirade against President Joe Biden's nonexistent plan to force "plant-based beer" upon the American public, calling Biden an "ideological zealot" intent on scrapping America's most cherished tradition of meat-eating.
In an interview on Thursday, Kudlow :{_{:{erroneously attacked:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:}_:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Biden for putting forth a climate plan that calls for the elimination of meat, eggs, and dairy from the American diet. "There's a study coming out of the University of Michigan which says that to meet the Biden Green New Deal targets, America has to…stop eating poultry and fish, seafood, eggs, dairy, and animal-based fats," he started. "Ok, got that? No burger on July 4. No steaks on the barbecue. I'm sure Middle America is just going to love that. Can you grill those Brussels sprouts?"
Kudlow, notably livid over the thought of grilling vegetables –– let alone foreign ones –– continued to rail against Biden's new climate action plan.
"You can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts and wave your American flag. Call it July 4th Green. Now, I'm making fun of this because I intend to make fun of it. This kind of thing is stupid. It comes from a bunch of ideological zealots who don't care one whit about America's well-being. Not one whit."
It should be noted that beer, generally made from water, grain, hops, and yeast, and barley malt, is already, in fact, plant-based. Furthermore, nothing in President Biden's plan so far calls for a prohibition on meat consumption. The original culprit of this misinformation, a Thursday:{_{:{Daily Mail article:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:}_:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: headlined "How Biden's climate plan could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH," speculated that Biden intends on "cutting red meat consumption by 90% and animal products by 50%."
The article, quickly feasted upon by Kudlow and amplified by Fox Business News without the slightest fact-check,was then picked up by Republicans in government, including Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who spread the lies to their voting bases.
"Joe Biden's climate plan includes cutting 90% of red meat from our diets by 2030. They want to limit us to about four pounds a year," :{_{:{tweeted:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:}_:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Boebert. "Why doesn't Joe stay out of my kitchen?"
"Not gonna happen in Texas!" Gov. Abbott :{_{:{tweeted:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:}_:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, with a screenshot of Kudlow's broadcast.
Greene, posting a picture of Biden eating a hamburger with others a table, :{_{:{echoed:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:}_:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:: "The Hamburglar. No burgers for thee, but just for me."
The misinformation also came into the good graces of Donald Trump Jr., who declared most proudly, "I'm pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday. That's going to be a hard NO from me."
On Saturday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman explained how Kudlow's remarks planted the seeds for a concerted misinformation campaign.
"If you read what Kudlow actually said,'' Krugman argued on Twitter, "he's cagey — doesn't say that Biden proposed this, only that some people say this is what would happen. But Fox viewers won't notice, which is the intention. This is what right-wing politics is down to. It's all false claims about evil liberals, which the base is expected to believe because it's primed to believe in liberal villainy. They're not even trying to engage on actual issues."
The White House has thus far released scant information about any formal plan to address emissions. According to the :{_{:{Washington Post:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:}_:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, on Thursday, the President made vague remarks about investing in "American infrastructure and American innovation" in order to build "a critical infrastructure to produce and deploy clean technology."
The right's outrage was widely mocked online by the left, who were quick to point out that Biden's apparent political aversion to meat has no factual or historical basis at all. On Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., took a jab at his conservative colleagues . "Excited to be watching the Oscars with an ice cold plant-based beer," he :{_{:{tweeted:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:}_:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, with a picture of himself holding a beer while watching the Oscars. "Thanks Joe Biden."
JON SKOLNIK
Jon Skolnik is a staff writer at Salon. His work has appeared in Current Affairs, The Baffler, AlterNet, and The New York Daily News.
MORE FROM JON SKOLNIK
aha? antifa blm merge
https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/fox-news-and-right-wing-media-circulate-seemingly-inauthentic-antifa-poster
pix of poster bring rocks ...
mma 1 23
protests emerged around the country following the release of police body camera footage of officers fatally beating Tyre Nichols, Fox News and other right-wing media sources promoted an “antifa poster” whose authenticity has not been proved. The poster supposedly called for protesters to “burn it all down” and bring rocks and heavy objects to riots in New York City.
The image was initially shared in a Daily Mail article, which called it “a shocking poster,” and on Twitter by user Rob O’Donnell, per disinformation researcher Caroline Orr.
On January 27, Fox News’ Jesse Watters hosted O’Donnell, who said he knows the poster was “put out by antifa” and it’s “calling for protests and riots at all police precincts across the city, to bring rocks, to bring pipes, to bring box cutters,” saying it’s “circulating in the underground of New York City.”
Video
In the next hour, Fox host Tucker Carlson showed the poster, using it to suggest there is “an organized militia encouraging organized violence across the United States of America.”
Carlson’s guest during the segment, former Detroit Police Chief James Craig, told Carlson the police should have “zero tolerance” for antifa protesters and chastised “Biden’s DOJ” for doing “absolutely nothing” about antifa, who he said are “threatening cities across this country.”
Carlson also suggested the poster was evidence of a “criminal conspiracy” by antifa.
Carlson’s commentary was circulated by right-wing blogs The Daily Caller and The Gateway Pundit, and FoxNews.com promoted his segment with Craig.
Video 1 27
With the poster on screen, Fox correspondent Christina Coleman saidon The Ingraham Anglethat “antifa put out this bulletin, calling for violence, even though Tyre's own family has called for peace.”
The poster was also picked up by other right-wing outlets.
On Newsmax, host Lidia Curanaj said “a police source” sent her “a flyer that showed that antifa was organizing throughout the country” but did not show it on screen. She speculated that “a lot of times these horrible incidents, like what happened to Tyre Nichols, are amplified and used by other organizations in order to achieve their political agenda.” Later on the network, Curanaj repeated that the protests must have been planned ahead of time, accused the protests of having “professional agitators,” and called on the media to “do their due diligence and actually investigate” the situation.
