Chris White Tech Reporter
November 18, 2019 9:11 PM ET
- More than 200 media outlets and journalists partnered together with activists to coordinate and hype climate change news before the 2019 U.N. climate summit.
- Two of the largest media outlets — BuzzFeed News and HuffPo — did not disclose their role in the project to their readers, a Daily Caller News Foundation review found.
- The project raises questions about whether journalists should work side-by-side with activists to hype climate change.
Over 250 news outlets and journalists partnered with Columbia University School of Journalism’s flagship magazine to shape control of “climate crisis” coverage in the lead up to the United Nations climate conference. The coverage-coordination initiative included directing how much time, space and prominence should be devoted to the coverage, and asking that climate “news” be added to seemingly unrelated stories.
Some of the biggest media outlets in the country, such as CBS and Bloomberg, joined the effort. But others, such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, declined to participate in a project they reportedly feared appeared activist in nature. More troubling, a number of the major outlets that joined did not disclose participation to their readers.
In addition to CBS and Bloomberg, the effort, called Covering Climate Now, involved BuzzFeed News, HuffPost, The Daily Beast, the Center for Public Integrity, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Slate, Vanity Fair and The Weather Channel, among many others. BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post were among the major outlets that did not disclose the coordination. When asked by the Daily Caller News Foundation, the lack of disclosure was criticized by the Society of Professional Journalists.
The coordination effort was organized in part by Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), a nonprofit that represents professional journalists and was traditionally focused primarily on journalism ethics. Covering Climate Now’s founders hope to continue elevating climate news even after the project ends. The effort’s target was the lead-up to, and coverage of, the U.N. “Climate Action Summit,” held Sept. 15-23.
BuzzFeed News reached more than 27 million unique views between September and October, according to Quantcast, a website measuring audience size. BuzzFeed is owned by Jonah Peretti, an internet entrepreneur who founded the outlet in 2006 to track viral online content, and the left-leaning HuffPo is owned by Verizon Communications. Media tycoon Arianna Huffington originally founded HuffPo in 2005 with the help of Peretti.
Covering Climate Now’s founders kicked off the project in April and announced in May that they would ask partners to devote a week to climate-related news, starting in September. The Nation environmental correspondent Mark Hertsgaard co-founded the project under the assumption that the news outlets don’t cover climate change as urgently as he thinks they should.
WaPo and others did not contribute because they believe Covering Climate Now has the “aroma” of advocacy, he complained in September.
“We believe that every news organization in America, and many around the world, can play a part,” CJR posted May 22. Sometimes that will mean committing your newsroom to important and high-impact stories. Other times it will mean sharing your content, engaging your community, or adding a few lines of climate information to stories that wouldn’t otherwise have them.”
Covering Climate Now has not responded to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Much of the group’s coverage leading up to the U.S. climate summit focused on Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old girl who traveled to the U.S. in August on a racing yacht. Her visit was designed to galvanize American support for policies that seek to tackle climate change.
Thunberg’s activism and Covering Climate Now’s media blitz seemed to fall flat with the crowd of United Nations diplomats: No major promises were made to tackle climate change at the summit. The European Union, for instance, didn’t go along with environmentalists’ wishes and set a goal to be carbon neutral by mid-century out of fear that such ambitions would tank its member state’s struggling economies.
“Large parts of the mainstream media have stopped pretending to strive for objectivity in their reporting,” Myron Ebell, a climate skeptic and director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, told the DCNF. “On the climate issue, many outlets and reporters are now publicly boasting about the fact that they are promoting their own prejudices on the grounds that increasing global energy poverty is a noble cause.”
Ebell was not the only energy advocate to criticise the program. “This is nothing more than what used to be known as ‘civic journalism’ … or propaganda for the left dressed up as news reporting,” Steve Milloy, JunkScience.com publisher, told the DCNF. He also suggested the media are being hypocritical. They would thrash the fossil fuel industry if it attempted to recruit reporters in a quest to support natural gas, Milloy said.
Much Of The Content Was Not Disclosed
BuzzFeed News and HuffPost did not divulge their participation in Covering Climate Now in any of the articles they published on climate change during that week, according to a DCNF review of the project. They never mention the words “Covering Climate Now” in any of their posts during the week-long coverage leading up to the climate summit.
HuffPost did not respond to numerous requests for comment while BuzzFeed News said the partnership did not affect the outlet’s coverage. “Our coverage of climate change is year-round and unaffected by outside partnerships,” Matt Mittenthal, a spokesman for BuzzFeed, told the DCNF.
