Guardian journalist tries to understand “deniers” by interviewing… himself

Who needs interviews when you know all the answers?

Greg Jericho, of The Guardian, can explain why the government is in “denial” and spends 15 odd paragraphs doing psychoanalysis of himself.

Has he met a skeptic? Not likely.

This government is not even pretending to act on climate change any more

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly I have a degree of sympathy for members of the public who are climate change deniers. I have this sympathy because I was once one of them. …doing my level best to deny it was happening. Because it scared the bejeezus out of me.

… so I understand why people choose to believe those who say climate change is not the issue, that the issue is power prices and thus we need to fire up the coal furnaces.

Denial is a very easy way out of guilt that your lifestyle is leaving your children and grandchildren an awful legacy. Denial is a good way to throw away concerns that you might have to actually wear a cost – either through lifestyle changes or monetary loss.

It is a scary thing to hear talk of the impacts […]

Climate Change is a ratings killer — Everyone is bored to death of the sermon

After 30 years with no debate and one predictable, repeated lecture the audience is switching off

Scott Whitlock at Newsbusters reports that one climate-worrier journalist revealed in a tweet that climate change kills the ratings. Another tweeter had prodded Liberal MSNBC journalist Chris Hayes to cover more on climate change. “Acting like there is nothing to be done is not excusable.”

In reply Chris Hayes lamented:

“almost without exception. every single time we’ve covered it’s been a palpable ratings killer. so the incentives are not great.”

@chrislhayes 24 July 2018

Those crashing ratings would change overnight if news networks threw open the doors and pitted skeptics against believers in a real televised form of debate. The spectators would suddenly be able to pick sides — may the best person win. There would be genuine controversy. Sacred cows would be slaughtered, and for a while at least, climate change would rate well.

What stops the media doing this? Most editors are too scared of being called climate deniers if they dare allow the other side to speak. Look at the pushback when the BBC allowed Professor Bob Carter to do one interview:

The […]

One third of Australia wants public ABC spending cut. That’s 14 cents a day but Not Worth It

New essential poll today shows 35% of respondents support cutting spending on the ABC.

The ABC once had a hallowed status, but those days are over. One in three Australians are not enthused with non-stop naked Green-Labor advertising combined with derision and scorn for the deplorable half of the population.

We pay 14 cents a day for the ABC and it’s not worth it.

ABC ratings plummet 13% in the last year

Showing that this survey is not an abberation, the whole nation is voting with the remote control:

Last week ABC News attracted about 660,000 viewers in the mainland capital cities. This compares with about 760,000 viewers a year ago.

That’s a trend line headed for zero by 2025.

Most Australians don’t watch the prime time 7pm news service they are forced to pay for. Apparently the ABC is a subsidy package for poor inner city elites who can afford to live in Darlinghurst but not to pay for their own news service.

The ABC rescue plan is a workshop on telling stories

The ABC solution yesterday is to get better at “storytelling”. It does not include employing a second conservative or libertarian commentator (one, […]

Climate change means Greenland is the same temperature now as 1880

Hands up who knew that Greenland has been pretty much the same temperature for the last hundred and forty years?

We know that there has been massive melting ice, shrinking ice sheets, a dark zone that is a huge problem, that the melting is accelerating, faster than at any time in the last 400 years. We all know “this is scary”, and due to climate change and could raise sea levels by 20 feet. And that’s just the news stories in the last two weeks.

At NoTricksZone, Kenneth Richards has found an up to date graph of Greenland temperatures buried in the supplement of a new paper by Mikkelsen et al., 2018:

….

So Greenland hasn’t been showing signs of warming since man made CO2 started rapidly rising after World War II. Indeed Greenland has been not responding to CO2 for 140 years or maybe a million.

Serious researchers have known this for years. It’s not like a flat trend suddenly popped up to surprise us.

Hat tip to Bob FJ for sending graphs and links of earlier studies last year. Even far back in 2004, it was obvious Greenland was not warming like it was supposed to. That […]

Tim Flannery in 2007: after a two month crash course in climate change, the man was a prophet

Tim Flannery, 2004, The West Australian.