The poster also appeared on far-right website The Post Millennial, in an article titled “Antifa vows to 'burn it all down' in NYC following death of Tyre Nichols,” which cites the Daily Mail as having obtained the poster. Neo-Nazi collaborator and Twitter personality Jack Posobiec shared the article on Twitter.
Right-wing commentary siteTownhallshared O’Donnell’s tweet, including the image in a Friday night piece warning about “potential riots” in Memphis.
Newsmax’s Justine Brooke Murray shared the poster on Twitter, writing, “ANTIFA terrorists plan to burn down New York tonight. They’re blasting THIS out.”
Right-wing radio host David Webb on Twitter claimed the image showed that “violence is not a solution but it is a possibility.”
https://theenergymix.com/2017/02/10/u-s-scientists-counter-courtroom-attack-on-noaa-climate-science/
2/17
american scientists and scientific organizations are pushing back against a lawsuit demanding that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) release 8,000 pages of drafts, email discussions, and peer review critiques leading up to a 2015 study that debunked the notion of a “hiatus” in global warming between 1998 and 2012.
“Now more than ever, it is critical that we defend climate scientists and their research,” said Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (CSLDF), one of the organizations responding to the lawsuit by the conservative organization Judicial Watch. “Forcing the disclosure of scientists’ private emails is invasive, unnecessary, and hugely detrimental to the scientific method."
The Judicial Watch suit “was inspired by a Congressional subpoena from Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, who denies the science of global warming and the need to take action,” InsideClimate News reports. The accusations against NOAA had already been refuted, but were amped up last weekend by the Daily Mail, a UK tabloid that has since been :{disavowed:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:400"):}: by Wikipedia as an unreliable source.
On the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) blog, Director of Science & Policy Peter Frumhoff says the 2015 study, published in the journal Science, was one of several that refuted claims that the rate of global warming had slowed down or paused in recent decades. The Daily Mail “screed”, he said, came from David Rose, “a writer with a history of inaccurate reporting on climate science.”
The article was an example of a “very old strategy,” Frumhoff writes. “:{Repeated:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:400"):}: and :{amplified:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:400"):}: through the climate denial echo-chamber, Rose’s allegations of misconduct have now been taken up by Rep Lamar Smith (R-TX), Chairman of the House Science Space and Technology Committee. Smith, who has long used his perch to harass NOAA scientists, issued a press release reiterating these unsubstantiated claims and accusing [retired NOAA climate scientist Thomas] Karl and colleagues of manipulating data for political purposes.”
The amicus brief from the CSLDF, the UCS, and the American Meteorological Societyargues that “groups across the political spectrum have attempted to discredit scientific studies they dislike…by seeking to use the scientists’ emails and preliminary drafts against them.” Frumhoff warns that, “along with other recent high profile attacks on prominent climate scientists and science agencies, this may well be part of a larger political strategy to intimidate federal scientists, justify cuts in agency budgets, staffing and missions, weaken support for U.S. and international climate policies and, most fundamentally, erode public trust in science and evidence so central to a functioning democracy.”
InsideClimate reports that it’s unclear whether the Trump administration would defend its own researchers against the lawsuit. But Michael Halpern, deputy director of the UCS’ Center for Science and Democracy, said the new regime “might not want to set a precedent that all government information should be public.”
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/351945-rep-lamar-smith-cites-fake-news-in-fight-against-climate-science
Rep. Lamar Smith cites fake news in fight against climate science
BY BOB WARD, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 09/23/17
Rep. Lamar Smith (R- Texas), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology has worked to delegitimize an important study on climate change, establishing there has been no recent slowdown in climbing temperatures. Smith’s pursuit inadvertently required citing other work that is far less credible.
Earlier this year, Smith again challenged the findings of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report by Thomas Karl, citing a British newspaper article, alleging Karl and his colleagues had “rushed to publication, and [the report] was not free from political bias.”
The article has since been ruled to be inaccurate and misleading by an official regulator.
The Mail on Sunday was forced to publishan “adverse adjudication” on Sept. 17 admitting that a story by its reporter, David Rose, had breached the Editors’ Code of Practice of the UK**Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO**). The organization was established and is funded by a group of British newspapers, including The Mail on Sunday and its stablemate, theDaily Mail.
The article at fault was published in February as an expose of “how world leaders were duped over global warming,” focusing on Karl, alleging NOAA had “rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.”
The story was mainly based on a blog post and interview with John Bates, a former NOAA employee who was not involved in the study, but who was unhappy about the way in which its data had been archived.
The academic paper on ‘Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global warming hiatus,' which was published in the respectable journal ‘Science’ in June 2015, presented the results of a new analysis of oceanic and land surface temperatures, and concluded that they “do not support the notion of a ‘slowdown’ in the increase in global surface temperature.”
Rose alleged that Bates had “shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data”. But a seven-month investigation by IPSO, carried out in response to a formal complaint I submitted about inaccuracies in the article, concluded that these claims were untrue.
The adjudication states that IPSO’s Complaints Committee “decided that the newspaper’s claims that Bates’ testimony had provided “irrefutable evidence” that the paper had been based on “misleading, ‘unverified’ data”, leading — as the headline claimed — to world leaders being “duped” over global warming, and “convinced” to invest billions in climate change, went much further than the concerns which Dr. Bates had detailed in his blog or in the interview; they did not represent criticisms of the data collection process, but rather, were assertions of fact that the data had been demonstrated conclusively to be wrong and had a significant impact on the decision making of world leaders, with an additional implication this had been part of a wilful attempt to deceive”.
In addition, the adjudication points out that Rose’s article had included “significantly misleading statements” about the archiving of data used for the academic paper, and that it was accompanied by a graph that had created a “significantly misleading impression” of trends in global average temperature.
In an important caveat, the adjudication stresses that the Complaints Committee’s “central concern was whether the article had accurately reported Dr. Bates’ concerns”, and it did not assess whether Bates’s claims were true.
In fact, it became apparent very soon after the publication of Rose’s article that several of Bates’s allegations were false.
