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The media influence public opinion about climate change, but not as much as national politicians and the state of the economy do, according to a new analysis of eight years of polling data.
Over time, activists have pointed their fingers in many directions while trying to explain society’s failure to address the threat of climate change. Scientists, policymakers, captains of industry, advocates, and the weather have all been blamed for the nation’s general indifference to the matter, but journalists seem to shoulder a particularly large share of blame.
Take a recent a statement by James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the country’s preeminent climatologists, who has become a vocal campaigner for reducing heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.
What Drives Public Opinion About Climate Change? : CJR
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“Public doubt about the science is not an accident,” he wrote in a personal letter posted online at the end of January. “People profiting from business-as-usual fossil use are waging a campaign to discredit the science” by manipulating the news:
Today most media, even publicly-supported media, are pressured to balance every climate story with opinions of contrarians, climate change deniers, as if they had equal scientific credibility. Media are dependent on advertising revenue of the fossil fuel industry, and in some cases are owned by people with an interest in continuing business as usual.
#1 - Tue Feb 21, 2012 7:22 PM ESTMost people are the 'gotta see it to believe it' not counting all the he said/he said stuff. But this winter is weird. Western KY where I'm at 1/2 inch of snow once. The winter wheat (farm country) is already about 3 inches tall In February!....Some of the farmers are worrying this is going to be a 'dry' summer for them too. Has happened.
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#2 - Tue Feb 21, 2012 7:30 PM ESTPart of media's role in the confusion is the equal weight they give to both deniers and AGW advocates. Yet the science is not even close to being balanced. The evidence supporting AGW vastly out weighs in volume and quality of work the denier work. Yet the average person does not get this information from the media. They are presented as being equally valid arguments.
- 1 vote
#3 - Wed Feb 22, 2012 9:39 PM ESTYou're in Easy Mode. If you prefer, you can use XHTML Mode instead. |