Covering Climate Now published a list of articles on its website throughout September that promoted climate coverage.
Nearly 40 of the articles on the list of 128 failed to mention the project. The list included pieces from CBS News, Bloomberg News and The Nation, all of whom produced pieces that failed to mention their participation in an outside project designed to direct their editorial bent. Many of the articles on the list bore labels containing the words “Covering Climate Now” but do not otherwise explain what the project entails or which groups are involved.
CBS News, which has not returned requests for comment, produced a Sept. 21 feature on clear cutting in Oregon that did not include a disclosure. The title of that feature was “Who should be in charge of America’s ancient forests: industry or environmentalists?” which discussed the impact clearing U.S.’ forests has on the environment and if private companies should be allowed to use forests.
CBS News included disclosures on articles throughout September that discuss how Americans feel about climate change. The channel also mentioned its participation in a Sept. 17 feature highlighting how U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is considering a summit to discuss ways of re-invigorating the Paris Climate agreement, which he says needs to be re-booted.
Bloomberg News, for its part, published a statement on Sept. 16 announcing its role in the project, but the outlet still produced content that did not contain disclosures. The outlet published a Sept. 22 article titled “Big Oil Prepares to Defend Big Gas as Climate Week Begins,” which discusses how the oil industry is defending the use of natural gas as a clean alternative to coal. The article did not mention the outlet’s participation in Covering Climate Now.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg founded Bloomberg News. Bloomberg, who flirted with the idea of running for president in 2020 and filed in the paperwork to participate in Alabama’s Democratic primary, has devoted much of his philanthropic work to funding various anti-coal projects. Bloomberg News has not responded to the DCNF’s request for comment.
The Nation, Covering Climate Now’s co-founder, published a 2,400-word article on Sept. 18 with an alarmist headline suggesting that Americans are “fueling the next global extinction.” The piece did not contain a disclosure but notes that it was originally published by Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch.com, though the DCNF was unable to locate the article on Engelhardt’s website.
The Nation, which announced the project in a July post, also published a journalistic piece on Sept. 19 by Nation associate editor Zoe Carpenter that fails to mention Covering Climate Now. Nobody from the outlet has responded to requests for comment.
Wealthy Climate Activists Also Participated
Covering Climate Now was aided by wealthy advocacy groups, some of which help journalists edit and craft stories discussing climate change from an alarmist perspective. One nonprofit group associated with the project is Climate Central, which provides extensive guidance to reporters.
“We contribute data and charts plus a science reporter and an editor,” the group’s website notes. “For a text story, we help craft a feature in a way that puts climate change in appropriate and accurate context. For broadcast media, we provide story and interview suggestions and help develop and review scripts.”
Climate Central has not responded to the DCNF’s request for detailed information about how it contributes to journalists’ content. The group is funded in part by the Energy Foundation, a charity providing grants to various groups with the hope of transitioning the U.S. away from fossil fuels.
Is This Ethical?
Reuters did not participate in the project, yet its editors did not object when Yereth Rosen, a freelancer for the wire service, contributed. Reuters, which opposes advocacy journalism, dismissed any suggestion that Rosen’s contributions are inappropriate.
“We do not see this cause in conflict with the Trust Principles. All stories, under the Trust Principles, are required to be accurate, fair and free from bias. Ms. Rosen’s work for Reuters has been exemplary in this regard,” Brian Ross, Reuters’s ethics and standards representative, wrote in an Aug. 15 email reviewed by the DCNF.
Ross was responding to an Aug. 13 email complaint from a former reporter who was concerned about Rosen’s role in Covering Climate Now. The person made the complaint through the outlet’s online support option. Reuters was more circumspect in later emails to the DCNF on the subject.
“While we do not comment on individuals in our newsroom, all Reuters journalists, including freelancers, are bound by our Trust Principles of ‘integrity, independence and freedom from bias,’” Heather Carpenter, a spokeswoman for Reuters, told the DCNF.
“Our journalists are to remain free from personal conflicts on the subjects they are assigned to cover,” she added. Reuters has not made Rosen available for comment nor did it address whether it is appropriate to allow an external group to dictate what content its reporters publish.
The Society of Professional Journalists, however, criticized the lack of transparency. (RELATED: UN’s New Report Shows There’s ‘Little Basis’ For A Favorite Claim Of Climate Activists)
“We encourage journalists to be transparent,” Lynn Walsh, a national member and former president of the Society of Professional Journalists, one of the oldest groups representing journalists, told the DCNF. “If they did not include any disclosure there is nothing we can do though. SPJ is not a regulatory body.” She went on to say that any group involved must explain exactly what the project entails.
