Don Aitkin, foundation chairman of the Australian Research Council and former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Canberra. Provides a much needed counterpoint.....
I listened last week to an astonishingly ignorant radio interview of a professor of journalism who had measured the proportion of news stories in the Australian press that dealt with ‘climate change’ between 2011 and 2012 in the same three-month periods, and had discovered not only that the numbers declined over the period but that the proportion that seemed sceptical in tone had risen. ‘Quite extraordinary’, said the professor, and went on to say that scientists and journalists were both seekers after the truth, and when 97.4 per cent of scientists said that human beings were caused climate change, and they (the scientists) are truthful, why would newspapers be saying in effect that ‘climate change’ was a matter of open debate?
Read the rest at the link.
Last night I said Wendy Bacon should resign from teaching journalists at the University of Technology, Sydney.
My reasons:
Her new report on media coverage of global warming notes in approval a ban by Fairfax newspapers on articles by people sceptical of the so-called “consensus” position on catastrophic man-made warming.Bacon is critical of News Corp editors for letting me write articles critical of the consensus position.Bacon’s report devotes pages to criticising my writing on global warming issues without once identifying a mistake. The implication is that my error lies simply having a bad opinion - one that many (but very far from all) climate scientists don’t share.
Bacon is advocating not reporting but a shutting down of debate. A closing of the mind.
This is promoting not journalism but propaganda.
Totally agree! It is embarrassing that she is a professor in an Australian University and it is no wonder that most journalists nowadays have been reduced to regurgitating press releases, rather than doing any original investigation or analysis of their own!
ReplyDeleteIt's a sorry state that journalism has gotten to in our country.
ReplyDeleteSurely the foremost interests of the journalist should be to seek and provide the public with coverage of all sides of an issue. When the issue is as large and complex as what influence that humans might have on the ever-changing climate of planet Earth, there are genuine questions to be asked. Hugely expensive research and modelling have seen notable errors in many major climate predictions.
Bacon demonstrates a closed mind approach. It seems she eschews debate on any aspects of the issues of past and present predictions of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. That she is of an ilk that shapes and influences our future journalists is scary indeed.