In particular, Bates’s post on the Climate Etc blog stated that “Tom Karl constantly had his ‘thumb on the scale’ — in the documentation, scientific choices, and release of datasets — in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy”.
But Bates backed away from his accusations of scientific fraud when challenged by other journalists, and he told a reporter at Associated Press that there had been “no data tampering, no data changing, nothing malicious” by Karl and his co-authors.
Most reputable media were skeptical of Rose’s false claims when they were published in February. However, a few outlets, such as The Times in the U.K. and Fox News, were fooled and erroneously reported the story without checking its veracity.
In addition, Science Committee Chairman Smith, was taken in by Rose’s article and cited it in a letter he wrote inFebruary to the Acting Administrator of NOAA, Mr Benjamin Friedman.
It is perhaps surprising that he and others were not more suspicious about Rose’s article given his track record of inaccurate and misleading reporting about climate change and his previous admission that he was an unwitting conduit for false information about weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
However, Smith seems to be carrying out a campaign against Karl and his co-authors since publication. The IPSO ruling should catch Smith’s attention. Smith should set the record straight by acknowledging that he cited a fake news article in his letter to Friedman.
Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
==
https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/bogus-daily-mail-story-spearheads-latest-right-wing-assault-climate-change-science
Bogus Daily Mail Story Spearheads Latest Right-Wing Assault On Climate Change Science
WRITTEN BY KEVIN KALHOEFER
PUBLISHED 02/07/17
A story by David Rose of the British tabloid Daily Mail falsely alleged that researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) “manipulated global warming data” in order to “dupe” world leaders into agreeing to provisions of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
In reality, the NOAA report’s finding that there was no slowdown in the rate of global warming has since been independently verified by other experts, and it’s the Daily Mailstory -- and the GOP politicians and right-wing media outlets like Breitbart News championing it -- that are distorting climate science to score political points.
Daily Mail Deceptively Attacked NOAA Climate Scientists, Distorted Their Research
Daily Mail: Scientists “Manipulated” Data To Exaggerate Global Warming And Influence World Leaders Ahead Of UN Climate Conference. In an article headlined “Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data,” Daily Mail writer David Rose asserted that NOAA “rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.” Rose was referring to a June 2015 NOAA report published in the journal Science, which examined whether there was a slowdown, or “hiatus,” in the upward trend of global surface temperatures since 1998, as previous studies had suggested.
The NOAA report found, “Warming has continued at a pace similar to that of the last half of the 20th century, and the slowdown was just an illusion.” As purported evidence of “manipulation” by the NOAA researchers, Rose cited an “exclusive interview” the Daily Mailconducted with former NOAA scientist John Bates, who accused the NOAA report’s lead author, Thomas Karl, of “insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximised warming and minimised documentation… in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming pause, rushed so that he could time publication to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.” *The Daily Mail*, [2/4/17; Sciencemagazine, 6/25/15]
Longtime Climate Contrarian Judith Curry Also Promoted Bates’ NOAA Accusations On Her Blog. The same day that Rose’s Daily Mailstory ran, Judith Curry, a former Georgia Institute of Technology climatologist and frequent critic of established climate science, provided Bates with space on her blog Climate Etc. to make his accusations against NOAA. Curry was also quoted in the Daily Mail:{ article as saying that the purported slowdown in global warming suggested that “computer models used to project future warming were ‘running too hot’.” :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*The Daily Mail*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[2/4/17:{; Climate Etc., }:2/4/17:{]}:
Daily Mail Claims Widely Panned By Climate Scientists
Berkeley EarthClimate Scientist Who Independently Verified NOAA’s Data: Daily Mail Accusations Are “So Wrong It’s Hard To Know Where To Start.”Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with the nonprofit Berkeley Earth Institute, wrote on Twitter that the Daily Mail’s claims about climate data are “so wrong it’s hard to know where to start,” pointing out that data from satellites, buoys, and Argo floats “all agree” with NOAA’s data. Hausfather, who was the lead author of a study that independently verified NOAA’s findings, expanded on the legitimacy of the NOAA report in a post for Carbon Brief:
I recently led a team of researchers that evaluated NOAA’s updates to their ocean temperature record. In a paper published last month in the journal Science Advances, we compared the old NOAA record and the new NOAA record to independent instrumentally homogenous records created from buoys, satellite radiometers, and Argo floats. Our results, as you can see in the chart below, show that the new NOAA record agrees quite well with all of these, while the old NOAA record shows much less warming.
[...]
The fact that the new NOAA record is effectively identical with records constructed only from higher quality instruments (buoys, satellite radiometers, and Argo floats) strongly suggests that NOAA got it right and that we have been underestimating ocean warming in recent years.
John Kennedy, a researcher at the UK’s Met Office in charge of their ocean temperature product, agrees that NOAA’s new record is probably the most accurate in the last two decades, remarking: “At a global scale, those adjustments really do seem to work and the ERSSTv4 adjustments [NOAA’s new record] work best of all.”
Hausfather also provided a point-by-point rebuttal of the Daily Mail article, noting that “Rose’s claim that NOAA’s results ‘can never be verified’ is patently incorrect,” Rose’s criticism of NOAA for adjusting buoy data to match ship data is “a bit of a red herring,” and a graph included in Rose’s article is “deeply misleading” and makes a “spurious” comparison of data sets with different baselines -- as NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt also observed.
[graf tet]
Hausfather concluded:
The “astonishing evidence” that David Rose purports to reveal in no way changes our understanding of modern warming or our best estimates of recent rates of warming. It does not in any way change the evidence that policymakers have at their disposal when deciding how to address the threats posed by climate change.
