Guest Essay by Kip Hansen
The Columbia Journalism Review, “The voice of journalism”, has been organizing and promoting “a project co-founded by CJR and The Nation aimed at strengthening the media’s focus on the climate crisis.” This effort is called “Covering Climate Now”.
I have covered this [propaganda] campaign before here at WUWT in an essay titled: “A National Narrative for Media on Climate Change”. In that essay, I promised to keep readers advised as to the progress they are making in signing up news outlets [co-conspirators] in their push to see that all news outlets are “running a week’s worth of climate coverage in the lead-up to the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York on Sept. 23.”
When CJR and Covering Climate Now say “climate coverage” they mean specifically the type of stories featured at the project’s home page. None of the stories make any attempt at explaining climate change to the news consuming public. All could correctly be classified as advocacy for the IPCC Paris Agreement and the Green New Deal.
In a recent essay here, I bemoaned a “news media [that] spins further and further out of control, abandoning real journalism”. The CJR’s campaign is the finest example of this tendency to date. Their objective is NOT to cover the story of climate science or climate policy issues — local, regional, national or international — rather their interest is publicly declared as being “aimed at strengthening the media’s focus on the climate crisis.”
“At that meeting [the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York on Sept. 23] the world’s governments will submit plans to meet the Paris Agreement’s pledge to keep global temperature rise “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. ”
“The need for solid climate coverage has never been greater,” said Kyle Pope, CJR’s editor and publisher. “We’re proud that so many organizations from across the US and around the world have joined with Covering Climate Now to do our duty as journalists—to report this hugely important story.”
The Columbia Journalism Review has jumped the track — gone off the rails — and is violating the very essence of journalism. The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics clearly states, first and foremost:
“Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Journalists should be honest and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.”
And specifically directs journalists to:
Label advocacy and commentary
Nothing in the SPJ Code of ethics calls for the creation of [secret] groups of news outlets dedicated to create a flood of advocacy stories on any topic. Advocacy is not the purview of journalists — it is the job of columnists and other opinion writers.
The lure of White Hat Advocacy has polluted what was once the bastion of professional journalism — reducing itself to the level of Greenpeace and other groups that have “admit[ed] that their campaign amounts to “hyperbole” that doesn’t adhere to “strict literalisms or scientific precision”. In other words, exaggerations and lies.” “Greenpeace publicly insists its claims are factual, but now, in formal legal filings in US Federal Court, calls its campaign more “figurative than literal” and blames the public for believing their “non-verifiable subjective opinion[s].”” [ source ]
CJR, The Guardian and The Nation even promise, making carefully sure that news organizations get the story right, that they will:
“In the most dramatic cases, … deploy Rapid Response Teams to newsrooms tasked with covering extreme weather or disaster in their own backyards. In those cases, we’ll assist newsrooms, either in person or remotely, with additional reporting help as well as whatever scientific or other resources are needed for them to fully tell their story.”
Does this represent the beginning of the end of the Free Press in western civilization? Instead of promoting a Press with diverse and compelling coverage of the world’s most important issues, the Covering Climate Now cabal has now lined up “More than 170 news outlets from around the world with a combined audience of hundreds of millions of people” to follow through with a barrage of climate catastrophism news crammed into a single week. [ the full list is at the bottom of this link ]. CJR, The Guardian and The Nation will supply the narrative — a single united narrative for all 170 news outlets. They will all share and repeat the same advocacy viewpoint on climate change, climate crisis, and extreme weather. If the cabal is very lucky, Tropical Storm Dorian will develop into a major hurricane and hit Florida hard — feeding right into their narrative of catastrophe on climate.
In the past, journalists have resisted and fought back against being fed united narratives on world issues — usually pushing back against the governments of nations, national intelligence services, industry special interest groups and supra-national bodies such as the United Nations.
Now, the Columbia Journalism Cabal and its cronies are the special interest group pushing a [false] narrative — claiming it is their “duty as journalists—to report this hugely important story” — creating a wide and largely secret super-news-group to flood the airwaves, newspapers and the Internet news outlets with single viewpoint — a single advocacy position– on the climate issue. The public will not know that the massive news blitz was organized months in advance — nor will they know who, or why, they organized it. The Cabal will create the news-organization equivalent of a Twitter-storm — mobbing the general public with the same ethical values displayed in the sociopathic rantings we see every day on Twitter — disregard for truth, disregard for facts, disregard for multiple viewpoints, name-calling and shaming of any and all that do not agree with the story line being enforced by ideological mob-rule.
That, my friends, is not journalism. That is a mockery of journalism.
There remain but two weeks until this propaganda storm erupts across the world in the mass media and on blog and web sites, all seemingly independently. it will not, however, be independent coverage — it will be an orchestrated campaign of [biased and mis-] information.
