Saturday, March 24, 2018

When "Balance" Really isn't Balanced: An Example of Right-Wing Media Bias


Have you ever noticed a bias against climate change science in many of Canada’s newspapers?  I’ll give you a great example I saw recently in the Edmonton Sun in a column by its notorious right-wing columnist Lorne Gunter. In an article titled “CLIMATE CHANGE ALARMISTS: Cherry-picking facts about weather extremes to make their climate danger arguments”, Gunter of course makes much of the fact that there was more snow on March 3 than there had been in 25 years, followed by the coldest March 4 in 22 years.

Then there is a deceptive flash of intelligence: “Fine, I know, weather is not climate. But…when weather extremes fit the alarmists’ climate-change theory, we’re told it proves the environmental science is settled. But when the weather doesn’t reinforce their panicky message, it’s dismissed as meaningless.” [ Unfortunately, however, the inconvenient truth is that the past couple of harsher-than-usual winters actually do fit the theory. Warmer air being funneled to the poles by the Earth’s convection currents has caused sea ice to melt that had previously been holding the polar vortex in place. As a result, the vortex has weakened and drifted south, yielding longer, harsher winters for most of North America.]  Then Gunter lets loose an unsubstantiated whopper: “For decades now, the sun’s activity has been on the increase. Solar scientists predict it will now lessen for a couple (or three) decades. And as it lessens, global temperatures should fall , too. ..We can shut every coal plant on earth, ban SUVs and force everyone to ride transit, and it will have negligible impact on climate.”   

Here is the funny part: on the opposing page is an article by PostMedia’s science writer Hina Alam,  in which she interviews Katherine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, stating that the sun’s energy has been measured very accurately for about 4 decades now, and that its energy has been going down over the last few decades, once you control for the 11-year sunspot cycle: the precise opposite of what Gunter asserts. “So if we are being controlled by the sun’s energy right now, we should have been getting cooler, not warmer.”  Her facts are easily corroborated by NASA and university scientists.  “Humans are controlling the climate, and that means that our choices will determine our future.”

Now, here is the more subtle and insidious part: if you were to complain to the Editors of the Sun about Gunter’s error (prevarication?), they would point out that it was they who placed Alam’s report on the same page as Gunter’s column, and the interview with Hayhoe on the opposing page. Gunter is an opinion columnist and is therefore entitled to his opinion, and they also made the opposing opinion about climate change available to their readers, who could then make up their own minds.  What’s wrong with that?  Well, here’s what’s wrong with that: providing equal space to two different scientific “truths”--flat and round Earth, evolution and creation, sunlight falling or increasing,---  is not the same thing as providing a balance of opinion. Accurate measurements and scientific consensus should provide the common basis upon which  reasonable discussion and difference of opinion takes place, so that truth can be advanced. Instead, we get a complete relativization of truth itself--the kind of “fair and balanced” journalism more worthy of  Fox Television than a respectable Canadian news outlet.  Would the same media  relativize objective facts congenial to the right-wing point of view  in this fashion?  We should ask: who are the real cherry-pickers, and how are they operating?