If anything, there is strong independent evidence that NOAA’s new record may be the most accurate one over the last two decades, at least for the two-thirds of the world covered in ocean. Zeke Hausfather Tweet, [2/4/17; Carbon Brief, 2/5/17; Gavin Schmidt Tweet, 2/4/17]
Colleague Of NOAA Report’s Authors: Daily MailSource “Was Not Involved In Any Aspect Of The Work.”In a post on the blog of the Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units, climate researcher Peter Thorn also rebutted the Daily Mail’s claims and noted that he had been involved in the build-up to the NOAA report, whereas the Daily Mail’s “whistle blower” had not been involved in any aspect of the report:
I worked for three and a bit years in the NOAA group responsible in the build-up to the Karl et al. paper (although I had left prior to that paper's preparation and publication). I have been involved in and am a co-author upon all relevant underlying papers to Karl et al., 2015.
The 'whistle blower' is John Bates who was not involved in any aspect of the work. NOAA's process is very stove-piped such that beyond seminars there is little dissemination of information across groups. John Bates never participated in any of the numerous technical meetings on the land or marine data I have participated in at NOAA NCEI either in person or remotely. This shows in his reputed (I am taking the journalist at their word that these are directly attributable quotes) mis-representation of the processes that actually occurred. Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units blog, [2/5/17]
Current and Former NOAA And NASA Officials Issued Harsh Rebuttals To Daily Mail. Climate Nexus compiled reaction to Rose’s Daily Mailarticle from several past and present officials with NOAA and NASA, including:
- James Hansen, former Director of NASA-GISS: “This is another case of making a mountain out of an anthill, while not telling the public that it is an anthill. The misimpression, that there might be a substantial flaw in climate change analyses, was predictable and surely was realized and even encouraged by those who brought forth this attack. The only censure should be on the heads of those who pretend that there is some significant new revelation and those who aid in the promulgation of this falsehood.”
- Rt. Rear Admiral David Titley, former NOAA chief operating officer: “In summary, the Mail on Sunday has found a disgruntled ex-NOAA employee and is using him to construct alternative facts about the climate. Unfortunately for all of us, the air will keep warming, the seas will keep rising, and the ice will keep melting, regardless of the Daily Mail's fanciful claims and accusations. The real atmosphere is impervious to alternative facts.”
- Jane Lubchenco, former NOAA administrator:“These are sad, old accusations that have been definitively disproven. The accusations are a blatant attempt to sow confusion and doubt with the goal of distracting folks and undermining the global momentum to reduce carbon emissions. ... Definitive studies by other authors have independently and conclusively verified Karl et al.’s findings. I know that NOAA has robust scientific checks and balances. Its scientists are widely recognized as outstanding and its high standards and procedures ensure that its products are rigorous and of the highest quality. Moreover, there is a refreshing openness to multiple points of view and possible interpretations, but in the end, conclusions are based on data, rigorous analysis, and are subject to peer-review.” Climate Nexus, accessed [2/6/17]
Editor Of ScienceJournal Disputed Rose’s Claim That NOAA Report Was “Rushed”
ScienceEditor Jeremy Berg: “Any Suggestion That The Review Of This Paper Was ‘Rushed’ Is Baseless And Without Merit.”Climate Nexus also published reaction from Scienceeditor Jeremy Berg, who rebutted Rose’s claim that the NOAA report was “rushed” to influence the United Nations climate conference in Paris:
With regard to the “rush” to publish, as of 2013, the median time from submission to online publication by Science was 109 days, or less than four months. The article by Karl et al. underwent handling and review for almost six months. Any suggestion that the review of this paper was “rushed” is baseless and without merit. Science stands behind its handling of this paper, which underwent particularly rigorous peer review. Climate Nexus, accessed [2/6/17]
Daily Mail Story Echoed House Science Committee Chairman’s Baseless Attacks On NOAA, And It Came Just Days Before Committee Hearing On The EPA’s Use Of Science
Republican House Committee Chairman Requested NOAA Scientists' Internal Communications, Baselessly Claimed NOAA Inappropriately Altered Data.On October 13, 2015, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, issued a subpoena requesting internal communications related to the NOAA study.
On October 28, the journal Nature:{ reported that NOAA had refused to comply with the subpoena, arguing that the agency had already provided Smith's committee with the publicly available data behind the study, but that releasing scientists' internal communications would violate the “confidentiality” that is “essential to frank discourse among scientists.” In response, Smith baselessly accused NOAA of “alter[ing] the data to get the results they needed.” :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*Media Matters,*[11/3/15:{]}:
House Science Committee Issued Press Release Promoting Daily MailAllegations Of Misconduct. Ahead of a February 7 hearing that it will hold on the EPA’s use of scientific data, the House Science Committee issued a press release in which Smith praised Bates, the former NOAA official cited in the Daily Mailstory, for “courageously stepping forward to tell the truth about NOAA’s senior officials playing fast and loose with the data in order to meet a politically predetermined conclusion.”:{ Committee on Science, Space, & Technology, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[2/5/17:{; hearing schedule accessed }:2/6/17:{]}:
Conservative Group Judicial Watch Also Filed Suit Against NOAA Seeking Communications Tied To Report. InsideClimate News reported that the conservative organization Judicial Watch “has sought to force the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to release 8,000 pages of researchers' communications” about the June 2015 report.