Why Didn’t WaPo And The NYT Contribute?
Most legacy media are unwilling to break away from the idea that journalism should not advocate for a position, according to Hertsgaard, who co-founded Covering Climate Now in part to impress upon journalists the importance of covering climate without feeling compelled to provide a platform to climate skeptics.
“The New York Times is not on there, The Wall Street Journal is not on there, The Washington Post is not on there,” Hertsgaard said in a September podcast with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. Hertsgaard was referring to the major outlets that did not contribute content to Covering Climate Now.
“This has an aroma — in their minds — of activism,” Hertsgaard continued, explaining why the big three legacy outlets preferred not to join. He and Pope noted Covering Climate Now intends on breaking up that perception by wrapping climate coverage in the blanket of science rather than politics.
The Post refused to comment for this story. The NYT, WSJ and Hertsgaard have not responded to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Advocacy-style journalism is the new in-thing, according to David Blackmon, an independent consultant and analyst who has nearly 40 years experience in the energy industry.
“I don’t think that anyone would object to any of it if they were upfront about their agenda,” he told the DCNF. “There’s no effort to properly identify agenda-driven pieces. They are backed up with factual information, but it usually tells just half the story. It’s become the norm.”
Blackmon, a Forbes contributor, noted that much of the reporting is one-sided and focuses exclusively on one narrative: Climate change must be stopped at any cost. Such reporting rarely gives coverage to the economic consequences of climate activists’ preferred policies, he noted.
“We are at a point where we were at the turn of the 21st century,” Blackmon told the DCNF. “You had partisan affiliated outlets and almost no objective journalism at all. We’ve gone to that place after a period of time.
There is a campaign from journalists here in Australia, ‘Australias right to know’. The implication being that there are issues that the government won’t allow them to publish.
How could anyone take that seriously when the journalists themselves are so selective about what they will publish or air on television. The news content here in Australia is so left wing that most forms of media are spouting pure propaganda.
I am so sick of hearing the words ‘unprecedented’ and ‘catastrophic’. I am so sick of ‘renewable energy’ being heralded as ‘clean’, ‘green’ and free, when it is absolutely none of these things. Truth in journalism, what a joke. Or is that they are too lazy to question what is being quoted as fact? I personally think that they simply don’t have the courage to report an opposing story. Fair enough, don’t want to lose their jobs, or respect of their peers. Maybe we could crowd fund some of them. They could become famous for telling the truth.?
I have been trying to get a journalist, any journalist, to pick up the story about the fact that ‘renewable energy ‘ is toxic throughout the whole cycle of it’s existence. Without success needless to say. I have learned so much about this simply by doing my own research and I can’t believe that neither journalists nor the general public ask questions!
Renewable energy is creating an ecological nightmare and no one wants to talk about it.
I sent my local editor some WUWT and other info pages
I was accused of trolling her
and todays word of the year announced on ABC this arvo is?
climate emergency
apart from Andrew Bolt we dont HAVE a journo with balls anymore
Bolt is talking about retiring next year. Hope he changes his mind. Peta Credlin and Paul Murray are very good, as is Miranda Devine, though she’s in NY to cover the election. There are quite a few that speak common sense at Skye News and the Daily Telegraph too, I just need to find a way to talk to one of them.
““We are at a point where we were at the turn of the 21st century,” Blackmon told the DCNF. “You had partisan affiliated outlets and almost no objective journalism at all. We’ve gone to that place after a period of time.”
Didn’t he mean, “… at the turn of the 20th century” ? That was the time of the unabashedly partisan press.
Extinction Rebellion founder ‘calls Holocaust just another f–kery in human history’
And such people will be responsible for our future ?
I don’t even know what that means.
I’d say nur ein weitere Scheiss in der Menchheitsgeschichte is a pretty accurate, yet pessimistic way of talking, thinking about Stalin, Chingis, Mao, Pol Pot and other regimes. It wasn’t just yet another for Jews, of course. He didn’t talk about fakery.
Article:
‘“Our coverage of climate change is year-round and unaffected by outside partnerships,” Matt Mittenthal, a spokesman for BuzzFeed, told the DCNF.’
I bet, because they ARE the activists.
I haven’t heard anything about Greta in the news for over a week.
