Viewer’s guide to rooting out propaganda in future CBC climate coverage
By Dr. Tim Ball & Tom Harris Friday, November 9, 2007
In the CBC’s handbook of Journalistic Standards and Practices, outgoing network President and CEO, Robert Rabinovitch asserts, “The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation occupies a unique position of trust… it is funded, through Parliament, by the people of Canada. CBC therefore considers it a duty to provide consistent, high-quality information upon which all citizens may rely… CBC is and must remain properly accountable to the public it serves. The Corporation is proud to declare its journalistic values for all to see and understand.”
Part 5 of a special week long series in Canada Free Press on ‘The Denial Machine’ (click here for Part 1, here for Part 2, here for Part 3, and here for part Part 4,)
For the past four days, we have explained how the Fifth Estate programme, The Denial Machine, grossly betrays the fundamentals of honest and professional journalism that the CBC tells Canadians they follow. Will the network, of its own accord, now launch a formal review of a programme that clearly violates its own stated “journalistic values.” Or will the incoming president, Montreal lawyer Hubert Lacroix, simply sweep the issue under the rug as did Rabinovitch when this sort of problem was brought to his attention in 2002? Only time will tell.
In the meantime, CBC viewers need self-defense strategies to protect themselves from the sort of propaganda we witnessed in The Denial Machine and other CBC News programmes that deal with the immensely complex and controversial field of climate change science.
The most reliable tool is simple skepticism, standard operating procedure in science untainted by politics. ‘I don’t believe you; prove it!’ is an appropriate response to the assertions of David Suzuki and the newly minted Al Gore-trained climate campaigners now criss-crossing North America. But such a charge, while normal among real scientists, is politically incorrect when applied to climate change so most people need something more passive, a climate change propaganda detector.
Here are eight basic journalistic blunders that will cause alarm bells to ring on a properly tuned detector:
1. Reporters stating, or implying, that natural events are unnatural, or normal events abnormal. This guarantees that assertions that we are seeing more extreme events are always right. The “warmest/wettest/driest/snowiest/windiest” actually means the most extreme in the official record which for most of the world is less than 50 years. Such a short time interval guarantees records will be set all the time.
2. Speculation and exaggeration presented by journalists and guests as unbiased fact. The Fifth Estates uncritical inclusion of the comments of Dr. Andrew Weaver that, “We have warming. It’s because of humans and the cause is fossil fuel combustion.” is a good example. Weaver’s remarks are the sort of wild leap in faith that has become all too common in the computer climate modeling community (see Note 5 below for more on the problem with models). The public must take such overconfident proclamations with a very large grain of salt.
The Rest Here: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/574