Flannery will be on Q&A tonight (bet you can’t wait, copy your questions and tweets below please!). Let’s check the exact wording of his original 2004 prediction that Perth would become a ghost town. It tells us something, not just about Flannery and a messiah complex (he really does talk of himself as an old testament prophet), but about journalism. Back then journalists interviewed critics too. Flannery was even called “alarmist” in 2004.

The original story had the calm headline: “Perth Will Die, says Top Scientist”. That article has gone beyond the space time continuum, but thankfully, it was preserved by the Wayback Machine.

Perth will become a ghost city within decades as rising global temperatures turn the Wheatbelt into a desert and drive species to the brink of extinction, a leading Australian scientist warns.

–Carmelo Amalfi, The West Australian

Perth in 2018, is wet, cool and productive and 30% larger:

Dams are at their equal highest level at the end of summer since 2002, and Perth has 67 billion litres more than any year of the last seven. The desert seems to be shrinking, arid regions […]

Fake News Media: Would you like the hole truth or fake mud with that?

The decrepit legacy media is now so low there are competing stories in the same week discussing which form of decay is the worst.

Is it that the media suppresses the good news, or that it amplifies the bad — throwing fake mud that is never cleaned up? It’s two sides of the same corrupt, self serving coin. Pass on these links to friends who think the legacy media still has journalists with , a) a backbone or b) ethics.

Suppressing the Good News is the media’s dirtiest tactic

Steve Sheldon

Here are headlines you won’t read in almost any major American newspaper, hear on any of the evening news programs, or see in your Yahoo “news” feed:

Dow Hits 87 Record Closes Since Trump Elected

Texas Hero Was NRA Instructor

Dow Reaches Four 1,000 Point Milestones in One Year for the First Time Ever

ISIS on the Run, Almost Completely Destroyed

New Home Sales Highest in a Decade

Texas Hero Uses AR-15 to Save the Day

Dow Hits Two Streaks Lasting More Than Ten Days, First Time Since 1959

Trump Donates […]

You mean the ABC isn’t telling us all the news on Iran?

It’s a shame Australia’s billion-dollar-ABC apparently can’t afford a Wall St Journal subscription. In long coverage of the Iranian unrest ABC prime time news tonight said the protesters “wanted the government to create jobs”. (Sounds like an Australian election) But The Wall St Journal, puts it differently. Farnaz Fassihi describes the slogans being chanted:

“We don’t want an Islamic Republic, we don’t want it, we don’t want it.”

“They are using Islam as an excuse to drive people crazy.

Breitbart:

Despite the threats of physical violence, women in the Islamic republic have used the opportunity to call out for more personal freedom and a relaxation of strict Islamic rule and sharia law:

In a different article Caroline Glick sees dismal coverage in the US too and speculates on a much bigger picture.

I’m just letting people know there is another side. Best wishes for the brave people seeking freedom.

There is an epic battle going on, with lives of workers and families at stake, and the only subheader the ABC can find is” ‘Trump should focus on America’.

8.8 out of 10 based on 108 ratings […]

The Guardian invents a myth that Trump obstructs satellite research

Part #4,566 in The Demonisation of Trump — The Guardian spawns another urban myth and fake-hate-news. Donald Trump accused of obstructing satellite research into climate change

The poor ignorant readers, fed the anti-science spin, and missing all the relevant info below (or any counter point of view) — predictably respond with the words “sociopath”, “Hitler”, “Nazi’s”, “criminals”, “crooks”, “liars” and “sychophants” — and that’s just in the first 20 comments of nearly 400.

The author Robin McKie found one scientist willing to hype this in a suitable way:

“This is like throwing away the medical records of a sick patient,” said David Gallaher of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

If McKie bothered to get calmer and more accurate views, he does not report them. Though he also says: “Many scientists say this decision was made for purely ideological reasons.” He names none of the “many”. Way to go McKie.

Enter a real expert in satellite systems:

Roy Spencer, award-winning satellite expert, explains how Trump is being wrongly blamed

In short, the story is that a series of US military satellites are monitoring sea ice. Four were launched from 2003 – 2014 (numbered 16 […]

ABC renewables fantasy island “farewells diesel” (except for 40% of its power)

Flinders Island is in the Bass Strait North of Tasmania.

