Full disclosure. I’ve worked in television and radio for 30 years, and I’ve seen many examples of bias in my time. Bernard Goldberg, who was a reporter for the CBS Evening News, documents even more in his book at left.
After this story, there’s example of a pattern for what peaked in the 10:10 video. – Anthony
Exploding Children in Eco-Group’s Video Fails to Upset Liberal News Media
Shocking British short to promote cutting carbon emissions shows skeptics being blown up for not participating.
By Julia A. Seymour
Business & Media Institute
10/6/2010 3:11:11 PM
Red is the new green, according to a horrific short film put together by global warming alarmists in Britain for 10:10 a “Global Day of Doing.” Blood red that is.
The group 10:10 UK’s “No Pressure” video advertisement that was intended to promote its cause begins with a teacher lecturing her students: “Just before you go there’s a brilliant idea in the air that I’d like to run by you. Now it’s called 10:10 – the idea is that everyone starts cutting their carbon emissions by 10 percent, thus keeping the planet safe for everyone, eventually.”
Preaching global warming alarmism to children is nothing shocking, but the next part of the film was. The teacher singles out the two students who are skeptical about participating, presses a red button and BLAM! those children’s bodies explode as blood and guts cover their classmates.
Skeptical soccer players, businesspeople and even actress Gillian Anderson all get blown up in the “disturbing” video for not complying with the wishes of the global warming crowd.
The violent depiction may be a new low for the environmental movement, but its violent rhetoric has been in use for years. Yet, the response from the liberal news media in the U.S. has been minimal, despite the willingness of the same outlets to portray – without a shred of evidence – conservatives as “incendiary” and violent.
Despite the horrific nature of the video and the message that skeptics should be killed, the television news media, with the exception of Fox News, haven’t reported on it as of October 5.
The New York Times has run a couple of articles on its website, and James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal wrote a strong condemnation October 5 of the “green supremacists” that created the video. But, so far at least, much of the national news media have ignored the controversy.
The video was outrageous enough to upset even climate-change extremist Bill McKibben, who called it “the kind of stupidity that hurts our side.” Taranto said that the video had “drawn lots of criticism, much of which to our mind is not strong enough.” Perhaps he had the Time magazine’s blog headline in mind which callously read: “Blowing Up British Kids: Not Everyone’s Cup of Tea.”
But compare the minimal, isolated journalistic condemnation of such a violent and shocking film, to the volume of news stories portraying tea partiers and conservatives violent, without any proof whatsoever. On March 25, NBC’s Ann Curry harangued Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., about Republicans “encouraging the violence” against Democrats.
Curry specifically cited a map from former Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin’s website that had shown weak Democratic districts in crosshairs. She pressed McCain saying “Do you know, recommend that your party use less incendiary language?”
McCain replied that terms like “targeted” and “battleground” are part of the “political lexicon.” Such terms have been long used by both parties and by the news media without concern of actual violence, yet Curry declared “These are very dangerous times.”
A few days after that “Today” interview, CNN condemned Palin with an onscreen caption that read: “INCITING VIOLENCE?” as Palin was showing speaking in Nevada.
Anchor Don Lemon said on March 28, “Sarah Palin takes on one of the highest ranking Democrats right in his own backyard, all while causing another uproar by urging tea parties to quote ‘reload.’ And the question is, are comments like that inciting violence and name-calling over the health care bill and the like?” The panelists that answered that question agreed that Obama’s political opponents were inciting violence and were motivated by racism.
But Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen took the criticism of conservatives to an absurd level on October 5 by arguing that the Tea Party movement is like those responsible for the 1970 Kent State shooting. Cohen claimed a “language of rage” fuels the Tea Party and took shots at Glenn Beck and New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino.
Violent Video, an Attempt at Humor?
After sparking outrage over the violent video, 10:10 pulled the video and issued an apology which read in part: “At 10:10 we’re all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change. Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark … Oh well, we live and learn.”
