In his recent widely publicized Rolling Stone essay, former Vice President Al Gore harshly criticized media coverage of global warming. He compared journalists to referees of “professional” wrestling. Some mainstream reporters who regularly write about climate change objected. But climate scientists nodded approvingly, as did Joe Romm, who called Gore’s essay a “devastating critique” and piled on: I…Continue Reading…
It’s from yesterday, but what the hell: How the perception of media bias by biased people has grown even more biased Brilliant!
They’re a little late to the game, but the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media finally gets around to reviewing Matthew Nisbet’s Climate Shift report released in April, which triggered an unhinged response from a handful of popular climate bloggers . (I wrote about that here and here.) The myth of the media…Continue Reading…
Another day, another revelation about the news gathering methods of a Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper in the UK–methods that some are referring to as “institutional criminality.” No doubt the curtain on Murchoch’s News International operations will be pulled back further in the coming days and weeks, revealing much more ugliness. The questions is, will it spur…Continue Reading…
While reading the intro to the new SciAm blog network (launched today), this caught my eye: We are trying to eliminate the artificial line between “blogging” and “journalism” and focus on good, accurate writing, no matter what form it comes in or what software is used to produce it. Our bloggers are a part of…Continue Reading…
One reader, in response to my post on the PBS discussion of Al Gore’s Rolling Stone essay, asks me if I have any comment on Gore’s primary critique; namely that the MSM is failing the public on this issue? I thought media bashing and climate change was your bete noire”¦. I do have some thoughts, but…Continue Reading…
Oh, the irony. Yesterday, Rolling Stone magazine posted Al Gore’s 7,000 word essay, which is critical of the media’s (and President Obama’s) handling of climate change. That same day, the highly respected PBS news show hosted a discussion of Gore’s essay. Instead of inviting non-partisan environmental scholars or political scientists to analyze the essay’s premises,…Continue Reading…
A lament from Time magazine’s Bryan Walsh: Work in environmental journalism for very long and you can eventually become inured to catastrophe. Every ecosystem is on the brink of collapse; every endangered species is just a few steps from extinction; every government decision to authorize an oil well or a coal mine is the one…Continue Reading…
If there is one deeply held sentiment in the climate debate that is shared by bloggers and commentators of all stripes, it is this: journalists suck. It’s a constant refrain at places like Climate Progress and WUWT. But really the sentiment is widespread in the climate blogosphere, so much so that an alien visiting from…Continue Reading…
He’s a talented provocateur who sometimes smokes his own exhaust. That artful putdown of Jeff Jarvis is sure to be sniffed out by journalism’s eminent aggregator. In his response, Jarvis seems reflexively defensive, but I agree with him here: I dare to question the assumptions about the forms of news and journalism…I believe it is…Continue Reading…