InsideClimate News :{added, “The anxiety of climate scientists because of the NOAA litigation has intensified since the start of the Trump administration. Charges against NOAA were revived this weekend in the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, and echoed by conservative media (followed by several refutations).” InsideClimate News, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[2/6/17:{]}:
Conservative Media Promoted Daily Mail’s Bogus Claims, Urged Trump To Fire “Fake Experts At NASA And NOAA”
Conservative Media Outlets Promoted Bogus Daily MailStory. Shortly after the publication of the Daily Mail story, several conservative media outlets promoted the story on their websites or social media, including:
- Breitbart News: “Whistle-Blower: ‘Global Warming’ Data Manipulated Before Paris Conference” Breitbart, [2/5/17];
- Breitbart’s James Delingpole: “NOAA Scandal Gives Trump The Perfect Excuse To Drain The Climate Swamp” Breitbart, [2/5/17];
- Drudge Report: “World leaders duped by manipulated global warming data…” Twitter.com, [2/6/17];
- RushLimbaugh.com: “Another Huge Global Warming Data Scandal” RushLimbaugh.com, [2/6/17];
- The Daily Caller: “Whistleblower: NOAA Scientists Manipulated Temperature Data To Make Global Warming Seem Worse” The Daily Caller, [2/5/17];
- The Washington Times: “Climate Change Whistleblower Alleges NOAA Manipulated Data To Hide Global Warming ‘Pause’” *The Washington Times*, [2/5/17]; and
- Blasting News: “Report: New Climategate brewing at NOAA” Blasting News, [2/5/17]
Daily Mail Journalist David Rose Has Long History Of Publishing Climate Denial, Incorrect Statements On Climate Science
Daily Mail’sDavid Rose Has Frequently Misrepresented Climate Science. As The Guardian’s John Abraham noted, David Rose, the author of the Daily Mail story, “has a history of denying the well-established science of climate change” and “making incorrect climate change statements.”Indeed, as recently as November, Rose engaged in egregious cherry-picking to assert that global average temperatures over land had experienced the “biggest and steepest fall on record.” And in 2013, Media Mattersdubbed the Daily Mailthe “climate change misinformer of the year,” in large part due to Rose’s distortions and outright falsehoods.:{ :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*The Guardian,*:{2/5/17:(style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-attachment:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.15s;transition-timing-function:ease-in-out;transition-property:box-shadow;box-shadow:rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset"):}::{; :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*Media Matters,*[12/1/16:{; }:12/30/13:{]}:
==
Climategate 2?
also GUK
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David Rose's alternative reality in the Daily Mail - Variable ...
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Missing: karl | Must include:karl
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3743316/Yachting-enemy-Ivanka-Trump-Jared-Kushner-jet-ski-Croatia-Democratic-Hollywood-billionaire-David-Geffen-s-200m-boat.html
hmmn tabloid?
Sunday, Nov 3rd 2019 1PM 75°F 4PM 75°F 5-Day Forecast
Yachting with the enemy: Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner take the jet skis out and relax on Democratic Hollywood billionaire David Geffen's $200m mega-yacht off the coast of Croatia
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were spotted jet skiing off the coast of Croatia on Friday
The pair are vacationing on the Rising Sun, the $200million yacht belonging to billionaire Hollywood executive David Geffen
Geffen is close friends with President Barack Obama and donated to both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary
He called Hillary 'an extraordinary, smart, accomplished woman' in a 2014 interview, and said he would 'absolutely' support her run for president
Brian Grazer was also on the trip with his new wife Veronica and Ivanka's good friend Wendi Deng
Geffen has also hosted some of the Democratic party's biggest supporters on the yacht, including Oprah Winfrey, Bob Iger, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jimmy Iovine, Bruce Springsteen and Rita Wilson
By CHRIS SPARGO FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
==
Jones blamed a terror attack on Muslims; it was inspired by one of his regular guests
On June 19, 2017, a van plowed into a group of people leaving a mosque in London. One person was killed and many more were injured. Immediately as news of this attack broke, Infowars' Alex Jones and Mike Cernovich blamed Muslims. The driver is now on trial, where he admitted that, in addition to people outside the mosque, he hoped to also kill the mayor of London Sadiq Khan, and the head of the British Labor Party, Jeremy Corbyn. It also came out in the trial that the driver was radicalized by a frequent guest of Jones, Tommy Robinson. Robinson is the head of an anti-Muslim hate group in the U.K. called "the English Defence League." In an appearance with Jones just 13 days before the London attack, Robinson said the time was coming for English men to take matters into their own hands.
More: It's not just Jones. There are deep connections between Robinson and right-wing media. Robinson is an employee at Rebel Media, a Canadian "alt-right" website which has published things like "Ten Things I Hate About Jews." Rebel Media just hired Sebastian Gorka, former top aide to Donald Trump and current Fox News contributor (who also has apparent connections to a Hungarian Nazi-allied group). Rebel Media also recently hired Katie Hopkins, a former Daily Mail columnist who during an appearance on Fox News called for putting Muslims in internment camps.
==
Madison Malone Kircher on how Wikipedia has banned the Daily Mail,
==
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/02/daily_mail_new_york_times_how_the_british_tabloid_became_the_world_s_most_popular_online_newspaper_.html
==
The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market[2][3] tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust.[4]
First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun.[5] Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982. Scottish and Irish editions of the daily paper were launched in 1947 and 2006 respectively. The Daily Mail was Britain's first daily newspaper aimed at the newly-literate "lower-middle class market resulting from mass education, combining a low retail price with plenty of competitions, prizes and promotional gimmicks",[6]and was the first British paper to sell a million copies a day.[7]
It was at the outset a newspaper for women, the first to provide features especially for them,[8][9] and as of the second-half of 2013 had a 54.77% female readership,[1] the only British newspaper whose female readers constitute more than 50% of its demographic.[10][11]
It had an average daily circulation of 1,708,006 copies in March 2014.[1] Between July and December 2013 it had an average daily readership of approximately 3.951 million, of whom approximately 2.503 million were in the ABC1 demographic and 1.448 million in the C2DE demographic.[12] It has over 100 million unique visitors per month to its website.[13]
Contents
Overview
The Mail was originally a broadsheet but switched to a compact format[14] on 3 May 1971, the 75th anniversary of its founding. On this date it also absorbed the Daily Sketch, which had been published as a tabloid by the same company. The publisher of the Mail, the Daily Mail and General Trust, is currently a FTSE 250 company and the paper has a circulation of around two million which is the fourth-largest circulation of any English language daily newspaper in the world.[15]
Circulation figures according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations in March 2014 show gross daily sales of 1,708,006 for the Daily Mail.[1] According to a December 2004 survey, 53% of Daily Mail readers voted for the Conservative Party, compared to 21% for Labour and 17% for the Liberal Democrats.[16] The main concern of Viscount Rothermere, the current chairman and main shareholder, is that the circulation be maintained. He testified before a House of Lords select committee that "we need to allow editors the freedom to edit", and therefore the newspaper's editor was free to decide editorial policy, including its political allegiance.[17]The Mail has been edited by Paul Dacre since 1992.
