FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz spends his Sunday mornings as the host of Reliable Sources, the media criticism show on CNN. Yesterday (12/13/09), one segment concerned the Washington Post‘s decision to print an op-ed (12/9/09) on “Climategate” by Sarah Palin. It prompted this exchange with guest John Aravosis of Americablog: ARAVOSIS: What newspapers aren’t supposed […]
Forbes.com has an article up called “The Fiction of Climate Science” (12/4/09). Thanks no doubt to a link from Drudge, it’s currently one of the website’s “top rated,” “most popular” and “most emailed” items. “Fiction” is a polite word for what the author, Gary Sutton, does with evidence. Sutton grinds the already well-worn denialist ax […]
The New York Times‘ reporter on the climate beat, Andrew Revkin, had a front-page story this weekend (11/20/09) detailing the contents of climate scientists’ private emails discussing global warming. Predictably, the emails are being taken out of context by climate change deniers—but more interesting to me is the fact that the focus is on the […]
Stating quite succinctly how “there is an ongoing issue about whether global warming deniers should be treated seriously by the media, given that they have about as much scientific support for their position as the flat-Earth crew,” economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/11/09) notes how the July 11 “New York Times goes them one […]
Jonathan Hiskes of Grist—who recently exposed “The NYT‘s Favorite ‘Climate Change Denier’”—has now (5/13/09) caught Fox News giving airtime to Marc Morano’s charge of Al Gore “profiting off global warming campaign” : Say you’re a harried cable news producer with 24 gaping hours to fill with finished material every day of the week. Say you’re […]
During his regular review of scientific reporting for the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Boyce Rensberger describes (5/7/09) how the “11-year (give or take) sunspot cycle, associated with a periodic reversal in the sunâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s magnetic poles” means that “the number of sunspots increases in the years just before a reversal.” But Rensberger notes that “Where are […]
An April 24 New York Times op-ed from “Skeptical Environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg contends “that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a hopeless cause and that public money is better spent on research and development of renewable energy”–which Jonathan Hiskes of Grist calls (4/27/09) “a classic Lomborg argument–deliberately provocative and presenting several worthy goals as an either/or […]
Washington Post/Newsweek economics columnist Robert Samuelson was recently out plugging his new book at an event recorded by C-SPAN. Samuelson began his remarks (watch the video here, at the 4:20 mark) by saying: I am not an economist. I’m a journalist. And so that anything I say that seems contradictory to what a freshman in […]
Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias (2/25/09) hits the Washington Post for “standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is”–and then spreads some of the blame around: Meanwhile, one of the Post‘s main competitors in the world of papers with potential to attract a national audience is the New York […]
George Will’s history of misquoting data to distort the climate change debate goes back nearly two decades—that we know of. As Extra! reported in 2003, in 1992 Will trashed Al Gore (Washington Post, 9/3/92) for being “cavalier with the truth” in his “wastebasket worthy” book Earth in the Balance. More from Extra!: Will confronted Gore […]
How distorted is the corporate media concept of critical journalism? Just look at Media Matters‘ write up (2/5/09) of a cable news show that named one commentator its “Muckraker of the Day” for presenting bogus evidence against global warming: On the February 2 edition of MSBNC‘s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, anchor David Shuster let syndicated columnist […]
For a change of pace from his incessant immigrant bashing, CNN‘s Lou Dobbs recently exclaimed over “unusual storms” and snow in Las Vegas, Southern California and Arizona’s mountains. This “unbelievable” evidence has Dobbs wondering: “So what are those folks talking about global warming?” Posting at Washington Monthly‘s Political Animal blog (12/19/08), Steve Benen describes how, […]
The prevailing body of scientific evidence for climate change more or less holds sway in news reports, but opinion journalism—where the policy agenda is defined and debated—is dominated by those who question or reject that evidence.
