My recent post on KSTP-TV’s news “package”, which included covering a one-man protest against the City of St. Louis Park’s showing of, “An Inconvenient Truth” followed by Al Gore’s appearance before House and Senate Committees discussing global climate change, brought out the usual suspects making the usual claims.
There is this …
“You are a joke, Brian. The very thought that someone would disagree with the global warming doctrine being shoved down our throats makes you convulse with outrage. You’re pathetic.
“What is it about other viewpoints that angers you so?
“By the way…the movie is entitled “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. You didn’t bother to see it, I surmise.”
And …
“Nice to know you will wait to form an opinion about the “The Great Global Warming Swindle” until you see it. Otherwise, “flatly asserting” that it is “crackpot” would really be stupid, especially after hitting the Elder on the same point.
“Incidentally, I’ve seen “No Inconvenient Context” twice and I can flatly assert that it is a partisan piece of trash that randomly pulls events together and calls them global warming. It is an embarrassment to science, which even scientists who agree with Gore on the core principle will admit.
“You oughta widen your mind and thus your experience Lambert.”
As I’ve said before elsewhere, this “debate” over whether global climate change is occurring is a settled issue, at least for those who value science over the gamesmanship of partisan rhetoric. It is happening. How “global warming” became yet another point of left-right conflict, I’m not sure. But I’m guessing the mere presence of Al Gore was sufficient to light up the usual right-wing echo chamber/spin machine that supplies so many of these “correspondents” with their templated sources, talking points and arguments.
In the context of responsible journalism, what I’ve been asking of the legitimate press is this: “When does the science and gravity of this particular issue — not to mention the common sense of it — rise sufficiently high so as to obviate the “requirement” of equal, opposite “balance”? On the one hand you have here overwhelming consensus among the people who have devoted the most time to researching the problem, while on the other you have — if you care to scratch the surface at all — mangled science at best, (if any at all), and constant, pervasive ideological partisanship.
Point being: When do TV stations and newspapers who so regularly trumpet their “accuracy” and “leadership” say, “Case closed. One professor in Winnipeg, one ill-informed Senator in Congress and one wingnut blogger in a basement is no longer sufficient to balance out the staggering preponderance of science supporting the prevailing view.” Or, conversely, “When does our professional, journalistic responsibility require us to stop giving partisans with such reckless disregard for accuracy equal time on our air or in our pages?”
This isn’t a debate over the 2000 election, WMD in Iraq or any of half dozen other ready recent examples of gross partisan “gaming”. This one is even more important, in that effects the entire planet.
I’m not going to “debate” my commenters, because it really is important to marginalize them into insignificance. If their entire rationale for living is shrieking “fraud” at anything and everything said by anyone who may have voted Democratic, submitted a report to the U.N. or had lunch in a French restaurant what’s the point in interaction? Like a belligerent drunk at the end of the bar or some spittle-flecked street corner prophet, the best course of action is a simple, “Sorry for your loss, pal”, and move on.
But for the record, while I was being flippantly dismissive about the global warming documentary the wingnut blogger is demanding St. Louis Park play as “balance” for its’ citizens, I have in fact seen the film. (The precise title is, “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, and you can watch it here if you’ve got 73 minutes you don’t mind never getting back.)
But on the charge of “crackpot” — (my capsule review) — I encourage the more sober-minded and critical-minded to check out this letter to The Independent newspaper in Britain from Prof. Carl Wunsch of MIT, who agreed to be interviewed for a film vastly different than what was eventually shown. Prof. Wunsch is, as you can see, not a happy camper, and, I suspect, inclined to seek full and proper redress from Britain’s “edgy” Channel 4.
For a quick primer on the producer’s background I recommend this and this . Do note his pattern of misleading interview subjects and distortive editing … so severe Channel 4 was forced to make a public apology after his previous film … the one where he declared modern environmentalists to be the true heirs to 20th century Nazis. Also note that the scientists he populates his film with are almost all linked to neo-conservative think tanks which have in turn been shown to receive funding from major oil interests.
It is hard to know what among all the distortions is most egregious, but the claim that liberals are using global warming to deprive the Third World of the opportunity to achieve affluence via fossil fuels is the sort of thing that leaves you dizzy and speechless. The oil economy is doing great things for the Third World. Wouldn’t want them switching over to renewable energy anytime soon.
My underlying point about KSTP-TV’s completely routine global warming “package” is that it representative of a timidity that borders on cowardice. In KSTP’s case it is more a fear of ownership since reporters and managers are well aware that their boss, Stanley S. Hubbard, regards global warming as hokum. But elsewhere in the Twin Cities news marketplace, saying nothing whatsoever about climate change, or “balancing” anything said “by others” with … a wingnut blogger or some transparent knucklehead like Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe … is, let’s be honest, a way of avoiding an avalanche of snarling e-mail and phone calls from the types of fevered reactionaries quoted above.
THAT ain’t community service, it ain’t leadership and, IMHO, it ain’t responsible journalism.
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