Andrew L. Urban
So Joe Biden identifies as a black woman? In his first radio interview in the wake of his disastrous June 27, 2024, debate performance, on July 5, 2024, Joe Biden proclaimed he was “proud” to be the “first Black woman to serve with a Black president.”
Joe Biden
As a mentally challenged and shouty Joe Biden clings to the US Presidency and leadership of the free world, the left wing mainstream media (LWMM) – aka the legacy media – is shown up having ignored and/or kept secret his mental decline over the past two years. Now it’s “Joe must go” – mostly, anyway. Too late. You’ve failed a key test: speaking truth to power. It’s not a football game; loyalty to the party team should have been loyalty to the country team.
That failure has enormous negative consequences, not least the collapse of trust in the media. Two other major failures of the LWMM compound the problem.
The first of those must be the abject failure of the mainstream media to scrutinise the claims that burning fossil fuels is dangerously warming the planet.
As recently as July 5, 2024, the respected climate author Dr Javier Vinos commented (on Climate Etc), “…that global warming is due to CO₂ is a belief, since there is no clear evidence of it, just circumstantial evidence and a kind of computer games called climate models.” (Vinos is the author of Solving the Climate Puzzle (2023) and has a Ph.D in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.) But that’s been common knowledge for years – and suppressed by climate change zealots in the media. (EG: There are many others, but my first article on the subject in Spectator Australia, The Big Con, was published on October 15, 2016.)
Here was a genuine conspiracy theory completely missed. Only ‘deniers’ and ‘right wing nut jobs’ challenged what quickly became the ruling orthodoxy. Blind to their own politically motivated agenda, the mainstream media (except those serving ‘right wing nut jobs’) fell in with whatever the bible of the alarmists said; the IPCC reports.
Misleadingly wrapped in the cover of ‘the science’, the IPCC, hand in glove with media such as the Sydney Warming Herald and The Guardian of the Galaxy, didn’t begin by asking key questions. Like, where is the evidence? (N/A) What percentage of the atmosphere is comprised of CO2? (0.04%) How much of that is produced by fossil fuels? (3%) Why isn’t the 97% of naturally occurring CO2 driving any warming? (CO2 doesn’t drive warming; see geology, eg the melting end of the ice age.)
These central questions were ignored. They go the very heart of the issue, separating any warming from its cause.
Some four decades of ‘fighting’ climate change has emasculated energy policy around the world. According to my power bills, Australia’s energy wealth has been wasted by Australia’s pointless but destructive switch to so called renewables. Multiply that experience by several hundred millions around the world. Meanwhile, nuclear energy, the one saving energy source, is frozen out of the Australian policy mix. It’s banned! That’s like banning water in a draught. This is a tragedy; not only would nuclear energy provide power for homes and commerce and industry, it would also shut down the incessant and ignorant bleating against fossil fuels. Great collateral benefit …
And third: Very few governments around the world were immune (pardon the pun) from the mass hysteria generated by the Covid pandemic, spread by the LWMM.
Once again, the LWMM failed in their prime purpose of keeping the citizens informed by challenging propaganda and looking for genuine verification behind decisions – especially when those decisions impacted on free speech, human rights and civil liberties. Sky News was – and is – notable for its unrelenting pursuit of facts about Covid and challenging governments on their actions. But then Sky is not part of the LWMM.
We no longer expect the truth from the LWMM. I am reminded of author Douglas Murray’s remarks about “the pointlessness of the New York Times”. He explained: “For several generations now the New York Times has been seen as America’s ‘paper of record’. You might have appreciated some aspects of it more than others, and it may have been a little dull, but it was reliable; even necessary. A sort of journalistic fibre.
“Then at some stage in recent decades, it started to exemplify a rot which has wormed its way through much of the legacy media. Its reporting became unreliable and its comment pages monotone. The paper became increasingly unreadable. If there was one reason above all, it was that it became untrustworthy.
“It first passed through a stage of appearing to believe that its job was to stand equidistant between the facts and the public. Then – and never more so than in the era of its nemesis, Donald Trump – it just came out for a particular side on issue after issue. It stopped being a newspaper and became an organ of opinion for one set of political positions.
“Some time ago I became aware that I no longer trusted it even on issues that I didn’t know about. Because on every issue I did know about, I discovered that the paper was spreading untruths and lies.”
Likewise, back in February 2022 the SMH was reporting the climate catastrophes awaiting us Down Under, with a typical doomsday headline: ‘Atlas of human suffering’: More drought, fire and flood, less snow and coral, UN report says: “Australia is already at the forefront of extinctions likely attributable to climate change…” But then the SMH reports uncritically everything the UN publishes, including the UN chief Antonio Guterres’ declaration that global warming is now global boiling … thanks to CO2.
Perhaps the most unforgivable harm has been the unjustifiable fear planted in the minds of vulnerable, impressionable school children that the planet faces extinction. If only the mass media hadn’t become the megaphone for climate alarmist propaganda and suppressor of other voices.
In short, the LWMM has played a key role in destroying its own credibility and damaging the west’s economy.
Andrew L. Urban is the author of Climate Alarm Reality Check (Wilkinson). This book is dedicated to the panic stricken 12 year old schoolgirl sobbing on the TV news fearing the world will soon end because of ‘climate change’ – and all her fellow schoolchildren around Australia.