She’s a failure – she got believers a little excited, but she did nothing to convince skeptics and undecideds. Her scolding only works on people who already feel guilty about their climate hypocrisy, and even for believers I don’t think it changes their behaviour, or perhaps even their voting intentions.
Worse, she never provided political cover for global leaders who want to pretend to care about climate change without actually doing anything – so she’s not really useful to them.
I suspect she will disappear as quickly as she appeared. Sure they’ll drag her out of the closet once in a while, but she hasn’t got anything new to say, she’s not useful, so she’s not really newsworthy anymore.
She’s sailing across the Atlantic in a catamaran. If something significant happens at sea, then she’ll be back in the news. Otherwise, when she reaches Spain it’ll be big news.
Yes Eric.
You’ll no doubt remember Kevin Rudd’s tear-jerker letter from “Li’l Gracie” that he read out at the Copenhagen COP in 2009.
The media was all over it for oh, a day or so at the time.
And I don’t think KRudd has ever mentioned Li’l Gracie again.
(here’s a thought – Gracie would now be 16. Could she have moved from Australia to Sweden and changed her name to Greta? And still be brainwashed and manipulated by her parents as she was back in Oz? I think there might be a Netflix series in this . . .)
There was a comment made concerning Nordic Thanos and her latest yacht trip and the fact that she always seemed to be ‘sleeping’ whenever the rest of the crew were doing media link ups.
A suggestion was made that Greta was not on the yacht at all and was instead doing a Capricorn One fake.
My counter suggestion was that Greta was on the boat, but bound and gagged because the rest of the crew got jack of her constant complaining.
Jokes aside the decline and fall of that uneducated plonk is rather amusing. What the Green creates they can also destroy. I actually find the comparisons to Jeanne d’Arc bemusing, especially when one considers that Jeanne herself was thrown on the literal bonfire by her ‘supporters’ once it became politically useful to do so.
Personally I predict that she of the harsh glare will not suffer exactly the same fate as Jeanne, but will be simply abandoned as being too 2019 for the current market and replaced by whatever guilt trip they can cobble together from left over causes. As a side note I feel XR will also be thrown under a bus, having failed to obtain mass public support and being increasingly exposed as being run by utter nutters.
How Greta will handle this will be interesting and probably depends on if you believe she is an innocent, well meaning but misguided youth unfairly manipulated by powers beyond her comprehension, or a manifestation of pure evil. Still, on the plus side she is still legally a minor, so we are, currently, spared the usual ‘protest methods’ of angry women with nothing actually to say. Enjoy that while it lasts.
Oh dear, this rather reinforces my strange feeling that ‘News’ has morphed into ‘Infotainment’. I’m almost beginning to wonder if it might be worse, and that it could be a vast ‘Infomercial’. 🙂
Step 1: fire all the real journalists (i.e., those who probably never went to J school, just were actually good at journalism)
Step 2: hire recent liberal arts grads and pay them crap to re-write press releases and scour social media for “news” to “write”.
Step 3: fire those hired in Step 2, hire even cheaper help, publish even worse crap
Step 4: bankruptcy
Here in Canada, our version of the New York Times is “circling the bowl”, as the kids might say. Just shuttered their free give-away commuter papers written mostly by 20-something SJWs and took a huge red bath.
Oh, and guess what the the journalist union, which backed Prime Minstrel Zoolander, thinks should happen now?
Yep: more taxpayer’s money:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/unifor-says-parliament-must-act-225800107.html
What’s the latest on La Vagabonde’s progress carry Greta to Spain? Internet news is stale…
Stale or becalmed ? 🙂
Hope they packed some Gravol:
https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/SailingLaVagabonde?mapMod%20e=useAtlas&windSymbol=WindStreamlines&weatherSource=ECMWF
I was wondering how far south their course was going to be, I see it appears they changed their plans.
Certainly looks as if they are trying to get between those big red splotches, which will take them north.
Hope they don’t miss the conference, the lives of 8 billion people are at risk…
Well, there are lives at risk. I wonder, how close is the nearest US Navy asset, and will a SeaHawk be able to reach them before their immersion suits let the water temp leach all the heat out of them? More pertinent is did these pinheads even think of having the proper survival gear aboard for this little excursion? Perhaps this will turn into cnn’s next marathon coverage cash loser. Guess we will see.
Why the US Navy?
Why can’t the mighty EU or UN navy shadow them with one of their aircraft car…
Oh. Wait.