If there is a heaven for renewables, this island should be it. But instead, even on Flinders Island, renewables aren’t cheaper than diesel generators. This is a dismal reality, yet the ABC promotes it as a fantasy poster-isle, interviewing only vested or “no idea” people, asking no critical questions, doing no counter research and telling us renewables will be “more reliable” and implying they are cheaper too. The ABC is a three-million-dollar-a-day advertising outlet for other government agencies. Instead of serving Australians it appears to be there to help shake down the taxpayer.

ABC renewables hype strikes again: Rhiannon Shine reports Flinders Island as a showcase of the brave new renewables world. Let’s translate that spin and see just how pathetic it is. If anywhere was going to be totally renewable, Flinders Island would be it — a first world island, tiny population, massive subsidies, no access to cheap coal or gas power, government support at every level and placed in a handy wind stream known as “the Roaring Forties”. Yeah! This is one of the last places in the first world (short of Antarctic stations) where renewables […]

Uni NSW Journalism lecturer gives advice on how to cleanse your news sources

Christopher Kremmer, Senior Lecturer in Literary & Narrative Journalism, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW, wants to help you shield yourself from worldviews that you don’t like, so he provides a detailed “how to” list of ways to make sure you filter out, specifically, news.com.

This man lectures in journalism. Instead of teaching journalism students on how to logically outplay and counter arguments and spot the flaws, he’s teaching them to cleanse their feeds lest they be exposed to inconvenient worldviews.

The team that has no evidence and no answers has to find a way to compensate for their intellectual vacuum.

Taking control of who gets to send us news

… before I had even typed in my search terms, it was apparent that my options had been narrowed. The news list that the aggregator threw up was dominated by websites whose idea of what constitutes news is very different to my own.

It takes a lot of effort to build an information silo:

One by one, I began blocking offending mastheads, then refreshing the browser to check the progress of my censorship. It takes a while because news websites use multiple addresses to maximise […]

Fake News: Whipping up a media frenzy over bizarre “records” before they occur

Australia’s “leading climate scientists” can’t predict the climate but they are very good PR operatives. Here in Perth we’ve had a cool year — for the last twelve months it’s been nearly a whole degree cooler than the average for the last 20 years. But last weekend in Perth, news stories told us we’d had an “autumn stinker” and wait for it, we might get Perth’s second hottest first eight days of March. Call that a HFEDOM record and write in the Guinness Book of records. It’s a permutation “record” almost as important as the longest distance run by a man holding a table in his teeth. Except it’s not even a record, it’s a news story about a record that “might happen”, but didn’t.

Let’s name Neil Bennett (BOM) and Will Steffen (ANU) as the Propaganda-in-Chiefs dumping meaningless climate-trivia on the people in order to generate FEAR and screw more money from the public.

Straight from the New Climate PRAVDA Manual:

Invent contrived trivial permutations in order to use the word “record” Don’t bother waiting for real data, use forecasts If record includes the word “cool”, “cooler”, or “cold”, send to trash. When wrong, crickets.

Click to enlarge, […]

NY Times makes out climate change believers are forced to speak in hidden codes

More Fake News from the NY Times

Here’s a creative effort to sell the story that the people with billion dollar industries, all the academic positions and a sympathetic media entourage are going underground, forced to disguise their belief about “climate change”.

This is a death-throes type article, clutching for ways to pretend Global Worriers are still relevant, and to feed a fantasy that they might be the underdog.

In America’s Heartland, Discussing Climate Change Without Saying ‘Climate Change’

So while climate change is part of daily conversation, it gets disguised as something else.

“People are all talking about it, without talking about it,” said Miriam Horn, the author of a recent book on conservative Americans and the environment, “Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman.” “It’s become such a charged topic that there’s a navigation people do.”

What really happened is that climate change is overused agitprop and people are tired of being beaten over the head with it. The first most compelling example the NY Times can find is a farmer called Doug Palen who talks about “carbon sequestration” in his soil (and what crop farmer wouldn’t?) Palen is painted as a “believer”:

Trump has broken the mainstream media — a president so powerful he tells them off to their faces

A week ago, the grip of the old-school media elite was busted, but few seemed to have noticed this remarkable shift.