==
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/07/13/3679662/global-warming-speed-up-not-ice-age/
==
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/And-global-COOLING-Return-Arctic-ice-cap-grows-29-year.html
http://mediamatters.org/print/research/2013/12/30/climate-change-misinformer-of-the-year-the-dail/197340
[images]
Climate Change Misinformer Of The Year: The Daily Mail
Research››› December 30, 2013 10:36 AM EST ››› DENISE ROBBINS & SHAUNA THEEL
The United Kingdom tabloid the Daily Mailcould be dubbed "the Fox News of the Internet." It has a huge audience, a conservative slant and has a blatant disregard for the facts. The paper wields huge power in the UK, and with its website plotting a U.S. expansion and reportedly receiving about 154 million global unique browsers each month, it is increasingly gaining that traction in the U.S. as well.
The Daily Mail is best known for its celebrity gossip, but this year U.S. media turned to it for science reporting. The tabloid had huge influence in stirring up faux controversies about climate science, often shredding facts and then abandoning the damage it had done in the name of viral traffic. In fact, four times this year the Mail published climate stories that required corrections, which the paper often skirted by revising its article without a formal correction, helping the misinformation to continue to spread. In September, for example, the Mail's claim that Arctic sea ice had increased by 60 percent not only pushed a misleading narrative about the clear long-term decline in Arctic ice, but also got the figures wrong -- the real increase was less than half that amount. Yet the claim was repeated by two U.S. Congressmen in a hearing and at least 36 different U.S. news outlets.
For these reasons, theMail earns the distinction of being Media Matters' 2013 Climate Change Misinformer of the Year.
The Mail's Arctic Ice Inaccuracy Received Widespread Coverage, Even After Correction
David Rose's Most Egregious Myth: Arctic Sea Ice Is Increasing, Proving "Global COOLING." Daily Mail reporter David Rose, who often covers climate change in a misleading way and was previously known for uncritically repeating Weapons of Mass Destruction claims by an untrustworthy source, wrote a September 7 article titled "And now it's global COOLING! Return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 60% in a year." In the article for the Daily Mail's sister paper, the Mail on Sunday, he claimed that Arctic sea ice levels had increased by almost one million square miles in the course of a year, citing data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). *Mail On Sunday,***[9/7/13] *The Guardian*, [12/8/10]
Mail Was Forced To Issue A Correction After Inflating The Increase By Over 200 Percent.Journalist Bob Ward reported that the Mail's figure was incorrect, based on Rose's interpretation of a typographical error on the NSIDC website and "faulty reasoning":
Rose told me by e-mail that the source of his claim that the ice extent was 60 per cent higher this year was an announcement posted on the website of the United States National Snow and Ice Data Center on 4 September: "August 2013 ice extent was 2.38 million square kilometers (919,000 square miles) above the record low August extent in 2012. The monthly trend is -10.6% per decade relative to the 1981 to 2010 average."
Elsewhere on its website, the NSIDC indicated that the average Arctic sea ice extent in August 2012 was a record low figure of 1.82 million square miles. This should have led Rose to claim that the Arctic sea ice was 50.5 per cent higher last month, but further faulty reasoning led him to conclude the difference was 60 per cent.
However, the NSIDC confirmed to me yesterday that the main figure used by Rose for his article was mistyped and that the mistake was corrected on 10 September, showing that Arctic sea extent in August 2013 was only 29 per cent higher than was recorded for the same month last year. Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, **[9/18/13]
Mail On Sunday subsequently corrected their article, including a headline change to "And now it's global COOLING! Return of the Arctic ice cap as it grows by 29% in a year" (down from 60 percent). However, even disregarding the statistical error, Rose's argument was misleading: 2012 was a record-breaking year for Arctic sea ice lows, and an increase from such an anomaly was to be expected. Nevertheless, the August 2013 sea ice extent was the sixth lowest for that month on record -- a point that Rose neglected to mention. Skeptical Science illustrated the fallacy of using a single year's data to discredit a long-term trend:
Skeptical Science, [**9/13/13**]
U.S. Media Repeated Rose's Inaccurate Arctic Ice Claim At Least 38 Times. The false claim that Arctic sea ice had increased 60 percent was picked up by U.S. news outlets at least 38 times, including 22 instances after the correction, by 36 news outlets. These mentions primarily came from conservative media, and also includes several state outlets that published the same inaccurate column -- one op-ed written byCal Thomas (nationally syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor) appeared in 10 different news outlets, and another written by Robert L. Bradley Jr. (CEO of the fossil fuel-funded Institute for Energy Research) appeared in three. Several of the reports repeated Rose's absurd suggestion of a long-term decline of Arctic sea ice showing that the planet is "cooling." Not included in our count were at least six letters to the editor that were published using his false statistic, five of which were published after the correction. American Thinker,:{ :(style="font-weight:normal"):}:**[9/8/13] [Bowling Green Daily News, 9/21/13, via Factiva] Breitbart,:{ :(style="font-weight:normal"):}:**[9/8/13] [Bristol Herald-Courier, 9/21/13, via Factiva] [Casa Grande Dispatch, 9/21/13, via Factiva] CNS News, **[9/13/13] Fox News Channel, *Cashin In,***[12/14/13] Daily Caller,:{ :(style="font-weight:normal"):}:**[9/8/13] *Daily Review Atlas*, **[10/3/13] Examiner, **[9/17/13]FoxNews.com, [9/9/13] *Hawaii Reporter*, **[10/9/13] Hot Air,:{ :(style="font-weight:normal"):}:**[9/8/13] *Idaho State Journal*, **[10/8/13] Independent Journal Review,:{ :(style="font-weight:normal"):}:**[9/8/13] Investors' Business