That’s why…
I’ll never forget the official from southern India who was practically in tears at a press conference where people criticized America for sending an Aircraft Carrier Group in after the 2004 tsunami. Yea, America really sux. /sar
TS Sebastien still stands in their way to Iberia.
Perhaps they should have waited and made that left turn at Albuquerque.
Sebastien is headed for Britain. High winds off NW Iberia now, but La Vagabonde should be able to skirt the storm and make safe harbor in Spain or Portugal.
Did her dad and cameraman fly back to Sweden?
Her entire entourage flew back to Europe, with stops and side trips along the way.
I knew the boat’s owner and skipper flew back, but her dad accompanied her around North America.
Is he aboard the SS Minnow, too? Had only read she was.
I also haven’t read that her dad is aboard, so presume he’s being evil and burning kerosene across Atlantic skies.
I wonder exactly how much money he returned to his native country with. Only reason to do this is to stuff their pockets full of OPM.
So her dad is still with her, plus joined by the experenced pilot who flew across the Atlantic in order to steer La Vagabonde from North America to Europe.
They’re nearing Lisbon.
I read that yesterday, so I searched for pics of him on the boat, only find the pics showing her, the man sailing the boat a woman and another child. Just seems rather odd.
“The channel [CBS] also mentioned its participation in a Sept. 17 feature highlighting how U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is considering a summit to discuss ways of re-invigorating the Paris Climate agreement, which he says needs to be re-booted.”
Hmmm… a four-year-old most important worldwide tool to fight climate change needs re-invigorating.
Dang… That excitement didn’t last too long… and with only 10 or 18 or… years until it’s too late. Blame it on guns and video games.
If humans don’t survive, who will dig up all the old bones to figure out what happened? Who will be the new archeologists?
Climate activism has done irreparable harm to the reputation of several institutions: science, journalism (such as it was) and politics (such as it was – and that’s if you’re generous enough to call politics a profession).
Politics could be said to have a lot in common with the “oldest profession” as politicians are often just another kind of prostitute.
Yes, in the old days “political science” meant something totally different.
She is a mentally challenged child being exploited by her parents and other adults. She needs to be taken into custody by a legitimate authority of child protective services and all adults involved prosecuted. Period. Full stop.
Oh come off it, she’s a young woman who’s well-along on the transition to full-independence from parental guardians, the cat is out of the bag and is not going back into it. If she makes mistakes she will pay for it and learn from it. That’s growing up, good luck to her, I hope she’s learning fast from it, she’ll need to.
(This article was not principally about Greta even, a token mention was made about her but apparently only as click-bait.)
This article would not exist without St Greta the Pious, and she only exists because her parents and others are exploiting her mental condition. Your backhanded defense of their actions does not make you look so good.
Like I could care how stating facts makes me “look”. If you want to call such a “defense” of “their actions”, that’s your problem. The following is the only reference to Greta Thunberg in the whole article, the rest of the article says nothing about her, it’s about mass media collusion to hype climate-change.
“… Much of the group’s coverage leading up to the U.S. climate summit focused on Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old girl who traveled to the U.S. in August on a racing yacht. Her visit was designed to galvanize American support for policies that seek to tackle climate change. Thunberg’s activism and Covering Climate Now’s media blitz seemed to fall flat with the crowd of United Nations diplomats: No major promises were made to tackle climate change at the summit. …”
i.e. A headline by Daily Caller on an article with only a token reference to Greta Thunberg within a total of three sentences. That’s not an article about Greta, that’s click-bait.
Facts? She a mentally challenged child being exploited by her parents and other adults. You defending them changes nothing.
Facts? She a mentally challenged child being exploited by her parents and other adults. You defending them changes nothing.
___
And you pretending I’m “defending them” is you just being a jackass. What I wrote to you in my first reply above is entirely correct, you are grossly exaggerating, and I stand by what I said.
Yep, the facts are what they are, a mentally challenged child being exploited.
Doc Chuk says it all, the ravings of a very inmature young girl will fizzle out in a few months.
MJE VK5ELL
Is it a conspiracy? Or is it collusion with generous dollops of group-think, noble cause corruption, laziness, and crony-capitalism? Maybe all of the above (and more).
We need to recognize that we are now dealing with POP CULTURE not science.
+10,000!
And as pop culture goes, may it soon go the stale way of leisure suits, shoulder pads and Big Hair.
Everything is getting dumber, including science.
If you can’t rock the good hair (Cox) or the bow-tie (Nye), or the braids (St. Greta the First of Her Name), you ain’t science.
