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.

Labels: Activism, Class War, Corporations, Ecology, Environment, Holocaust, Imperialism, Media, Neoliberal Economics, Society