Daily, **[9/9/13] Investors' Business Daily, **[9/24/13] Investors' Business Daily, **[9/26/13] [Jefferson City News-Tribune, 9/23/13, via Factiva] Premiere Radio Networks,:{ :(style="font-weight:normal"):}:*The Rush Limbaugh Show*, **[9/9/13] [McClatchy-Tribune Regional News, 9/23/13, via Factiva] MSN.com, **[9/9/13] National Review, **[9/9/13] Newsbusters, **[9/8/13] *North Platte Telegraph*, **[9/12/13] *Orange County Register*, **[9/20/13] [Shreveport Times, 9/24/13, via Factiva] *Standard Journal*, **[10/28/13] [telegram.com, 10/3/13] *The Coeur d'Alene Press*, **[9/30/13] *The Daily-Tribune,***[9/29/13] [The Desert Sun, 9/28/13, via Nexis] Fox News Channel, *The Five*, **[9/11/13 via Media Matters] *The Herald-Journal*, **[9/11/13] [The Leaf-Chronicle, 9/21/13, via Factiva] The News Journal, **[9/28/13] [The Tulsa World, 9/21/13, via Factiva] Fox Business, *Varney & Company*, **[12/16/13] [The Virginian-Pilot & The Ledger-Star via Factiva.com, 9/20/13] Washington Examiner, **[9/18/13] Townhall,**[9/19/13] *Wilson County News*, **[10/29/13] [Pensacola (FL) News Journal, 10/5/13 and 10/5/13, via Factiva] FoxNews.com, accessed:{ :(style="font-weight:normal"):}:**[12/18/13] Sourcewatch, accessed:{ :(style="font-weight:normal"):}:**[12/18/13]
Rose's False Number Repeated By U.S. Congressmen During Hearing. The inaccurate 60 percent Arctic increase figure was also used by two U.S. congressmen to cast doubt on climate change and argue against addressing it. In a September 18 House Energy and Power Subcommittee hearing (a hearing dubbed by Organizing for Action as "DenierPalooza"), Congressman Ed Whitfield (R-KY) stated, "I recently read an article that stated that the Arctic ice had nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at this time of year," and Congressman David McKinley (R-WV) asserted that "Arctic ice has actually grown 60 percent." *Media Matters*, [9/19/13]
The Daily Mail Published Three More Climate Fallacies Requiring Corrections In 2013
David Rose Altered The Words Of Scientists.In an article titled "The Great Green Con no. 1: The hard proof that finally shows global warming forecasts that are costing you billions were WRONG all along," Daily Mail journalist David Rose reported that he presented "irrefutable evidence that official predictions of global climate warming have been catastrophically flawed," and featured quotes from four climate scientists. However, three of those four scientists subsequently criticized Rose, with two saying they were misrepresented in the article. Climate scientist Myles Allen said that Rose misrepresented his view by claiming that he now thought the world was on the course for much lower warming than he previously thought. Allen said that he "certainly never suggested to David that my assessment of the odds on any particular level of warming by 2100 had changed." Climate scientist James Annan said that theMail on Sunday had seemingly attributed quotes to him that he never actually said.The tabloid subsequently issued an apology for incorrectly quoting Annan, but did not address the other criticisms. *Mail on Sunday,*[**3/16/13**] *The Guardian,*[**3/20/13**] Carbon Brief,:{ :(style="font-weight:normal"):}:[**3/19/13**]
Yet some conservative U.S. media still have the misquotes on their websites, including a post by Climate Depot'sMarc Morano -- Media Matters' 2012 climate misinformer of the year -- and another by PJ Media. Climate Depot,:{ :(style="font-weight:normal"):}:[3/17/13] PJ Media,:{ :(style="font-weight:normal"):}:[3/19/13] *Media Matters*,:{ :(style="font-weight:normal"):}:[12/27/12]
David Rose Fudged Numbers To Claim Climate Scientists "Confess[ed]" To Lower Warming.The Mail on Sundaypublished an article on September 14 originally titled "World's top climate scientists confess: Global warming is just HALF what we thought." In the article, reporter David Rose claimed that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set to admit that the world is warming more slowly than previously thought. A climate scientist explained to the UK watchdog group Carbon Brief why Rose's numbers were "completely incorrect" and that thetrue revision was minor -- from 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade to 0.12 degrees Celsius:
The Mail on Sunday says:
"Back [in 2007], [the IPCC] said that the planet was warming at a rate of 0.2 degrees Celsius every decade ... But the new report says the true figure since 1951 has been only 0.12 Celsius per decade - a rate far below even the lowest computer prediction"
Dr Richard Allan, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, tells us this statement is quite simply wrong. He says Rose has mixed up the numbers in the last IPCC report.
"The main claim by David Rose in the Mail on Sunday is that rate of global warming since 1951 has been halved since the last IPCC report. This is completely incorrect."
In 2007, the IPCC said the rate of warming since 1951 had been not 0.2 but 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade. If the new report says 0.12 degrees Celsius, as the Mail on Sunday suggests, this is a very minor revision of 0.01 degrees.
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So where does the 0.2 degree per decade figure come from? Richard Allan tells us it does appear in the last IPCC report, but refers to a 15-year period in the run up to the report's release, not the warming per decade since 1951. He says:
"The 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade figure relates to an observed warming over the period 1990-2005 which clearly cannot be compared with the period since 1951".
So the two figures Rose compares are not measuring the same thing. As the Met Office's Richard Betts tweeted yesterday: "Rose created a headline by misrepresenting [the 2007 IPCC report]." *Mail on Sunday,*[9/14/13] Carbon Brief, [**9/16/13**]
After it was shown that Rose was comparing two numbers that measured two different things, Rose dodged responsibility by issuing a "clarification" that moved the goal posts to change the title to "global warming just QUARTER what we thought." Despite the incorrect figures, a number of conservative media outlets amplified his claims, including:
- Rush Limbaugh devoted significant airtime to this report, in a segment titled "Global warming scientists: We were wrong."
