Rigorous new research, published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, trawled through more than 116,000 newspaper articles from 10 influential outlets, both right- and left-leaning, and found systematic fearmongering in their reporting of the six major Assessment Reports from 1990 to 2023, writes Adam Creighton, chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs, in The Australian.
According to Creighton, “sociologist author James Manzi – who probably deserves a bravery award – used AI to analyse almost 600,000 English-language social science journal abstracts published between 1960 and 2024. He also found that the academic disciplines with more leftward orientation displayed the most ideological conformity. Perhaps the only positive finding was that sociocultural content “was more consistently left-leaning than economic content”, a gap that had been widening. Economists still have to argue in logic, numbers and statistics, which makes it harder, though not impossible, to publish biased nonsense.
“Whether the issue is climate change, energy, inequality, public health or immigration, interested citizens are often told they are receiving “the science”. Yet they are being fed a chain of politicised interpretations layered on top of the science that is often contestable, as the footnotes of the IPCC reports make clear – if ever we were lucky enough to hear about them.”
While the thrust of these research results is not news – certainly not to the many readers here and elsewhere – the specifics of the research are, and they quantify, at least to some extent, what we have always known. The mainstream media (with a couple of rare exceptions) has played a major role in fearmongering in support of climate change ‘action’. As if that is their proper role. Their proper role is to scrutinise such claims, challenge the claimants, respect the scientific method. To their great discredit, they ignored or minimised scientist who observations were not in line with the ruling orthodoxy.
Creighton prefaces his article with the damnation of the mainstream media: “Two decades after the release of Al Gore’s film documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, it has become fun to point out how few of his hysterical claims have materialised. Sea levels have not risen six metres. The snows of Kilimanjaro have not vanished. Polar bear numbers have risen, and no major cities lie underwater.
My book, Climate Alarm Reality Check (Wilkinson) is dedicated to the 12 year old schoolgirl I saw sobbing on the TV news fearing the world will soon end because of ‘climate change’.
“Gore’s impact on the climate change debate has been infamous, and increasingly amusing. But blame for the steady brainwashing of swaths of the population, including schoolchildren, who surveys show are the most fearful, must rest with the wider mainstream media.
“All 195 IPCC member governments – whose bureaucrats have typically swallowed the alarmist narrative – must approve SPMs line by line before they are released to the media. “This makes the public-facing document a politically negotiated artefact rather than a neutral summary of the underlying science (and) because a single delegation (can) block consensus, the wording converges on what the most risk-averse delegation will accept,” the report says, adding the SPM “reweights severity upward” in every one of the six reports.
“From then on, it’s institutional Chinese whispers on a grand scale as the media sensationalises the findings further still, filtering the SPMs’ claims by dwelling on the scariest projections, and sometimes dumping important hedges and qualifiers that were essential to the original IPCC report.
“Remarkably, left- and right-leaning outlets show similar patterns, except for The Wall Street Journal, which was the only outlet that consistently understated SPM (The Guardian and The Independent were the most sensationalist in the catastrophist direction).”
So we can thank the mainstream media for bolstering the grotesque energy policies driven by climate change hysteria. We should send our energy bills to guilty media such as the Sydney Warming Herald.