All the advocacy that’s fit to print
In what is perhaps the most shameless column I’ve ever read, Steve Outing advocates media advocacy in trade rag Editor & Publisher. He claims that the alternative to “objectivity” is “truth-telling”. The cause in which he says newspapers should ditch this objectivity? Why, climate change, of course.
I’ve … been thinking about the newspaper industry and global warming. And frankly, I don’t think newspapers are doing enough. Indeed, newspapers’ fabled commitment to “objectivity” has been a detriment to efforts to combat global warming.
The industry still has a lot of power to influence people. How about if newspapers abandon their old way of doing things when it comes to the issue of global warming, and turn their influence to good? It just might be that through this issue alone, newspapers revive themselves to some extent. Editors are shirking their responsibility to improve our world, in my view, so let’s change that.
What follows is a tortuous explanation of how the opposite of objectivity is not subjectivity, as simpletons might think. In fact, it is “truth-telling” and “advocacy.” I kid you not. This isn’t a publication defending its own editorial slant. This is a media trade publication recommending that newspapers in general abandon impartiality, and consider the often complex, often speculative debate on the causes, impact, severity and extent of climate change as settled fact. The issue now, he says, is what newspapers can do.
Outing is apparently unaware of embarrassments such as the Newsweek column that took the original global cooling advocacy mag’s more recent cover story on global warming to pieces as “vast oversimplification of a messy story” and “a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading”. He sustains his argument for some time, before making just a teensy weensy mistake:
Advocacy has gotten a bad name in modern news media. I would argue that climate change is too important of an issue squander the power of the news media. Newspapers can and should not only educate people about what they can do, but pro-actively lead and encourage behavior change. That will mean setting aside a time-honored journalistic practice — for this one vital issue.
If his argument held any water at all, why would newspapers need to “get over objectivity”, but only “for this one vital issue”?
A newspaper (or any media for that matter) being impartial? Now there’s a pig levitating over my head!
This is an interesting reading of the article.
What he is saying is that pseudo-objectivity of the kind that requires reporting contrary views whether they make sense or not is a cop-out. The same thing happened with the tobacco “controversy”. Despite the fact that the link between smoking and cancer was known since the 1930s and the evidence since then had become so convincing that the tobacco companies closed their own research labs in the 1980s because they could come up with nothing helpful, the press continued to report the matter as a “controversy”.
Why?
Because someone with deep pockets was stoking the “controversy” largely by propaganda techniques, and the press was too thick to see through this.
Climate change is shaping up much the same way. Most of the contrary science does not stand up to detailed scrutiny. Journalists aren’t scientists, and are not willing to go the extra mile to understand this stuff, so they take the easy way out and claim “objectivity” by reporting the denial side as if it had equal weight to carefully-reasoned science based on massive data sets and careful cross-checking to minimize error.
If they were really taking “objectivity” seriously, rather than taking the IPCC vs. the deniers as the only sides to the debate, they would also give the more scary possibilities the IPCC has excluded, like a rapid collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet equal time (5m sea level rise). But no advocacy group is feeding the press with stories on that, so it gets ignored. And guess what? Although the science on that is by no means settled, it is a lot more convincing than the “denial” science.
Oh, and by the way, the “global cooling” scare was just that, a scare, largely invented by the press. Find the large body of scientific literature making this claim and report back, if you don’t believe me. Just because Newsweek got it wrong once doesn’t mean they have it wrong again. Poor logic, worthy of a journalist. :)
Many news sources like the BBC and The Guardian is already treating one side of the climate change debate as an accepted fact and skeptics as fringe lunatics.
It doesn’t matter if the science is correct one way or the other, but as long as the atmospheric science professors at MIT and Colorado as well as another at least 10,000 qualified scientists disagree it remains the media’s journalistic duty to report the controversy from both sides. Just because the IPCC, a massively funded body whose whole existence relies on climate change being an issue say it’s a problem doesn’t mean the science is settled.
The debate is not settled, it is never settled, that’s science. We need to more research before we pretend to be able to predict the weather for more than six months from now, and good publications should always take this into account.
Hi Philip,
You claim: “What he is saying is that pseudo-objectivity of the kind that requires reporting contrary views whether they make sense or not is a cop-out.” But that’s not the case. He goes much further than that, proposing that newspapers advocate the truth of a theory, that they accept an appeal to “consensus” establishes scientific truth, and that they exhort their readers to action “to help the planet”.
The truth or otherwise of the theory is irrelevant. It remains scientific theory, and a newspaper is in no position to prove it, nor to act as if it is gospel. Scientists themselves know this full well. One survey I recall from a few years ago found that two-thirds of more than 500 climate scientists surveyed did not believe that they knew enough to come to a reasonable conclusion on the effects of greenhouse gases, and half said the science isn’t settled enough to permit making informed policy.
Besides, the only serious attempts I have seen that critique the “contrary science” have been pretty spotty. I have also not seen answers to the very real criticisms about scientific method among the pro-crisis scientists. Some examples that make me very suspicious (and should raise serious doubt among scientists) include:
Yet predictions from climate models that are incomplete, complex to the point of chaos theory, ultra-sensitive to variations in input data, and “tuned” to produce “expected” output, are held up as serious science.
The usual critique of the “contrary science” is the critique you offer: that it must be “propaganda” paid for by “someone with deep pockets”. That is, the usual critiques do not address the facts or the arguments, but consist almost entirely of ad hominem attacks or imputing pecuniary motives to skeptics. As if climate change researchers don’t in reality have far deeper pockets than any climate skeptic will ever have. As if they don’t have at least as significant a vested interest in maintaining the huge funding base and supporting bureaucracy that has sprung up around the issue.
As for Newsweek’s flip-flopping, the cooling scare certainly was based on statements by influential scientists such as Stephen Schneider and Cesare Emiliani, as well as scientific bodies such as the National Science Board and National Academy of Sciences. There is, of course, no logical connection between its claim then and its claims today, as you correctly point out. However, it does speak to the credibility (and gullibility) of the magazine.
However, as I said, the issue here isn’t the strength of the theory, and the evidently opposing sides we take on this point. The issue is whether newspapers, should turn to advocacy over climate change, rather than maintain their tradition of objective reporting. Many would argue that most media have abandoned all pretence at impartiality on the subject years ago.
Journal industry is not science industry, it doesn’t save the world like superman, and it becomes a waste after you have read on it contains only messy report, like some tabloids. But at least, they entertain us. Some newspapers do have influences, they bring attention to important political events which changes our lives. Some editorials are able to change opions too. Your opions may change the editorial direction of some newspapers. Does the National Geography Magazine reports what you like and need?
Global warming issue is important since the global population is expanding and consumes too much of resource and we have only one Earth.