The Mass Media's Climate of Bias and Propaganda
Jacques Ellul once wrote: "The propagandist uses a keyboard and composes a symphony." He might, had he been alive today, have been thinking of the mass media's current obsession: global warming scaremongering. Ellul (as Konrad Kellen wrote in the Introduction to Ellul's book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes) saw propaganda as "a greater threat to mankind than any of the more grandly advertised threats hanging over the human race."
The media's part in the mega-hype of the GW alarmism is the epitomizes Ellul's warning. This has, in part, been captured by a rash of exposing reports from the excellent Business & Media Institute in the US. Here is their highlighting of the problem in 'Climate of Bias' and an excellent debunking review of the mass media's 'warming, cooling,warming, cooling' predictive hype over 100 years in the report Fire and Ice.
For me though the work here was summed up in the simple, understated but all-encompassing quote:
"It would be difficult for the media to do a worse job with climate change coverage."
Amen to that.
With special thanks to Laura Curtis for alerting me to this material.
And here is yet more evidence of the counter-productivity of the media hype on global warming from scientist Mick Hulme who has been conducting research on people's attitudues to media portrayals of a catastrophic future. Here's a taster:
His (Hulme's) concern is that these exaggerations have given the green light to the media to use the language of fear, terror and disaster when covering scientific reports - even when those reports are much more constrained in their description of the course of likely future events.
He says extravagated claims simply generate a feeling of helplessness in the public.
"My argument is about the dangers of science over-claiming its knowledge about the future and in particular presenting tentative predictions about climate change using words of 'disaster', 'apocalypse' and 'catastrophe'," he said.
Peter C Glover
in Historical analysis, Media hype
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Reader Comments (2)
You're quite welcome. :-) Your site has been a great resource and I appreciate how much work you've put into it. It's nice to have some push back against the media hype.
Hi Peter,
thanks for your good work! It's a big relief to see so many people still showing common sense and trying to figure out what the facts on AGW really are. Here in Canada we have to deal with great Hysteria too, fueled by the PR Firm "James Hoggan" working for the David Suzuki Foundation. They finance the "desmogblog" and do nothing but discredit anybody that comes out and says:
"hey, wait a minute!"
A beloved target of their assaults is Timothy Ball, the Canadian Climatologist that appeared in the Swindle movie by Martin Durkin.
60 scientists wrote an open letter to Stephan Harper, our Prime Minister last year to ask him to rethink Kyoto.
Desmogblog's quest in life is now to "investigate" each and every one of these 60 people, hoping to find that these guys are funded by Oil and Gas companies. I wrote them that it does not matter who pays, David Suzuki does not live off the proceeds of his vegetable garden in the backyard either, he lives of Tax dollars, which is even more disturbing and sponsors. And oh, visit his Suzuki Foundation website and look who his sponsors are.
Apparently these sponsors are OK, but as soon as Oil and Gas are involved, it is not OK.
Suzuki, a Canadian Tree Hugger Extraordinaire was given a chance on May 5th to be the Editor for a day of the Vancouver Sun, the main local paper here in British Columbia.
The Sun is generally pretty good in telling both sides of the debate but I don't understand what came into them when they gave Suzuki the free hand to do my Paper on May 5th. It had the most ridiculous tips and stories in there, from "we have to stop flying" to "stop eating Sushi", "the ingredients have to come from too far away" The sportpages even had a story on our beloved Vancouver Canucks Pro Hockey Team, and how terrible it has been this past season with the 95,000 km's that the Team have been flying to play their away games.
No sooner was Al Gore caught red handed with his huge home utility bills, did Suzuki (probably on advise from his PR guy James Hoggan) announce that "he was now stopping his twice per year trips to Australia to visit his friends there".
I assume that Hoggan advised him to just send the tickets to Australia so that his friends can visit him here in Canada instead....is safer that way, he won't get spotted on a plane this way....
Suzuki was travelling the country (it's really large out here) in a big bus to do his speeches but he's stopping that now too, Video presentations
is what he is now offering to his flock.
My biggest beef with the whole stinking mess is that CO2 is being sold now as a pollutant.
99% of the people that you talk about this subject have no idea about the following facts:
1. a CO2 free world would not be able to feed itself, trees, plants, wheat, fruit,veggies would not be able to grow.
2. CO2 levels in the atmosphere are a whopping 0.038%. Most people that I ask think that it is something like 40 or 50%
3. The most important greenhouse gas is? Watervapor....
None of this is explained in Al Gore's movie the Inconvenient Truth. All we see is the dreaded hockey stick graph, melting icebergs, smoking chimneys, crying polar bears and more stuff that works on peoples emotion so well, very Hollywood.
(By the way I heard that we have now 20,000 polar bears versus 5200 in 1970.....)
Here is my wish:
Could we check with a guy like Michael Moore if he could be pursueded to do a film on the BS that is being fed to us? He loves uncovering BS, he lives off that.
Loved his Fahrenheit 9/11, how he showed us the Bush Dynasty's links with the Saudies.
Moore is definitely a liberal, but so am I but I just don't buy the Al Gore BS that is being wheeled into our livingrooms every day.
It's a pity that Gore lost the Presidency back in 2000. We would have been spared of a lot of this AGW propaganda and we would not have the mess in Iraq either.
I can already see Michael Moore follow Al Gore with a Mike and a Camera asking him prickly questions, on why he refuses to be in a real debate on the topic of AGW with scientists.....
Keep up the good work Peter, I am a big fan of your site!
best regards,
Fred van der Velden
Langley, BC
Canada