My boss (well, way up on the corporate ladder) is a qualified scientist, teaches at a big time university, and if you can’t put your data into an infographic, you won’t get a meeting.
But like islands in an ocean of dumb, WUWT, Climate Audit, etc. give us hope that the numbers still mean something.
Awww! I LOVED my pale green or blue leisure suits! With my long hair, flared trousers and dangly chain, I looked a right ….. prat! (Thinking about it later).
Heh.
Whenever one of the younger folks in my family come in with a “great new fashion idea”, I pull out my old pics. Doesn’t matter which era, there were crimes committed in all of them. I used to rock some purple in my hair back in the 80s, when I had hair. Now, everyone has purple hair as if its “new”. And those Miami Vice pastel suits. And acid wash jeans. Etc.
Difference is…unlike tats and multiple piercings, I don’t look like that NOW.
Slightly off topic, but in the UK while Greta is temporarily off the radar (pending her perilous Atlantic Crossing), we are being bombarded with a new type of vaguely climate-related scare stories timed to be released at the time of routine weather events (here, a lot of rain). The tactic and content are not new, but seeing it in video is new, especially when it is endorsed by a well-known company. Here is an example: https://www.brut.media/uk/science-and-technology/the-uk-vs-the-netherlands-on-floods-0b14ef15-3223-4b09-ba23-5dd6551b20e6
The tactic is to take some routine inconvenience (here, flooding) and start with suggesting that government inaction will create an emergency, compared to some other government (here the Netherlands). Most people identify with this soft sell. At the end of the video the message is punched home: that it’s all down to Climate Change and that we must Act Now as it is An Emergency. (This particular video is very muddled about what inconvenience it is referring to: sea rising or rain falling.)
Imagine the outrage if you substituted for “climate change”
Clean coal…
The internet would explode….
If journalists partner with activists then they cease to be journalists and should not be treated as, or referred to as such. They become activists themselves.
If they stop the ‘partnering’, whatever that means, they can become journalists again but NEVER on that subject! And they may have to be deprogrammed first.
“Why Didn’t WaPo And The NYT Contribute?”
Well at a casual guess I would say these two ‘institutions’ didn’t want to sign up in case they were forced to cut back on their climate content.
On the topic of media I strongly feel that people need to get past the myth that the media exists to tell us ‘The News’ and to tell us in an unbias manner neatly bordered with modesty and integrity.
This is a lie. Privately owned media exists to either make the stake holders money by selling content to their market is willing to pay for – either directly through sales or indirectly via third party paid ads – or to spread a dialogue that matches the owner’s interests (with profit being a bonus, not an objective) or both.
Truth? Who ever told you the media delivers truth? The people claiming that are media members themselves because it fits into the marketable image they believe they need to put forward to their readers/viewers/click bait victims.
Private media is an industry. If it wants to make money it needs to supply to their selected market the product their market is willing to pay for. Know your market. If your market is willing to pay for stories about the moon being made of green cheese then you make sure your pages are filled with articles suggesting matching wines, reports on where to get the best Wensleydale and is totally devoid about the entire Apollo programme or your readers will go elsewhere.
The problem with ‘elsewhere’ for MSM is that ‘elsewhere’ now exists and they do not like it. They have had a long lingering period where only Media had access to the flow of information and the fact that anyone with a webpage can publicly offer an opinion bothers them greatly.
This is not to say that nu-media is automatically ‘better’. It is just different and again, needs to comply with the basic rule of knowing your market. I have happily watched someone destroy great chunks of the solar system on a computer simulation using a planet sized teapot. It was awesome. It wasn’t even fake news because it wasn’t news at all, but it was something the viewing market was willing to support.
Media is industry. Never forget that. It should be allowed to live or fail based on its own market strategies.
Oh, unless we are talking about state owned media, cause that is sink pool of useless Marxist twirks that deserves to be burnt down, the earth of their properties salted and the members and their families sold off into slavery in order to offset their massive debt to society…. or maybe just defunded and sold… I am open to suggestions 😀
Brilliant Craig! Puts it all into perspective really. I know who you want to see defunded and sold off, Aunty (colloquial term) really is passed her use by date. The left say “why can’t we just have a conversation”? Only they space out when it’s our turn to say something. I really am glad to have found this site. The marketing worked for me I guess.
hear this week some show on abc where they announced the science doesnt matter anymore..?
they have to go to political means to get their way
because the supposedly best educated ever kiddies and young adults just cant “do” facts or science without science reporters making it simple for em..