The top dogs in the media came to him expecting to discuss their access to him, instead he blasted them as deceitful, dishonest liars who should be ashamed.

Over the last forty years the mainstream media have degenerated into naked, unashamed political advocacy, yet conservative leaders still felt they had to pander for fear that they would get an even worse treatment if they called it for what it was. Not Donald Trump. Has there ever been a more powerful US president? They called him every name under the sun, and he took the insults and used them to win.

What other US president didn’t need to pander or even be polite to media royalty? Only a billionaire who got elected despite the old media could afford to blow them away. For the first time in US history, the top gatekeepers of the national discussion were named and shamed… The Kings and Queens of the media finally overplayed their hand to the point where the people elected someone so powerful, so rich, and so independent that he has no […]

Hypnotised by media hate. Donald Trump is a polarising, divisive, sexist, racist (don’t watch these videos).

Is there anyone online that hasn’t seen angry Democrats rioting, and beating up voters who made the “wrong” choice? In the land of meaningless slogans, this must be what happens when Love Trumps Hate. Presumably they are teaching Hitler’s disciples a lesson. As Mark Steyn says, every Republican candidate is called Hitler, and when everyone’s Hitler, nobody’s Hitler.

Around the world many people remain baffled as to how 60 million US citizens could vote for the sexist, racist, trash talking Trump. In one survey only 4% of Germans said they would vote for him. Here in Australia I don’t know the numbers, but The Flummoxed are everywhere. Thank the media for the one-dimensional caricature they sell.

Things are so bad here that The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) put out a story saying there were “reports from Trump Tower in New York on Tuesday evening” with crowds of thousands chanting: “We hate Muslims, we hate blacks, we want our great country back”. Michael Smith found a tweet pointing out that their entire source for this was a guy who runs a known parody account on Twitter @sRowntreeNews. Smith clocked up the screenshot, sure that the newspaper would correct their inflammatory uber […]

Intolerant, closeted, media sell hate and silence: can’t figure why electorate is so divided

Who are Trump’s loyal army asks Michael Goldfarb of the BBC

America is so divided in 2016 that one half of the electorate can barely understand the other. Comprehending the Donald Trump phenomenon has become the dominant theme of US election coverage…

Dear BBC et al, half the electorate is mocked, reviled, and otherwise ignored. No wonder the other half are clueless… The divided electorates throughout the West don’t understand each other because there is no national conversation to understand. When was the last time the BBC (or ABC) employed a show host that was a skeptic, Brexit-fan, or UKIP voter? Count the years. How about a whole panel? A series? A doco? When was the last government grant awarded to someone to explain the dangers of big-creeping-government?

It’s practically BBC official policy not to even interview people who disagree with certain views, even if that includes 62% of the British public. This is a good way to divide the electorate and create ignorance and misunderstanding, yes? It’s not that the skeptical half can’t get half the evening news, they can’t even get a 10 second, heavily edited sentence in. Greenpeace, on the other hand, get invited to […]

ABC reports pushy brain-snap from greenie activists to rename “Eggs and Bacon Bay”

Eggs and Bacon Bay, Tasmania

Their billion-dollar-ABC reports every irrelevant thought bubble a greenie group can dream up:

“PETA launches bid to change Eggs and Bacon Bay to healthy alternative”

The ABC can’t find a single local who wants the change, but they treat the fantasy to a three-photo feature, complete with expert opinions and interviews. The locals think the idea is a bad joke. Listen to Doug:

…Doug said locals were perfectly happy with the name.

“These single-interest groups ought to go overseas and annoy the shit out of ISIS,” he said.

The only person outside the ABC who thinks this issue is worth discussing is some poor chicken mayor who is happy to sell out the locals for fear of offending the busybody control-freaks:

Huon Valley Mayor Peter Coad is willing to consider the idea.

“Obviously these issues should be taken seriously and have some merit,” he said.

Dear Mayor Coad, PETA are demanding a meat-free map. You think this is serious?

One type of Eggs And Bacon Flower.

