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Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Is accurate reporting dead?

  Given that our society has become so dependent on handouts, entitlements, government grants, it seems our institutions, particularly those who report the news, cannot free themselves from ideological bias.
  Take, for example, the issue of climate change. So much money follows this issue of the year that it becomes quite profitable to claim that our world is going to fall apart unless we create this new religion of global warming, complete with high priest (soon to be billionaire) Al Gore and his acolytes, who also receive government subsidies.
  The alternate media, the NEW media, is now doing the job of reporting the truth. Powerline has the background behind the hysterical scientists who recently wrote to Congress begging for more attention (and funding) for their pet project which coincidentally will benefit them.
  In response to the hysterical scientists' plea is a letter from 36 scientists refuting the claim of global warming. Powerline:
Do they provide any real-world evidence of Earth's seas inundating coastal lowlands around the globe? No. Increased human mortality? No. Plant and animal extinctions? No. Declining vegetative productivity? No. More frequent and deadly coral bleaching? No. Marine life dissolving away in acidified oceans? No.

Quite to the contrary, in fact, these reports provide extensive empirical evidence that these things are not happening. And in many of these areas, the referenced papers report finding just the opposite response to global warming, i.e., biosphere-friendly effects of rising temperatures and rising CO2 levels.
Also on Powerline is an amusing little piece about the NY Times latest gullible reporting of magical thinking:
NY Times: In an article on Jan. 16 about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola erroneously reported a story about cows falling from planes, as an example of risks in any engineering endeavor. No cows, smuggled or otherwise, ever fell from a plane into a Japanese fishing rig. The story is an urban legend, and versions of it have been reported in Scotland, Germany, Russia and other locations.
    Powerline: Aren't newspapers supposed to employ editors, in part to prevent reporters from falling for urban legends? Sometimes one gets the sense that both reporters and editors at the New York Times are pathologically deficient in skepticism.
Then we come to Huffington again, who is taking over the reins at AOL to create a huge conglomerate of liberal news reporting, as if we don't have enough of that already. Bloomberg:
“Yes, she’s got political views, but gosh, look how political views have worked for Fox,” Enderle said in an interview. “There’s certainly the opportunity to create a much more powerful liberal voice in the country. The fact that it hasn’t been done yet, doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”
  It seems Fox's success is the excuse for all these liberal organizations to completely expose their true leanings, only waaaay out in the open now. 
  What they fail to understand is that Fox is partly so popular BECAUSE they present an alternative to the liberal swill we are subjected to every minute of every day. In addition, though their hosts (Hannity, Beck) are particularly partisan, their news reporting is fairly moderate, often with the dissenting liberal viewpoint part of the story. In addition, the talking heads who represent the liberal point of view tend to be more reasonable than, say, the Ed Schultz type of liberal (if we don't count Marc Lamont Hill).
  IOW, they've got the model wrong. Those viewers who watch Fox simply do not feel they have a voice in the discussion in the MSM, hence Fox. 
  So good luck with that, New York Times (failing business model).
  Good luck with that AOL (lousy and failing business model).
  We've seen your kind already. We know what it's like.

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