Spreading Ignorance about Global Warming

Global warming deniers are really starting to annoy me. I've already compared them to Holocaust deniers because of their techniques and self-serving conflicts of interest.

Now I get to lump in the Media Research Center with them all. The MRC is a neutral, almost academic sounding institution that "tracks liberal media bias" ["liberal" used as a pejorative like commie] in their never-ending pursuit of "truth". They are a hyper-conservative spin organization whose regular emails inflame in me a clear sense of just how far the global corporate elites will go to maintain their stranglehold on power.

I enjoy the irony of rich, well-funded conservatives claiming there's a great media bias. With such intense corporate concentration of ownership in the media in the western world, there still exists a remnant of the liberal journalist. And I truly believe that many in the media are more liberal or left-wing than not, for why go into journalism if you don't believe in the responsibility of a free press for rooting out corruption, from the left or right.

And while self-censorship is clearly alive among journalists as they continually remember which corporate neofeudalist owns them and their work, there is occasionally some good work in the press.

But the MRC's approach to hunting down the liberal bias and balancing it out with another truth is astonishing sometimes. Today's missive from our MRC friends is called NBC's Today Show Champions Global Warming Alarmist. I strongly recommend reading the whole thing.

They introduce their criticism thusly:

On Monday's Today show, NBC's Bob Dotson profiled Will Steger, a polar explorer who is indoctrinating America's youth about "collapsing" ice shelves and global warming. Dotson never doubted the explorer's theories, instead he chose to portray Steger's crusade as nothing short of much needed charity work: "Pitching back in between and forth between the Poles, Will began to notice our warming world, wrote one of the first books about it. Now the old explorer has set himself a new challenge. Here in his home of the great northern Minnesota woods he's teaching the next generation how to rally support and solve the problem."

Dotson didn't ask any skeptical questions or air any soundbites from global warming critics, preferring to set up Steger to pontificate about climate change.

Misrepresenting controversy about global warming, opponents who gain from denying it do a disservice to the truth and humanity's responsibility to fix our mess by cleaning up how we are treating our planet like a sewer.

What the MRC doesn't get is what Amira Hass does get: "being fair and being objective are not the same thing. What journalism is really about--it's to monitor power and the centers of power." They don't get it because they reflect the centres of power.

Fairness in reporting does not mean treating both sides of an issue as equally merited with equal time to both. Demanding identical treatment mis-represents the merit of the argument for the global warming deniers who are wildly outnumbered and often funded by corporations that profit from global warming.

It's important to watch the MRC though, because watching the watchers helps us all. And to top it off today, I just joined Ann Coulter's email list. That should be exciting.