The 10:10 UK climate group, which has several corporate sponsors including Sony, Kyocera Mita and O2, along with a number of celebrity supporters, claimed the video was supposed to be humorous. 10:10 said its sponsors did not have prior knowledge of the video and Sony issued a statement condemning the video as “ill-conceived and tasteless” and said they were “disassociating” from the group.
Kyocera Mita is reconsidering its partnership with 10:10 and said they were “very shocked by the movie.”
“We wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst making people laugh,” said more of 10:10’s apology. But is humor a valid defense for portraying the murder of people who disagree with you?
That was the basic defense Jim Edwards of CBS Interactive’s BNet gave for the video. Edwards said, “No one but the most extreme climate change denier believes this is actually what environmentalists want. It’s obviously just a joke outrageous enough to actually get people’s attention.”
WSJ’s Taranto wrote that “one may hope that Jim Edwards is right when he denies that ‘this is actually what environmentalists want.’ But it’s bad enough that this is what they fantasize about — and that they manifestly felt no inhibition about airing such a depraved fantasy in public.”
Full editorial here
=========================================================
This incident would be simply a bad aberration if it were not for the fact that we have had a string of such blunders from the green movement.
Let’s go all the way back to 1990, where the National Resources Defense Council uses a group of babies, a John Lennon song, and Tom cruise, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, and Demi Moore to push what they are selling.
By itself, harmless. But it does represent the beginning of a trend in the global warming movement with these two points; be afraid for the children, and pay attention to clueless celebrities. It is a theme that has been repeated again and again.
For example in 2006, we had a little girl that was going to be run over by a freight train if we didn’t do something about climate change:
Here’s another from 2006 called “Tick” using dozens of children:
While I can’t be certain, it looks like they may have used the same child actress for both of these. Compare:
Then we have this difficult to watch Finnish TV ad from Greenpeace showing a baby that could drown in a bathtub if we don’t do something about climate change
There’s the drowning puppy bedtime story from ACT ON CO2:
Then they move on to the beloved animals committing suicide:
Plane Stupid’s Polar bears falling from the sky commercial:
We have this disturbing child rant from Greenpeace:
Then we had this disturbing and insulting ad showing a swarm of planes attacking New York City to promote WWF’s view:
“The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it.”
Yes, there’s a whole lineage of shocking, angry, tasteless, and disturbing videos from the NGO’s that take donations and turn it into pure propaganda.
But we’re the crazy ones.
UPDATE: I forgot to add this one, probably the most offensive one, from the 2009 Cannes film festival.
Source: http://www.act-responsible.org/ACT/ACTINCANNES/THEEXPO2009.htm
Act responsible?
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Curiousgeorge,
I believe tallbloke is saying that he is charged for the access to TV as are all people there. He got rid of his TV so shouldn’t need to pay any longer. As a typical bureaucracy they will not accept his word for his no longer having a TV and will come ONSITE whether voluntary or not to CHECK.
Think of your cable box and the Cable company as PART of the gubmint and what they would get up to with that kind of authority!!!
jeez says:
October 7, 2010 at 2:14 pm
For those who fawn over Chomsky as a “great intellectual” and not simply an academic PT Barnum I strongly suggest reading The Anti-Chomsky Reader for a little insight.
===============
I think the authors of the Anti-Chomsky reader stand to Noam Chomsky in a very similar intellectual relation as the producers of the 1010 blowup video stand to, say, Richard Lindzen.
Google the phrase:
“long march through the institutions gramsci”
and follow the links. The leaders of the left may not be informed about natural science, but they do understand propaganda and psychological tricks. For example, Google:
obama nlp filetype:pdf
The internet should allow more rational people to organize a counter-march. There are a few talented media people such as Andrew Breitbart that can offer technical and strategic advice. The take-down of ACORN was instructive. He could introduce someone like Roy W. Spencer to far more people than the current informed minority.
The control of public information is extensive, and a generation will be required to have any strong effect.
“Red is the new green”
Wrong, green is the new Red !
Great article.
