The press’ reaction to The Wall Street Journal’s blockbuster weekend report that the US Department of Energy has concluded the COVID pandemic originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, is another highly revealing instance of deep media bias.
Mainstream media outlets were quick to highlight that the department itself rated its conclusion “low confidence,” which was clearly meant to cast doubt on the credibility and significance of the report.
Question: How often do the major media ever mention the “low confidence” ratings attached to many findings in climate science? Almost never.
Yet anyone who takes the time to read through the climate-science reports the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues every few years will find that many of the most crucial factors behind the catastrophic climate-change claims and forecasts are rated “low confidence” by the scientists who produce them.
In the most recent IPCC science report, for example, issued in 2021, the term “low confidence” appears 48 times in the key 131-page chapter on climate sensitivity; “uncertain” or “uncertainty” appears 248 times.
While the media breathlessly report that every tropical storm, tornado, hurricane and forest fire are caused by climate change, the UN scientists are much more restrained, saying they have “low confidence” the computer models or climate-history studies justify such statements. Ditto for predictions of large sea-level rise, Antarctic sea-ice melting, ocean-surface temperatures, regional climate impacts and North Atlantic storm tracks.
The IPCC’s estimates for the largest single cause of future temperature change — the various forms of water vapor in the atmosphere (in other words, clouds) — remain highly uncertain.
But anyone who brings up these “low confidence” findings or mentions “uncertainty” in any aspect of climate science is branded a “climate denier,” a term deliberately promoted to equate any climate-science skepticism with Holocaust denial — just as anyone who suggested the lab-leak theory for COVID the last three years was branded a racist, a bigot and a tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorist, including by Scientific American’s editor and The New York Times’ science reporter.
The “settled science” of climate is enforced by the most appalling groupthink. Most major media willingly go along with the demonization of dissenting analysis of climate questions just as they did with COVID.
The Los Angeles Times announced several years back it would no longer publish any letters to the editor that dissent from the party line on climate change. Major media outlets like The Washington Post that have otherwise been laying off journalists have been adding numerous reporters dedicated to covering climate change, and nearly all of them come with environmental-advocacy backgrounds.
The Society of Environmental Journalists is better known as the Society of Environmental Stenographers, so faithfully do most environmental “reporters” uncritically pass along the claims of green-activist groups.
Not content to let the SEJ do the heavy lifting for the climate campaigners, a new pressure organization, Covering Climate Now, boasts of signing up 500 media outlets and reporters who are on board to “inform the public and hold power to account.”
Covering Climate Now is a joint project of several leftist publications including The Nation and The Guardian, and the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review has taken sides as well, declaring that climate change should “touch every beat in the newsroom.”
CCN is just one of countless climate initiatives funded by a consortium of foundations that bankroll the massive climate campaign, including the Packard Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund and even Bill Moyers. The climate lobby is likely a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide at this point, and while CCN is a relatively recent and small node, it has enjoyed considerable success feeding storylines to the media. One of its gimmicks is to give out annual journalism awards in more than 20 categories, with the winners featured in ABC News TV — good for a budding career as a climate propagandist.
In addition to parroting climate activists’ talking points, the media also ignore or distort coverage of green energy, the holy grail of the climate movement. While there have been hundreds of local protests against proposed wind and solar-power installations around the United States, the media seldom cover these unless Greta Thunberg shows up.
Last week Reuters reported that Thunberg protested a wind-power installation in Norway because it is located near reindeer pastures an obscure indigenous tribe favors. A serious news media would be embarrassed at this kind of celebrity-driven coverage.
But we no longer have a serious and unbiased media. The press is one institution the American public now rates with “low confidence.”
The latest Gallup survey on American attitudes toward the press finds the proportion of people who have no trust in the media “at all” has risen from about 5% in 1972 to 38% today, with another 28% expressing “little trust.” The segment with a “great deal or fair amount” of trust in the media has fallen from 68% in 1972 to just 34% today.
That’s a climate change you can believe in. No wonder the forecast for the future of media is so grim.
Steven F. Hayward is a resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.
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