Science hasn’t mattered to alarmists since…well, ever. They don’t do math, certainly not statistics and obviously use the word “science” to mean “argue with skeptics”.
For example: in my local Toronto neighbourhood’s Facebook group there was the inevitable “discussion” of climate emergency. As we have just re-elected a Liberal with 57% of the vote, you can imagine how the skeptics fared…
The very next “article”, was an invitation for…Reiki for animals. And the very same self-absorbed and mis-educated idiots who were literally crying about catastrophic climate change, were signing up to have some hippy grifter wave her hands over their pets, and PAYING her for the privilege.
I could go on with examples: in the climate change thread, someone wanted the city to stop using salt in the winter, as it affects Lake Ontario (true) and creates climate change (not making this up). Wonder if its the same idiot who maintains that salt requires sunlight to melt snow and ice, so why do they even spread it on the south side of the street…
Sigh. I have my work cut out for me, eh?
Caligula, what hope have we got here in Australia? Can you believe that maths is not compulsory in the last four years of high school? That was put in place by our last leftist government some years ago, though you would have thought that our current government would have changed that. The number of good math teachers has significantly reduced here.
History has always been an elective subject though whether or not our kids are being taught actual history is debatable. Certainly if they are being taught anything about socialist regimes then they are leaving out all the nasty stuff.
On history, there is an individual here who has made claim to be an indigenous Australian. It has been shown through his family tree that this is questionable, though of course things happen out of wedlock so who knows. That is not a judgment. The thing is he himself describes himself as a storyteller (that is how our indigenous people pass down their past). He has written a book that actually changes parts of our history! There is no evidence to back up his outrageous claims and none of what he said has been raised up to this point. His book has been illustrated and is being put into the education system! Not only that, our National Broadcaster (exclusively left win) the ABC is putting out a two part documentary about him. But wait there’s more, he is now a professor! The minister for indigenous affairs, when questioned about this simply said that he had no reason not to believe what he said. Of course he himself identifies as indigenous and that in itself makes sense to me. But it also explains why this was accepted without question. PC has truly gone mad in this country.
Truth is dead and they buried respect along with it.
Media is mostly SyOp by foreign governments, that’s how you control democratic countries the cheapest way, how you conquer without a war.
For example, NYT is owned by Mexiacans and surprise, surprise…. promotes illegal immigration to USA.
That’s why they all are pissed off by RussiaTV, channel that is showing the truth about media already within its name.
The funniest paradox is: because state systems are based mostly on lies, RTV is doing most harm by telling the truth, it fits their needs of course.
And why not
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-ban-spreads-government-made-news-to-americans/
‘“Our coverage of climate change is year-round and unaffected by outside partnerships,” Matt Mittenthal, a spokesman for BuzzFeed, told the DCNF.’
We do it all the time and nothing to see here deplorables so move along.
Forget it, Jake, its New Journalism…
(Actually, remedial typing, but you have to give talent-less millennials something to do to not make a living at.
So the zombie term “conspiracy theory” was killed again.
It is just an open conspiracy praxis now.
Now “conspiracy theory” essentially means “until we get time to watch an inline video where they come clean, the accusation should be treated with the same respect as for those saying the Apollo missions were faked”.
Now remember:
– these people are unwilling to even merely take the time to watch an online video before they accuse kids of racism and potentially destroy their lives;
– if they did come across Moon landing denial nonsense (Bill “rocket expert” Kaysing…) they would be probably be unable to refute most of it: compare that propaganda to their own and notice it’s the same kind of crap. And I wouldn’t count on the counter-analysis of that thesis (that the performance of Saturn V was well below what was described and what was needed to go to the Moon…) from some journos who still can’t get the energy and power units right after decades of writing about future energy availability as THE reason we should panic.
That they will “conclude” that NASA is right (on the Moon landing) is hardly a sign of intelligence as they axiomatically take NASA’s word on everything, NASA being a US agency (that isn’t involved with border control). They might not see anything wrong from NASA, ever.
And successes of (some) Apollo missions is used as THE argument why NASA is right about everything in many green forums: “why don’t you believe those that put men on the Moon?”
It’s funny how many people see the world as a “function” of the Apollo missions as if they should create confidence. But then the idea that technology can provide solutions to problems is ridiculed! (See how GMO technology is treated.)