The town, by the way, is named after a flower. That’ll be next on the hit list, and before […]

The “77 Vote” Skeptical Senator and the journalists who don’t think 600,000 voters count

Malcolm Roberts

Some in the love media have real trouble understanding preferential voting. Big numbers seem to confuse them.

There are headlines that Malcolm Roberts “only got 77 votes” as if to delegitamize the skeptic. The Courier Mail put it on the front page. What they couldn’t find was one voter who voted for Pauline Hanson who was unhappy about where their vote went. And there were plenty to ask: Hanson’s party got 593,000 first preference votes nationally and won four Senate seats.

Apparently to be considered a real senator the magic number of first preference votes this year is “100″.

In South Australia, Stirling Griff of the Nick Xenophon Team won “103″ votes, and Sky Kakosche-Moore won “129″. Alex Gallacher, Australian Labor Party, won with “330 votes”. No newspapers seem to be suggesting that they don’t deserve to be there, or that their success is a reason to axe preferential voting.

In WA, the Liberal Party won fully 3 of their 5 Senate seats on a average of just 600 “votes” each. Let’s ignore that the Liberal group ticket in WA had 510,000 votes. They ended up getting five senators elected with less votes than […]

Only 20% of US people think the media even try to be unbiased on politics

The good news is that a majority of people are aware of media bias, and are skeptical of what the media tells them. The bad news is that this is just another marker showing the average Western citizen is losing faith in the integrity of so many key institutions.

The activist journo’s have overplayed their hand. They are not even trying…

“Voters Expect Reporters To Help Clinton Over Trump”

[July 21st, 2016] A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that only 20% of Likely U.S. Voters think that when covering a political campaign, most reporters try to offer unbiased coverage. Most (69%) say reporters try to help the candidate they want to win. Eleven percent (11%) are not sure (To see survey question wording, click here.)

The media have lost so much influence. They described Brexiteers as loony, selfish and xenophobic, but more than half the country ignored them and voted for Brexit. Similarly, the US media mocked and denigrated Trump supporters, and continually predicted he wouldn’t stay in the race, and wouldn’t make it through the primaries, and yet he did. Poor pundits keep being surprised by the people.

The key word in this […]

Even believer media are bored of climate change — TV coverage down

It’s panic stations over at Believer Central. They are losing their grip on the media. And 2015 was a bumper year for Climate Scares – the hottest ever year, the giant Paris Junket, The El Nino, The Pope! (The Pope?) Despite all that, the media spent less time on the climate. It doesn’t get any better than 2015 for the Global Worriers — there is no higher level of panic. But the free propaganda machine is slowing…

Lookout, climate denial is on the rise (don’t ask about the error bars):

 

Dana Nuccitelli, The Guardian

During the most important year for climate news, TV coverage fell

A report by Media Matters for America reveals that the media are failing to inform the American public on the most important issue of our time.

Media Matters for America has published a report detailing US broadcast news coverage of climate change in 2015, and their findings are stunning.

Stunning eh? Or not.

Dana might be knocked over, but I see ABC down 20, Fox up 20, and some “other stuff”. It’s not really much of a trend. The thing that really bugs Dana seems to […]

ABC news is bread and circuses agitprop, nothing to see on matters of national importance

UPDATE: For those who can’t see the ABC footage we have a copy at dropbox, thanks to Panda.

UPDATE #2: This episode has now been pulled from the ABC website 13 days early. The ABC, with its billion dollar budget, has a website to show all its programs for 14 days after they run. But for no stated reason this one has been deleted after just one day. Did the ABC not like us discussing it? (H/t to Panda). Thank goodness we have a copy. [Screencap of current ABC page here.]

h/t to Peter Q. Thanks to Andrew M as well.

Dennis Jensen has a lot to say on matters of national importance, but the ABC doesn’t ask him very often about those.

Tonight Dr Dennis Jensen was just the “Climate denier” target who had stepped over the line on another topic — breaking a sacred taboo. He might lose pre-selection. He might be out of a job. The ABC seem to think we care about the party political machinations more than the suffering of Australian citizens, which Jensen had been trying to get us to discuss. Instead the ABC went into great details of […]