Also read “Does increased solar activity lead to global cooling” by Lubos Motl
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/10/does-increased-solar-activity-lead-to.html#more
This article is not off topic because he lashes out at (Bias) Richard Black
Thanks. That said, who the hell would acquiesce to that? It’s none of the gov’ts business whether I have a TV or not. I contract with a cable company to buy their programing, but that is completely different than simply having a TV or 2. What kind of government intrudes itself into that level of personal lives? Communist? Totalitarian? Do they apply the same rule to other forms of communication (web, radio, phone ) and other appliances?
Well bad on me – after ripping on print media for missing the boat Forbes publishes this:
http://blogs.forbes.com/warrenmeyer/2010/10/07/why-blowing-up-kids-seemed-like-a-good-idea/#post_comments
I dunno. The phrase ‘bias’ implies you can determine what is neutral. People alwasy accuse the media of being biased in the opposite direction to what they happen to think. The comments here are selective, piling up evidence that reds and greens are violent. One could just as easily produce a damning indictment of conservatives, including their defense of torture, the invasion of Iraq, and so on.
Hate crime only applies with the media or liberal organizations force police to make it so. If an atheist attacks a fundamentalist Christian because he is a Christian, it is not a hate crime; if a fundamentalist Christian attacks an atheist only because he is an atheist, it is a hate crime. If a black person attacks a white person because he is white, it is not a hate crime; if a white person attacks a black person because he is black, it is a hate crime. Since the global warming movement is led by liberals, any attacks by it is not a hate crime but any attacks against it is a hate crime.
All this is true. A few years ago, here in North Carolina a black stripper accused the Duke LaCrosse team of raping her. The local district attorney called the Duke LaCrosse team thugs. The NAACP and Al Sharpton held rallies denouncing the team. The accuser even received a college scholarship. Then the evidence came out. Even though the LaCrosse team should have never hired a stripper, they did not rape her. The local DA was removed in disgrace. To this day, the NAACP has yet to apologize for their actions against the Duke LaCrosse team. Yet has the NAACP been held accountable for their actions? No.
And so it goes. The only time when the media is riled up is when the left leaning PC crowd determines it to be so. Even when AGW is disgraced, these people will never be held accountable for their slander and actions.
Anthony and Mods, you’ve been working overtime on this one.
Thank you very much, the value of your contribution cannot be overstated. We are all very appreciative of your time spent on our behalf. Cheers, Charles the Dr.P.H.
But – but – but – the real question here is whether any animals were harmed in the making of this production …
(Sorry if somebody’s already done this one, I didn’t have time to check all the entries above. If I doubled up I will volunteer to be the next one exploded.)
Some clips on the role of the media by Noam Chomsky:
On the beauty of “concision” in the media (3 min clip):
His comments here would perfectly apply to what would happen if you went on a mainstream tv show and said that climate change is basically an industry based on a fraud – with no time to give evidence for it.
Chomsky on the Liberal media (5 min clip)
Andrew Marr interviews Chomsky on the media (interview starts at about 4:10). This is more in depth.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4827358238697503#
Chomsky on the media, democrats, republicans (C-Span)
Left/right political bickering will always be the same big yawn it has always been. Natural climate oscillations, on the other hand, are absolutely fascinating.
Has anybody considered that even if everybody DID reduce their carbon footprint by 10%, as soon as we had 10% more people we’d be right back where we were? So what then? Blow EVERYBODY up?
Their lack of logic is legendary. Their lack of introspection is phenomenally amazing!
Someone said “For his work on linguistics, linguistic philosophy, and philosophy of mind, Chomsky is universally recognized as one of the sharpest minds of the 20th century.”
His work on linguistics is already in the dustbin. His linguistic philosophy was banal at best. There are tons of good books explaining the meaningfulness of grammar contra Chomsky. Start with Whorf. Grammar is not, as Chomsky postulated, an innate human mechanism that mindlessly transforms a “deep meaning” into a grammatically correct sentence. Rather, grammar, like other levels of language, is built from categories. The basic reason Chomsky doesn’t understand linguistic categories is that his relativistic philosophy precludes an understanding of conceptualism.
