One way or another every local television news outfit hypes itself as Your News Leader. What they mean by this, of course, since only one station can be the actual leader, is that the kids in their PR departments have found creative ways to twist Nielsen numbers to make it appear as though they have more viewers than the blow-dried crew on the next channel.
When I watch the news I want to know where the latest tornado touched down, not how many others are sharing the experience with me. But my peeve-o-meter really kicks in when the PR kiddies start implying that these demographically-tested sales vehicles, these twenty-two-minute newscasts embody anything like leadership. By my reckoning, leadership entails the courage to tell the truth about controversial issues—climate change, for example—even when the truth may be unpopular or anger certain interest groups.
Recent surveys show that most of our so-called news-leaders are showing a particular lack of leadership on the issue of global warming. How the average American feels about global warming seems to have more to do with the partisan slant of the newscasts they watch than with a careful analysis of available science.
A Pew Research Center poll conducted in January found “deep differences between Republicans and Democrats over virtually every issue related to global warming.” Ninety-three percent of liberal Democrats surveyed agreed that global warming is a “very serious” or “somewhat serious issue,” while forty-six percent of conservative Republicans viewed it as either “not too serious” or “not a problem.”
There isn’t much anyone can do about where global-warming skeptics get what they refer to as information. Based on my experiences, almost all of it comes through the filter of right-wing media where one loudmouth contrarian is accepted by cowed consumers as a counterweight to everything written by Nobel Prize-winning scientists. If otherwise-functioning adults feel a primal need to confine their scientific education to what Joe Soucheray and Sean Hannity say, so be it.
Where I think enough is now enough is on TV weather forecasts, and the op-ed pages of mainstream dailies.
With the notable exception of WCCO Television meteorologist Paul Douglas, who has been outspoken on the dangers of global warming for more than a decade, a reluctance to present the science of climate change seems pervasive among local weathermen.
“I think local television meteorologists, as station scientists, do have an obligation to report on this, to report the state of the science, free of politics or other influence. We’re all accountable, and I think we ignore or trivialize this topic at our own peril,” Douglas said.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s time to stop pandering to intentionally ill-informed partisans and steadily advance the public understanding of climate change.
Newspapers also must stop playing the balanced-debate game and start ignoring the propaganda of partisan political columnists. Case in point: a syndicated column by Debra Saunders in the Star Tribune several weeks back. Capsule summary: Global warming = liberal BS. Why did they run it? What greater good was served?
You can encourage a productive debate over the troop surge in Iraq or how best to suppress Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But another round of ridiculing concern over global warming?
At what point does an issue acquire both sufficient moral imperative and scientific foundation to make responsible journalists start rejecting counterfeit logic?
Eric Ringham decides what syndicated copy runs on the Star Tribune’s op-ed pages. “We have a little stable of conservatives to draw from,” Ringham explained. “We are committed to running one of them every day. If they say something that is factually dishonest, I won’t run the column. But mostly what we’re talking about here is distortion. I won’t run dishonesty. But I will run distortion. Because if I start drawing a line at distortion, pretty soon there is no opinion page.”
I asked if he’d run a Holocaust-denial piece.
“No, I would not,” he responded. “We’ve passed that line.”
Ringham said the climate-change skeptics’ arguments hold no appeal for him, but that the paper hasn’t yet passed the line on global warming.
The climate, however, has passed the line. And news leaders, you should too.
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