- Hot Air published an article titled "New IPCC report to retreat on global-warming claims," leading with "At least according to the Daily Mail, which heralds the final draft report as a major step back for global-warming advocates."
- Breitbart published an article titled, "Leaked UN Study: 15-year 'pause' in global warming." Rush Limbaugh, [**9/17/13**] Hot Air, [**9/16/13**] Breitbart, [**9/8/13**]
Daily Mail's James Delingpole Slandered The Met Office, Misrepresenting Its Findings. On January 9, the Daily Mailpublished an article by James Delingpole -- an English columnist known for dismissing the climate change consensus with inflammatory rhetoric -- attacking the United Kingdom's Met Office, one of the world's top weather forecasting services. In it, Delingpole called the Met Office "not just risibly incompetent-- but an active menace both to the integrity of science and to the nation's wellbeing" and "Britain's foremost cheerleader for climate change alarmism." The Met Office issued a public statement in response on January 10, detailing the inaccuracies in Delingpole's story:
This article contains a series of factual inaccuracies about the Met Office and its science, as outlined below.
Firstly, he claims the Met Office failed to predict snow in 2010, but our 5-day forecasts accurately forecast 12 out of 13 snowfall events - as you can see in this article.
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Mr Delingpole also says we failed to predict flooding in November last year. Once again, our 5-day forecasts gave accurate guidance and warnings throughout the period.
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Mr Delingpole then inaccurately states that the Met Office has conceded 'there is no evidence that 'global warming' is happening'. We have not said this at any point.
In fact, we explicitly say this was not the case in an article, posted on the home page of our website and widely circulated, which was written in response to articles about updates to our decadal forecast.
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He also states that the Met Office was trying to defend a narrative that the "the past ten years have been the 'wettest decade ever'". Again, this is not something the Met Office has ever said.
Also he quotes David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation saying that the Met Office 'thinks weather forecasting is beneath it' and that 'climate change... brings in more money'. A cursory glance at our annual report and accounts (pdf) would reveal weather forecasting represents the vast majority of the Met Office's contractual work on behalf of the public.
There are also a number of other accusations which cannot be substantiated.
Over two months later, the Mail finally appended a note at the bottom of the article from the Met Office Chairman on March 8. The Met said the note "does not fully address all the issues we had with the original article" but that it was "grateful" that the Mailhad dealt with its objections. *Daily Mail*, [**1/9/13**, updated 3/8/13] Met Office News Blog, [**1/10/13**] Met Office, [3/8/13]
Why Does U.S. Media Trust A Tabloid On Science?
Daily Mail Consistently Publishes Sensationalist, Contradicting "Science" Stories.The Daily Mail has consistently misled on scientific developments, even publishing articles that blatantly contradict each other. For example, two Mail Online articles made different claims about whether or not fracking can cause earthquakes:
david rose desmog
If you're interested in how misinformation makes its way into the public dialogue on important issues like war in the Middle East or climate change, then you should get to know**David Rose**, a “special investigations writer” for the :{UK:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:'s ultra-conservative *Mail on Sunday* tabloid.
Rose is making headlines this week for all the wrong reasons. But his path to this latest controvery started many years ago.
A 2010 article by Guardian columnist George Monbiot sums up the history of Rose's many errors, where the “special investigations writer” first gets it wrong on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and goes on to get it wrong on the consensus of the science on climate change. As Monbiot tells us, in Rose's previous stint at theObserver, Rose wrote:
“… uncritically the claims made by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the second invasion of Iraq.”
We all know the outcome of that fiasco. Over $1 trillion spent, thousands of lives lost, all based on an attempt to create a reality that just simply wasn't so. Rose wasn't the only journalist to get it wrong on the false claims of WMD, but you would think that after such a thing, with such devastating consequences, he might gain better skills in critical thinking.
In the same 2010 article, Monbiot shows how Rose went from getting it wrong on WMD, to getting it wrong on the state of climate science. As Monbiot's title says it most simply:
“David Rose's climate science writing shows he has not learned from previous mistakes.”
Monbiot points to an article Rose wrote at the time asking and answering his own question with the headline: “What happened to the 'warmest year on record': The truth is global warming has halted.” There were so many errors about the science of climate change that Monbiot's rebuttal goes on for many, many pages.
Fast forward to this past weekend and we have Rose at it again, making another run with the debunked claim that the planet has stopped warming, despite all of the solid evidence to the contrary.
It appears that Rose is either purposefully spreading incorrect information, or is grasping at straws and forcing evidence as a means of dealing with the psychological trauma that many feel when facing the prospect of a future with more droughts, floods and extreme weather. I will leave it to you to decide which is the truth.
In this most recent article, Rose shouts the headline:
If only that were the case. Imagine the collective sigh of relief among scientists and global leaders if global warming was only a quarter of what was originally predicted. It would be a second chance to get things right. It would give us the time we need to deal with the issue of climate change and avoid its most dire consequences.
Except that wasn't the original story that Rose published in the Mail on Sunday. As Media Matters details, the Mail has edited the story significantly to correct astonishing errors in Rose's original, which were regurgitated by Rush Limbaugh on Tuesday.
The original title of Rose's original article was “Global warming is just HALF what we said: World's top climate scientists admit computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong.”
Unfortunately, just like in 2010 and just like on WMD, Rose has once again grossly overstated his case and garbled the evidence to draw his conclusion that global warming is less dangerous than climate scientists have proven. A full scientific explanation of just how flawed Rose is on this can be found here onSkeptical Science and on the Carbon Briefand here on the great science blog Bad Astronomy.
Maybe Rose should get out of the journalism game, or at least think about moving over to the celebrity tabloid section of the Mail on Sunday where misinformation doesn't have deadly implications for generations to come.
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