Dear Big Effing Media:
Is there any possibility, any at all, that you will ever stop giving newspaper ink and broadcast minutes to the ignoramuses, liars, and greedheads who continue to contend that climate change is bad science or an outright hoax concocted by scientists getting rich off grant money?
Look, it makes sense for you to interview people who have a difference of opinion about how the climate crisis should be dealt with. For instance, whether nuclear power should be part of any transformation to 100 percent clean energy is an issue that divides scientists and environmental activists. As are the details of a Green New Deal or Green Marshall Plan. These and a host of other matters regarding our desperately needed energy transformation deserve to be explored and debated in detail. And you can be sure there are more than two sides to that exploration and debate.
But for you to ask the usual suspects for the zillionth time to poison the public sphere with their latest version of climate science denial is not “bringing balance” to the story, but rather destructive journalistic malpractice. Your news anchors and print reporters don’t give Nazis a platform to call the Holocaust a myth or claim Jewish bankers run the world. Why then do you treat with deference climate science deniers—whose policy prescriptions, if followed, could wipe out a significant portion of our and other species? They are nothing more than fossil-fuel puppets and propagandists. You, on the other hand, are supposed to have higher standards.
So, for everybody’s sake, can you stop your contribution to this relentless flow of disinformation? Or am I, as I suspect, just wasting my time even mentioning this to you?
With genuine disgust,
Meteor Blades
(30+-year newspaper veteran)
Michael Molitch-Hou at Common Dreams writes—CNN's Anderson Cooper Cancels Segment With Climate Report Author to Give Rick Santorum More Air Time:
Katharine Hayhoe, the director of the Texas Tech Climate Science Center, has been vocal about the Trump administration’s shameful response to its own recent report on climate change. In part, that’s because she helped write it. [...]
Someone who is so well-placed to rebut the lies being put out by the White House about its report would seem like an ideal person for cable news shows to feature. But cable news is, well, cable news. That could explain why a recent segment Hayhoe taped for CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 didn’t air during the show’s initial broadcast, and instead got bumped online. The show did, however, find time to air more climate-denying commentary from far-right former-senator-turned-CNN-commentator Rick Santorum. Priorities, right? [...]
Yet instead of airing Hayhoe’s interview on TV, CNN allowed Santorum to repeat on the lie that climate scientists are in it for the money, while acknowledging “a crisis”. Santorum told Cooper, “There would be no chair of the head of climate studies at every university in America if we didn’t have a crisis. These people make money because there's a crisis.”
Santorum became a CNN senior political commentator in January 2017 and is paid to regularly espouse right-wing views, only occasionally disagreeing with the Republican line. Media Matters for America pointed out that, while Hayhoe was not paid anything for her participation in the creation of the National Climate Assessment, Santorum received $763,331 in Senate campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry between 1995 to 2007. Santorum also serves as a consultant for Consol, a gas and coal company in Pennsylvania.
“I did [the interview with Cooper] because I thought it was so important,” Hayhoe told Common Dreams. “I understand breaking news and this is absolutely not the first time this has happened… The kicker is that they gave more airtime to Rick Santorum instead. That was really the issue… I understand if something doesn’t fit in the program and you have to put it on later, but to say a climate scientist is on clearing the air and fact checking previous statements made on CNN—there’s no time for that but there is time for that same person to get on and provide further disinformation that was the problem… Why give somebody more air to say more false statements if you really are a news program and you care about factual accuracy?”
Hayhoe went on to explain that interviews she was meant to conduct for All In with Chris Hayes in the past had also been canceled three times, “once when I was literally in a chair with that earpiece in my ear.” In July of this year, Hayes actually tweeted that climate change was a “palpable ratings killer,” when explaining why one of her segments had been dropped for a breaking news story. [...]