Wednesday 6 July 2011

American professors: Newspapers should not try to be objective on global warming

The Reuters news agency continues its climate change crusade. This time they have given two European warmist newspaper editors, Dutch Peter Vandermeersch and Belgian Wouter Verschelden, an opportunity to praise European media and criticize US media for being too friendly to opponents of the climate change orthodoxy:

For Peter Vandermeersch, editor-in chief at the traditionally conservative daily NRC Handelsblad in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, there is no debate about climate change.
"Absolutely, that's a given," he said. "The conviction has grown that climate change does exist, and that humans play a major role in how it evolves."
"There's almost no discussion about it," agreed Wouter Verschelden, editor-in-chief at the progressive daily De Morgen in Brussels, Belgium. "The nonbelievers have been marginalized, and they aren't taken seriously anymore. We don't have to convince our readers anymore of the fact that there is climate change, and that it's caused by humans."


According to Vandermeersch and Verschelden, who are both alumni of Columbia University's vaunted Journalism School in New York, American news media still make the mistake of giving climate skeptics a disproportionate voice and perpetuating a debate that has long been settled among scientists.
"In a sense, you're lying to your readers," says Verschelden. "You're creating a 'he said, she said' story, and looking for an argument that just doesn't always exist."

It has apparently not been difficult for the writer, Tom Vandyck, to get hold of two alarmist professors, who wholeheartedly share the the view of these European climate change believers:

the Europeans' position has merit, says Max Boykoff, a professor at the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research in Boulder, who has done extensive research on the issue.
"Within the top U.S. daily print media there has been this reliance on the journalistic norm of balanced reporting that worked to the detriment of accurately reporting whether or not humans contribute to climate change," he said. "I found over in the U.K. press, that hasn't been as much of an influence — in fact, that they’ve been reporting it quite accurately."
"I think the objectivity standard that U.S. newspapers apply has probably outlived its usefulness on this particular issue," said Mark Neuzil, a professor of environmental communication at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. "At some point you're not being a decent and good journalist when you're giving equal weight when 97 percent say one thing, and 3 percent say the other, unless you point that out really clearly."

Read the entire article here

The two naive Dutch and Belgian editors are, of course, typical representatives of the politically correct, often anti-American views of many mainstream European dailies. And the two American professors are shining examples of what´s wrong with the academic establishment in the US today. All four have a very strong common denominator: utter stupidity. They just do not know what they are talking about.

If you want to send professor Boykoff a message, he can be reached here:
boykoff@colorado.edu

Neuzil can be reached here:
mrneuzil@stthomas.edu


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