Only convincing people to use (a lot) less resources and energy is a solution. Green energy is also a solution even though it’s expensive, people should be convinced to make that effort. Also, green energy is cheaper now so people would be stupid not to switch…
The same people who can’t decide whether green energy is in its infancy and needs to be kick started with subsidies, or is very mature and reliable and cheaper than coal, those people will question your mental state if you question anything they ever write: “we are not making a mental diagnostic by labeling you as a conspiracy person, we just say that you have incoherent ideas and that you are delusional and mentally confused”.
That is how you get complete control of the messages, using false narratives and fake news and half truths to propagandise the people………who are relenentlessly bombarded with the exact same stuff and accept it because the gate keepers have established a cult like environment with them as the high priests who don’t report objective news any more but instead impose their belief system, abusing their reedoms of the press.
They are using the same strategy to control messages related to President Trump. They have the exact same objectives and act in unison to tell us what we should know,.
The education system has also been hijacked to indoctrinate our young people into these religious type beliefs……based on faith in the high priests of propaganda and their manufactured realities.
The manufactured realities define our world to such an extent that they have replaced the real world, including speculative climate model projections replacing observations and measurements/empirical data and critical thinking.
Monumental brainwashing on a global scale which began decades ago when climate science was hijacked for the political agenda.
Your average person thinks they are informed and too smart to let this happen. After all, the information they trust is endorsed by 97% of climate scientists. What they have no idea about is that convincing sounding information IS the propoganda being sold with a clever “save the planet” altruistic marketing scheme.
How would they know the difference if they are only told one thing?
If I raised a child and taught them from a young age that the animal we call a dog, was really called a cat and what we call a cat is really a dog and didn’t let them have access to the real world, how would they know it was the other way around?
The gatekeepers of the climate crisis/emergency messages/information/propaganda are intentionally denying us access to information in the real world that would inform us to a state which is capable of questioning their brainwash.
Reality Check time: Most people who don’t have all day to amuse themselves on the Internet pay ZERO attention to any of this. They’re busy, hard at work on their jobs. In the evening, they’re out running their kids around to sports and activities, attending PTA meetings, and trying to unclog the kitchen sink. They are NOT hanging with bated breath waiting for every word the MSM talking heads utter at 7PM.
Furthermore, it’s well known in publishing circles that CAGW is a ratings killer. You have only to go to a site like American Thinker or Townhall to see how few comments “climate change” stories generate vs. every other political story. Most people don’t actually believe any of the hysterical nonsense and have simply moved on. They may parrot the PC line in polls for social virtue purposes, but that’s about it.
As for the kiddies, I grew up with the specter of Mutually Assured Destruction, which I was “assured” by my all-knowing teachers would arrive early in my lifetime. Nuclear winter, The Day After, bomb shelters and duck and cover drills. I was actually somewhat surprised to see my 40th birthday come and go, some time after the Iron Curtain came crashing down. Today’s kids will look back on this the exact same way.
Anyone looking for honesty in the MSM will have to look under a rock.
No matter how they carry on propaganda is not news and merging opinion with news is not news.
Though they may believe they have a lofty perch the disadvantages of an attitude of superiority mixed with deception becomes apparent when caught. The best fix is honest news with full disclosure.
Oxford Dictionaries declares ‘climate emergency’ the word of 2019
Usage of the term increased 100-fold in the space of 12 months, dictionary says:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/21/oxford-dictionaries-declares-climate-emergency-the-word-of-2019
The brainwash tactics are in high gear. Controlling the language and using propaganda is crushing authentic and objective science.
I suppose the only good thing about this, is the incredibly short attention span of most people.
Isn’t a Kardashian about to give birth or something?
I was a regular contributor to the comment board on HuffPo until this week when they went paid subscription to comment. It was fun riling the Warmunists with facts but I don’t think I would give them a nickel for the pleasure.
Pretty much a sign that its over for HuffPo.
I used to comment at the Toronto Star (Canada’s version of the NYT).
Then they took the comment section away.
Then they started on digital subscriptions.
Now, the are awash in red ink.
Hmmm…if they only make money on clicks, and I have to click multiple times to comment…then they take the commenting away…how long before they go bankrupt?
Seriously, the “smart people” who think that they can make as much money selling only to their True Believers aren’t doing so well, are they?
As they said about Howard Stern: those who like him, listen for X minutes. Those who hate him listen X + Y.
Then again, math isn’t a strong suit with SJWs.
An option would be dissenter plugin.
Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) is described as “a nonprofit that represents professional journalists”.
In fact the CJR is almost wholly funded by George Soros.