Media “balance” unbalances climate debate

The corporate-funded propaganda campaign designed to hoodwink the public and prevent any concerted public action on climate change has been remarkably successful… An article by Naomi Oreskes in Science in 2005 studying global climate change articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 found 928 peer-reviewed scientific articles on global climate change, ALL of which pointed to human-caused climate change… Although attempts were made by climate deniers to criticize Oreskes’s findings, no one could locate a single peer-reviewed science article taking issue with the global scientific consensus on human-generated climate change in order to disprove her results, since such an article did not exist… Yet a 2004 study by the brothers Jules and Max Boykoff in the Global Environmental Change, entitled “Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the U.S. Prestige Press,” demonstrated that in the four leading newspapers studied (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times) a majority of the articles (53 percent) between 1988 and 2002 presented a scientist on one side, and a corporate-friendly spokesperson (usually not a scientist, and invariably someone removed from climate science research) on the other.

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