————-
Eric (skeptic),
Your last sentence is wonderful. I think it shows you don’t love Kant and his apologists (including the linguists). I don’t love old Kant and his >200 yrs of fellow travelers. : )
Oh, basically I agree with you on Chomsky.
John
Ian in the UK: “If only it could be done, it would pull the rug out from under the whole AGW case at a stroke. Just imagine, every ad that mentioned “carbon”, “emissions”, “footprint” etc. would have to be withdrawn, plus the media would be simply stopped in its tracks.
Is it just a dream or is there someone out there who can work out how to do it?”
What you need is some hard-hitting media product that doesn’t pull its punches, something that will explode across the internet and into the mainstream media.
I’m not in the creative media, but there must be people around who can come up with some ideas to achieve this sort of effect.
I think Goldberg’s best analysis is that what is most important is not that they are biased, but that they don’t even realize that they are biased. A condition that can only be incubated in the echo chambers of the ‘journalism’ schools like Columbia and NYU.
A mental (non-linguistic) categorization of the world has to precede the emergence of human language, not the other way around.
So the concepts a language develops are determined by the needs of the medium where it developped.
A lack of a specific word for a concept or object has never prevented the concept from being grasped (and named) once it emerges.
But a lack of a concept or object does indeed prevent the creation of a word for it.
It is remarkable that in spite of the huge differences in medium and culture where a langage develops, they all have words for common concepts and objects, with extremely similar categorizations, and even more remarkable that the underlying structures are so similar.
We really don’t have much of an idea how human language emerged, or how fast it was ingrained in our brains. But we know it IS there, dormant, when we are born, to be awaken very quickly by just very fragmentary and very incomplete exposure to it. In that sense, it is totally innate. If you believe it is entirely put there by those you learn it from, try putting it there in the head of a chimp, see how far you can get beyond, “Me, Banana, More” kind of messages.
Whorf’s ideas strike me as banal when not obviously circular. He observes what any young student of a foreign language observes right away: that certain concepts are much more finely split in some languages than others, and sometimes concepts for which a word exists in one language, lack a word in another. He concludes that the vision of the world a person has, is somewhat (or heavily) influenced by his language, which may be trivially true in some ways, though he offers no real proof of it other than the fact that the linguistic differences themselves exist. But if a language lacks a specific noun for “sibling”, or possesses a specific verb for “getting up before sunrise” or “befriending one’s sister’s best friend” etc, it does not follow AT ALL that a speaker of a language lacking those words cannot grasp or express the concepts. If that were the case, nobody could learn a foreign language.
I once knew a person who was planning on writing a thesis demonstrating how the absence of a grammatical gender in English rendered its speakers inherently fairer to women. She commented with great seriousness that, since the word for “kitchen” is feminine in Latin-based languages, this will tend to give more naturalness to its being a woman’s place, and so on. That’s the logical path Whorf leads people to. I didn’t even know good old Whorf made a comeback.
Rod McLaughlin says:
October 7, 2010 at 3:23 pm
I dunno. The phrase ‘bias’ implies you can determine what is neutral. People always accuse the media of being biased in the opposite direction to what they happen to think. The comments here are selective, piling up evidence that reds and greens are violent. One could just as easily produce a damning indictment of conservatives, including their defense of torture, the invasion of Iraq, and so on.
I know bias
Bias is a strong inclination of the mind or a preconceived opinion about something or someone. The liberals and the supporters in the media are quick to point out examples of racial bias but do see themselves as biased reporters of other issues that are conservative. There is a simple reason, they were educated in colleges and universities across which only hire liberal professors. Their experiences in higher education classrooms have convinced them that the liberal politics are really mainstream and centrist. Therefore they are not biased in reporting events they perceive as they are middle of the road. The 10:10 video is not worthy of comment because from their point of view the message in not ultra left wing.
The question you raise is a good one. Bias you say implies that there is a standard which one can use to judge whether the reporting is biased. Bias can be a matter of degree. Mel Gibson has been accused of being prejudiced against African Americans when he got is a verbal confrontation with his current wife by using words that are offensive to African Americans. Is he biased or is he careless? Generally there seemed to be a consensus that he probably is not against African Americans although a significant number of people who were offended would not agree. Whose standard applies?
