FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
CNN reporter Erin Burnett‘s comment (10/29/12) that it was “kind of neat” to see New York City break its flooding record as the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy flooded Battery Park was bizarre, to say the very least: I just want to give everyone an update of where we are right now in terms of […]
Columbia Journalism Review‘s Curtis Brainard and I had a somewhat lengthy back-and-forth on Twitter about his view (10/30/12, 11/1/12) that some journalists and environmental activists are misleading the public by pointing to superstorm Sandy as an outcome of human-caused global warming. I argued on FAIR Blog (11/1/12) that saying that global warming caused Sandy is […]
Writing about journalistic treatment of the superstorm and climate change, CJR‘s Curtis Brainard (10/30/12) criticizes the New Yorker‘s Elizabeth Kolbert for the wrong reason. He takes issue with her statement (10/29/12): As with any particular “weather-related loss event,” it’s impossible to attribute Sandy to climate change. However, it is possible to say that the storm […]
The Washington Post editorial page (10/5/12) weighed in on the contentious environmental issue of fracking. No surprise–they’re all for it. “Fracking’s Green Side” is the headline in the print edition. (The Web version is different.) The editors write: Those who would ban fracking or regulate it into oblivion ignore the exceptional benefits that inexpensive natural […]
Deep Throat Not What He Used to Be The Washington Post’s Dan Balz (8/14/12) somehow convinced a “senior Romney advisor” to reveal a stunning secret that could only be disclosed “on the condition of anonymity”—that Mitt Romney felt good about his vice presidential pick: “He was very confident in himself, in Paul Ryan, in the […]
NBC‘s Tom Brokaw from the Republican National Convention last night (8/30/12): The best line, I think, in the speech was the one in which he said: “President Obama wants to slow the growth of the oceans, I want to help you and your family.” Yeah, wasn’t that great when Romney pretended we weren’t facing an […]
In an attempted factcheck of Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention, AP‘s Calvin Woodward (8/30/12) takes on Romney’s big laugh line: President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family. Woodward looked into it and found […]
“Mitt Romney Sees Path to Energy Independence,” an L.A. Times piece by Seema Mehta (8/22/12), doesn’t mention climate change at all. It also doesn’t mention tar sands, the Canadian oil deposits whose extraction would devastate the environment, even though that’s what Romney’s talking about when he says that approving the Keystone pipeline will be one […]
What would you call someone who insists the Earth is not warming, but cooling? Or who recommends that a media outlet “cool the global warming mumbo jumbo”? On CBS Evening News, they call him an expert–the network’s “severe weather consultant.” Florida TV meteorologist David Bernard makes frequent appearances to talk about weather and climate on CBS Evening News and other CBS News shows. As FAIR and others have noted, recent TV coverage of weather disasters tends to downplay the effects of catastrophic climate change.
You would think—or maybe hope—that journalists who have to appear alongside climate change deniers would find it a bit awkward. It used to be that media were faulted for creating false “balance” in coverage of climate change—quoting reality-based scientists in roughly equal measure with non-scientists who either don’t think there’s a problem or don’t think […]
Once you’ve altered the atmosphere, every single weather phenomenon–every storm, every dry spell, every unremarkably pleasant day–is a result of that altered atmosphere.
Scientific American has a dilemma (Extra!, 2/11): It takes advertising from oil companies whose profits depend on denying the most important scientific fact of our era, the reality of human-caused climate change. The magazine would lose its whole brand identity if it pretended global warming wasn’t happening, but there are things short of that that […]
You have to wonder: Do journalists covering energy issues imagine they and their loved ones are going to be living on another planet in the not-too-distant future? That seems like the only reason you would write a piece about the world discovering ways to extract and burn vast new quantities of hydrocarbons without mentioning one […]
If you watch TV news you’re bound to see a lot of commercials for oil companies. As Miranda Spencer reported in Extra! (2/12), there are far more commercials about energy companies and natural gas than there are actual news reports about controversial industry practices like hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” But then there are the news […]
There’s a popular verb in headlines about climate researcher Peter Gleick’s admission that he used trickery to get damning documents out of the climate change–denialist group the Heartland Institute: “Activist Says He Lied to Obtain Climate Papers” (New York Times, 2/21/12); “Scientist Peter Gleick Admits He Lied to Get Climate Documents” (L.A. Times, 2/21/12); “Climate […]
New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer (2/2/12) accurately reports how Republicans want to frame the disputed over the Keystone XL pipeline. But she does almost nothing to challenge that framing. Under the headline, “For GOP, Pipeline Is Central to Agenda,” Steinhauer explains: Republicans are framing Keystone as an urgent jobs and energy project at a […]
Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel has a column in the Washington Post today (1/3/12) outlining the three important election issues to watch–and one of them is about how the press covers the process: Third, the media’s obsession with false equivalence: How the election is covered will almost certainly have a measurable impact on its outcome. […]
Frontrunner-of-the-moment Rick Perry is getting a lot of press for his performance at the recent Republican debate—especially because he’s standing by his belief that Social Security is a “monstrous lie” and a Ponzi scheme, and that climate change is an untested theory advanced by corrupt, discredited scientists. You can call such ideas a lot of […]
In case you were wondering whether Irene sparked any discussions of climate change, here’s a moment from the panel discussion on ABC‘s This Week (8/30/11): RON BROWNSTEIN (National Journal): Do we want to get into a global warming and a hurricanes discussion? DONNA BRAZILE (Democratic Strategist): No. BROWNSTEIN: I mean, I don’t know if we […]