Any journalist serious about his work would rush to call out this mockery — refusing to participate — doing his or her best to expose this travesty. Are there any Real Journalists still out there? Have you all been co-opted to act in the service of the CJR cabal?
# # # # #
Author’s Comment:
Yes, I am distressed by this turn of events. I was a radio journalist in University — University of California at Santa Barbara — KCSB radio. I covered the police riots in Southern California during the late 1960s carrying a portable Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder into tear-gassed crowds and mobs of baton-wielding policemen to get the real story on anti-war protests. With my news-team partner, Matt, we blended the sounds of real world events with popular music to create news with impact . . . . Telling multiple sides of the story — the few violent radicals forcing the police to react violently and vice-versa; the little-old-ladies-in-tennis-shoes marching to save the lives of their grandsons. I would no more have accepted a story-line from a biased advocacy group than cut off my own hand.
If you are a journalist — with the necessary ethical equipment to speak out — do so here and in your professional work product. Don’t let this anti-journalism story go untold.
# # # # #
In short, the volume of climate clucking and cackling will be turned up to 11. Because when you are having trouble getting “the message” out to the public, it always works to turn up the volume. It hasn’t worked yet, but it will this time because, 11.
Yes, because 11 is one better than 10. I saw that movie, too.
When jumping the shark there is obviously strength in numbers.
Mr. Hansen, your lecturing Columbia Journalism Review surely amuses them greatly.
At some point you need give up your paradigm of the nobility of journalism.
Gamecock ==> CJR is quite sure they represent the last bastion of nobility in their profession — but their viewpoint has been warped and skewed by white Hat bias and Jor-El syndrome.
Media Research Center is on it:
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/business/julia-seymour/2019/08/30/170-media-outlets-join-cjr-nation-climate-coverage-plan
Nechit ==> Great! Thanks so much for the heads up and the link.
This monster fraud is nothing but smoke and mirrors, so stop being restrained and polite and play hardball, because this game is for KEEPS! Expose the TRUE MOTIVE, this crime against humanity in-the-making, this ecofascist, techno-totalitarian world government NIGHTMARE that aims to monitor, control and restrict ALL energy and ALL humanity. No more freedom or liberty or Constitution or middle class; just a world of austerity and misery where only the ‘elite’ are free. Expose the tyrannical masterminds IN THEIR OWN WORDS and all the players who stand to gain riches, power and privilege. Donald Trump has opened a window of escape, but he alone can’t save us, so sound the alarm and go for the jugular or this nightmare WILL come to pass! I am NO bible thumper, but Prophecy is staring us in the face as Science! Carbon is 6 protons, 6 neutrons & 6 electrons; the human body is mostly carbon and a carbon chip WILL replace cash IF they succeed! So please FIGHT their big lie repetition with BIG TRUTH repetition and the truth shall make us FREE, dammit!
“During the past three decades, elite news media have become influential translators of climate change linking science, policy, and the citizenry. Historical trends in public discourse—shaped in significant part by elite media—demonstrate news media’s critical role in shaping public perception and the level of concern towards climate change. Media representations of climate change and global warming are embedded in social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions that influence individual-level processes such as everyday journalistic practices.” Dec 2016
https://oxfordre.com/climatescience/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228620-e-357
From the top…
“We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis.” – David Rockefeller, Club of Rome executive manager
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome
“It’s not a matter of what is true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true.” – Henry Kissinger
“A keen and anxious awareness is evolving to suggest that fundamental changes will have to take place in the world order and its power structures, in the distribution of wealth and income.” – Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable. Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme & architect of the UN Oil for Food Scandal
“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.” – Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund
“The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable, indeed a sacred principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation.” – UN Commission on Global Governance report
“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.” – Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies
“The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.” – Henry A. Kissinger
“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.” – Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund
“We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination… So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” – Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Climatology, lead author of many IPCC reports
“Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.” – Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC [climate change chairman]
“The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.” – emeritus professor Daniel Botkin
“The one thing man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by a World Government, a New World Order.” – Henry A. Kissinger
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.” – Club of Rome
“Global Warming was just one issue The Club of Rome(TCOR) targeted in its campaign to reduce world population. In 1993 the Club’s co-founder, Alexander King with Bertrand Schneider wrote The First Global Revolution stating, “The common enemy of humanity is man. … The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”:
https://climatism.blog/2014/01/24/in-searching-for-a-new-enemy-to-unite-us-we-came-up-with-the-threat-of-global-warming/
The Club of Rome invented Global Warming.
