Reuters
reports that Oxford University Reuters Institute for the
Study of Journalism has determined that news coverage of last
December’s climate summit in Copenhagen was insufficiently
scientific. Turns out that pesky Climategate scandal led too many
journalists to almost entirely ignore the Global Scientific
Consensus in favor of discussing the emails about “hiding the
decline” and beating
up global warming skeptics:
Based on analysis of 400 articles written about the December
2009 summit, the authors of the report for Oxford University’s
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism called for a
rethinking of reporting on future such conferences.
Author James Painter concluded that “science was under-reported”
as the essential backdrop when about 120 world leaders met in
Copenhagen but were unable to agree on a binding treaty to slow
climate change.
Much coverage from Copenhagen instead focused on hacked e-mails
from a British university that some skeptics took as evidence of
efforts by scientists to ignore dissenting views. The scientists
involved have since been cleared of wrongdoing.
“We need more discussion between scientists, journalists and
policymakers on how to keep highly significant, slow-burn issues
like climate change interesting and engaging to different audiences
around the world,” Painter wrote….
Painter said one way to improve the reporting on climate change
is to provide a larger media staff members to help scientists.
In other news Paul Chesser reports that the AmSpec University
Chesser Institute for the Study of Media Bias found that in an
analysis of journalistic coverage, the media paid way too much
attention to the political hacks and U.N. bureaucrats (but I repeat
myself) who attended Copenhagen; they reported too little about
Climategate; they bought easily the
whitewash investigations of the “cleared” Climategate
scientists; and that alarmist communicators are hopeless
incompetent boobs as was demonstrated by their recent
Splattergate video.
Just trying to uphold the Reuters standard of independent,
objective reporting of my own research.