How does society decide who is biased in reporting if there is no standard? If major politician used the N word in speaking about African Americans in speech, the majority of the black community would be demanding that the politician be removed because he or she is unfit to represent constituents. The basis for deciding what is biased is the opinion of the people it is directed towards, in this case the African American population. If this hypothetical event was not reported by the mainstream press, the black community could argue that the press is biased.
The 10:10 video offended many of us who seek the scientific truth about the causes and impacts of global warming. We think it is important to know what is true. However the 10:10 position on the issue of anthropological global warming is not offensive. It was intended to offend. Threatening my life in a subtle way with the notion that I should be destroyed over this issue is very annoying and disturbing. The destruction of life by explosion is a terrorist act that we are all too familiar with today. It is the ultimate form of bias.
The ignoring of the nature of the message destruction of life in the 10:10 video by most of the mainstream press means that projected violence against anyone who is skeptic about the science of global warming is an acceptable position for them. That is offensive to all of us. Therefore, the mainstream media are biased because the offense committed against the body of global warming skeptics is not even worthy of comment nor of an inquiry as whether anyone took offense or whether that is an appropriate notion to share in a video. It is easy to recognize bias when you are the subject that is being wronged.
commieBob Here’s a good web site to look at: The Chomsky Hoax
Thanks, huxley. I’ve thought of writing them up, but there are so many projects. . .
You’re right. His footnote density is daunting. But one just has to begin and go plugging along. I have to admit, though, that after all my exposure it’s become psychologically painful to read Chomsky’s stuff. That, as much as anything, makes me shy away from any more work on his material.
911tsunami-large
“The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. ”
I was up flying that day.
Out of character for me to say this, but what goes around, comes around.
Over the last few days I’ve also created a list of green propaganda.
Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=C92D7C5162FE0598
I think we should keep a record of this crap for the next bullshit environmental scare.
While I agree this film is vile and probably the biggest PR screw-up of all time I thing some skeptics are misreading this and taking it as a direct attack on them , I don’t believe it is.
“Despite the horrific nature of the video and the message that skeptics should be killed”
If you look at the victims in the film they are not in any “skeptics”. Their crime appears to nothing more than a lack of enthusiasm. When asked if they want to participate they shrug. No-one says they don’t agree with AGW or anything of the sort.
It seems the original thought of the producers was that they’d like to put a bomb under all those who are not bothering to do anything. So they did , literally, in their film.
So if this is the fate they reserve for those who are simply apathetic , God knows what they want to do to skeptics. Presumably some kind of Spanish Inquisition treatment where we renounce our mistaken beliefs and sign up to 10:10 just before being disembowelled and burnt at the stake. (Using recycled wood-chip pellets of course.)
I guess we’ll have to wait for the sequel to see what they have in mind.
Commenters ask how we can counter the media bias towards AGW and I suspect that the answer – beyond the great example set by WUWT, Christopher Brooker and other clear communicators of the truth – is that we cannot. AGW is essentially a global, corporate moneyspinner (that relies on the turkey-voting-for-Christmas mentality of the green movement) and, unfortunately, all the traditional checks and balances once imagined to have been practised by governments and the media have succumbed to the corporate dollar.
For my part, I have cancelled my O2 contract and told them why. I ceased to watch or listen to BBC news programmes several years ago (but have yet to go the whole hog and stop paying the licence fee!). I haven’t bought a newspaper for at least 3 years. These make me feel better but I’m well aware that my efforts will have no effect on the overall scheme of things.
Something that the environmental movement has been very good at has been organising: here in the UK, for example, Fairtrade has taken off in a big way, despite the premiums involved. We should, perhaps, adopt a similar tactic.
Short of warfare, and in the absence of democracy, the best way to make ourselves felt is economically: as far as possible, we boycott any organisation that supports the AGW hypothesis and only use businesses prepared to display a universal logo signifying their opposition to the scam.
Are there any businessmen out there prepared to comment on the real-world viability of such a proposal?