http://www.theeuroprobe.org/2014-002-the-club-of-rome-invented-global-warming/
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.” – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony, climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” -Christine Stewart, fmr Canadian Minister of the Environment
“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” – Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace
“Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced – a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.” – UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/04/hollywoods-new-development-partner-united-nations/
Hollywood’s new development partner: The United Nations
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/hollywood-meets-the-susta_b_12065224.html
Hollywood Meets the Sustainable Development Goals
“UN Sustainable Development is the action plan implemented worldwide to inventory and control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all energy, all education, all information, and all human beings in the world. INVENTORY AND CONTROL.”—-Rosa Koire
Renewable energy – the REAL sentiment:
“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.” – Jeremy Rifkin, New York Times journalist on climate change
“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.” – Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” – Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
Depopulation – the final solution:
“The world today has 6.8 billion people…that’s headed up to about 9 billion. If we do a really great job on vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 to 15 percent.” – Bill Gates
“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.” – Ted Turner
“Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world, because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries.” – Henry A. Kissinger
“[T]he resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion.” – Club of Rome
“Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the populations, perhaps we should control the population to ensure the survival of our environment.” – David Attenborough
“We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.” – Mikhail Gorbachev
“In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.” Prince Philip
“U.S. policy toward the third world should be one of depopulation” – Henry A. Kissinger
“There is a single theme behind all our work-we must reduce population levels.” – Thomas Ferguson
“One America burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say in order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.” – Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO Courier
“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells, the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.” – Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb
“There is a single theme behind all our work-we must reduce population levels. Either governments do it our way, through nice clean methods, or they will get the kinds of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it.” – Thomas Ferguson
“The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.” – John Holdren, Obama Administration Senior Advisor on Science & Technology
“The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.” – John Holdren
“A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.” – John Holdren
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
“A message consisting of a set of ten guidelines or principles is engraved on the Georgia Guidestones in eight different languages, one language on each face of the four large upright stones:
1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Feeling really heartened to find so many that already support ” my” case!
After teaching the topic in secondary school for over a decade, however I becoming increasingly … sceptical … I then did my darndest to find the data – the proof I needed. Nothing by emotionalism and indignation! From “sceptical ” sources I got lots of research, calm and reason. Trying now to understand the politics so the above helped…. thank you. I am appalled that our New Zealand Herald plus “Newsroom” would join this concerted propaganda.
Rosie NZ ==> You might write to their Public Editor or Public Ombudsman.
Thank you for calling this to my attention.
It is one of the most mind-boggling things I think I’ve ever laid eyes on. Mark Hertsgaard’s father was a television news reader in Baltimore for many years. Mark has been a CAGW evangelist for many, many years and is immune to any and all contradictory evidence. He is a true believer.
Like so many of his ilk, I suspect he has an anxiety disorder (god knows, he certainly has the Messiah complex that characterizes so many of his brethren in the CAGW pseudoscience/religion).
Linda ==> Thanks for the links — particularly the link to Boykoff.
Does this sound familiar?:
“Outlier voices—particularly those views often dubbed climate “skeptics,” “denialists,” or “contrarians”—have gained prominence and traction in mass media over time through a mix of internal workings such as journalistic norms, institutional values and practices, and external political economic, cultural, and social factors. In this context, the article explores how and why these actors—through varied interventions and actions—garner disproportionate visibility in the public arena via mass media. It also examines how media content producers grapple with ways to represent claims makers, as well as their claims, so that they clarify rather than confuse these critical issues. To the extent that mass media misrepresent and/or gratuitously cover these outlier views, they contribute to ongoing illusory, misleading, and counterproductive debates within the public and policy communities, and poorly serve the collective public. Furthermore, working through mass media outlets, these outlier interventions demonstrate themselves to be (at times deliberately) detrimental to efforts seeking to enlarge rather than constrict the spectrum of possibility for varied forms of climate action. …”
Nope, it’s not Nature Communications. It’s:
Public Enemy No. 1?: Understanding Media Representations of Outlier Views on Climate Change
Maxwell T. Boykoff
First Published March 1, 2013 Research Article
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002764213476846
Indeed, Maxwell Boykoff is someone to keep our eyes on:
https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Climate-Communications-Productive-Pathways/dp/1316646823
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=aW3k5WMAAAAJ&hl=en
This reminds me of Walter Cunningham’s wise words in the video entitled
“25 NASA Scientists Question the Sanity of the Global Warmists”
“These true believers in humans controlling the Earth’s temperature cannot be reasoned out of their position; it was not reason that got them there in the first place; it was emotion and politics.”
-Walter Cunningham
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhW-B2udhQw
and he entreats the scientific Community to engage the public on the Public Relations front because as Linda Goodman’s Henry Kissinger quote explains:
“It’s not a matter of what is true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true.” – Henry Kissinger
I’m glad to have discovered Maxwell Boykoff’s name. Thanks Linda Goodman!
I be deaf to their stupidity and that is the correct action, cleaning their waste to the inside of the trash bins, correcting their false statements politely and ignoring the noise they try to make.
The specter of false and fraudulent journalism is deeply disturbing which makes me OK with the demise of the large media organizations that I rarely listen to or watch any longer.